Also important happy news, we spotted G hanging out in the alley this morning. He seems to be completely fine and is just enjoying being able to hang out all night with his buddies. What a relief!
It must be a "thing." My feral Chaco showed up yesterday as well. He had some war wounds on his head. If I could catch him and have him neutered I would, but I can't. So he's living his life his way. I feed him & make sure there's water, but he chooses to live somewhere in the neighboring fields or under sheds or something. I'm so happy that G is back.
And now I feel good about announcing my new boys- I took the advice of folks here and got two- two 3 mo old black cats one short hair and one long hair (possible Maine Coon). The Long hair was out of the crate first- instead of showing nervousness, he plopped down on the rug, started messing with one of the dog's stuffies and started purring. I took that as a good sign. The shorthair was shier, but he's making friends too.
Very well. The dog adores them and they had no fear of him even when they first arrived. They're sleeping with me now and the short haired one is VERY cuddly and will likely become a bed hog later in life. It is really nice to wake up under a pile of kittens every morning, it gives meaning back to life. 😄
He's just now getting interested in going outside the fence, and only for a couple hours at a time. Mostly he's happy inside taking naps and getting lavished with attention.
Imagine if they held a national selection (I mean election) and no one showed up? Imagine if we all chose to watch anything but politics for the next year plus? Imagine if we did what a lot of us did during the "covid" hustle and just shut it all off? The only way these people are successful at dividing us and causing fear, hate and confusion is when we participate in it. I will be opting out.
So hang on, does that mean if I show up at the African American History Museum one minute after closing, they still have to let me in or else they’re the museum face of white supremacy?
I find it hilarious when MSNBC or CNN have a bunch of black anchors on at once -- at the very same time, a half screen (2) or a full screen (4) -- complaining about all the systemic racism. WTH? Would they even be on TV is we were indeed stuck in the pre-Civil Rights (or earlier) era? Do viewers actually see how ludicrous it is for such elite affirmative-action no-talent check-the-box high-and-mighty to pretend they have been subjected to any racism?
Lately there's been some banking commercial on too, that shows several blacks sitting at a table, discussing how the oldest woman there has been their banker for over 20+ years. I don't see how that would even be possible if we've been living with "systemic racism" and "white supremacy" all this time!
Not to mention Barack Obama being elected twice. Something that would have been impossible if a whole lot of "white supremacists" wouldn't have voted for him...
It's even worse than that........Joy insists that the "correct" black experience is one that experiences systemic racism -- yet black Americans overwhelmingly live in large, Democratic-run cities. (Baltimore, Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago)
If these people ARE experiencing systemic racism, it's the democrats who are responsible!
"Slave masters" is surely apt, but even more so they resemble the black african tribal leaders who sold neighbouring tribes to slavers.
Here, we call such people (regardless of pigmentation) for "Funktionshäftling" (the formal german term) or the better-known "Kapos".
For anyone not recognising the term, kapos were KZ-camp inmates who volunteered for guard/overseer/taskmaster duty. It is extremely derogatory so use with caution.
Mary Bubala fired for bring correct. Stop electing dumb leaders.
This is among the greatest problems in America. Piss poor leadership without holding leaders accountable - combined with the futility of not being able to. #TheMediaIsTheVirus #TERMLIMITS ! #PaperBallots #VoterID #Seeyaonthebeach
And before Musk arrived with his big fat checkbook, Twitter was a Far Left Social Network and it cannot be denied, that all these loons were perfectly fine with that!
One of the most impressive Covid documents I’ve read to date got me to thinking about the tsunami of unexposed Covid scandals. By my count, there are at least 10 … and they are all massive.
The neo-lib playbook of creating straw men and sowing hate is getting tiresome. The shrinking of legacy media and the growth of Substack are hopeful signs that the public is catching on.
Edited to add--what's funny is most of the shirts (after the first dozen or so shown) are seriously delusional by calling others racist or implying others are racist.
Well, this is what happens when people don't fight back against idiotic terminology fast and hard from the start. These morons got to trample all over the landscape and you can't clean up while they're still rampaging.
We have *ethnicities* and *cultures.* We have philosophical foundations to every culture. Religions are philosophical foundations.
Americans are the inheritors of the fruits of the Western Enlightenment. Letting these morons call it *white supremacy* was the fatal mistake. They should have been mocked out of the room and apparently all the smart conservatives were caught with their pants down on this because the only person I see saying "fruits of the Western Enlightenment" routinely and unrelentingly is me.
America succeeded as well as it did for a considerable period of time because of the "melting pot" theory. No other nation had that. People were able to actually become American. One can have French citizenship but the French will never really believe you've become French. As I understand it, the Japanese won't even give you citizenship.
We need to confront every stupid remark with questions. "What is 'white'?"
It used to be recognized everywhere in every nation-state that people had micro-local cultures, even if they shared the same ethnic heritage broadly across the territories that became their nation-states; that's why every country has a standardized form of the national language (or languages) taught in school, because there are so many dialects. Go look up how many dialects of Dutch are spoken in a small country like Belgium. We let too many morons in this country get away with not recognizing the essential unifying power of a commonly recognized standard form of language accessible to everyone regardless of their origins and home form of speech. I'm a garden-variety Noo Yawkuh born to English-speaking parents and I have my "official office voice" (not needed anymore these days) and my moderately well-spoken voice and my "just for friends" voice. Black people did not invent "code-switching."
Until we get people thinking about reality again, and not all this bilgewater propaganda from every side, we don't have a hope in hell.
Yep. And growing up in the 80s/90s, we were making HUGE strides towards a color-blind society (which today they call racist!). Nobody cared where you were from, they cared who you were.
Diversity IS our strength, but democrats reduce diversity to your superficial characteristics and ignore diversity of thought and opinion, which are way more important.
Growing up in the '50s and '60s, kids of many different ethnicities went to after-school religious/ethnic studies too; nobody ever thought that becoming fully American meant a repudiation of one's particular ethnic heritage. All those Hollywood movies about the guys and gals ashamed of Sicilian grandma or Greek aunts and uncles were probably a bit of dramatic over-exaggeration. Certainly many people experienced lots of prejudice from the groups that had come over earlier and fought their way into mainstream acceptance, but they were still on their way into the mainstream too. And plenty of them or their immediate ancestors had come here because of local/regional etc. prejudices over there in the first place. They understood a little better how the world in general works.
You said it much better than me, just wanted to tell you.
When my grandmother was born, local dialects were so heavy you would't hear them as swedish at all - people spoke their village-dialect and "school-swedish" and would rapidly learn the new dialect when they moved.
In this area, some villages still used runic script mixed with roman letters in the 1920s, to represent the sounds correctly. Further north is even more convoluted as it is either a blend of sámi language, rural norwegian dialects (if on the western side, otherwise it's finnish) and local swedish plus a sprinkling of gypsy words and the odd old german or russian expression, swedish-ified.
I was given a complete dictionary of the local dialect - with subcategories for distinct individual variations for various villages! A friend had noticed it at an antiquarian and got all 27 volumes for onlythe eq. of $70, a real bargain.
Didn't New York still have different cants/dialects for different burroughs/districts in the early 20th century?
"Didn't New York still have different cants/dialects for different burroughs/districts in the early 20th century?"
Always been so. This used to be well-understood as normal. I remember reading about Sean Connery's early years in acting and how he was warned he needed to lose his heavy Scots accent and it's funny how TV shows set in various parts of the UK will often have subtitles because the accents are so difficult to understand if one isn't a local.
My parents--both born here, both raised pretty much bilingual and neither having gone further than HS, spoke what for New Yorkers was a pretty much unaccented English. I suspect the teachers of their era worked very hard to ensure the incredibly diverse student bodies learned to speak in a manner that would lead to as much upward mobility as might be hoped for.
Someone murdered that common sense and it ain't getting resurrected.
Was that way in Stockholm when I grew up there (part-time).
You had "rikssvenska", i.e. "the Realm's Swedish" which is the common variety heard on TV and radio and what pretty much everyone speaks now, then you had your local cant or at least a very distinct pronounciation (more of a sociolect as Stockholm was and still is rather heavily segregated based on income/class though population replacement via invasion-migration has edged the class-thing out), and the the unique dialects like Söderslang (South Side slang, think swedish eq. of Cockney Rhyming slang) and Knoparmoj (Chimney sweeps' cant - a peculiar blend of gypsy, jiddish, swedish criminal cant, all mixed up with nonsense-words foradded confusion).
So "What time is it?/Vad är klockan?" would become "Vad kritschar dinkan?" - "kritschar" and "dinkan" are not "real" words, the point being to be able to have private conversations in public.
Of course, my scribblings doesn't do it justice - like all such things it must be heard in contrast and comparison to the official version of the language. It's sad since modern swedish is based on Stockholmian mid-century upper class sociolect which is much more staccato-like than the sing-song dialects of the rest of the country (save Scania and Gotland) in which the entire sentence often is spoken like one longword (to an outsider that's what it might sound like). Scanian has it's own unique sound, being a mix of swedish, danish, dutch, and german pronounciations. Gutemål (Gotlander tongue) is the still in-use language spoken there over 1 000 years ago, so if onewants to hear what gotlander vikings may have sounded like, that's a living link.
Wonder what you think of the bizarre stilted fake accent the showrunners of "Vikings" came up with for no sensible reason.
And turning to a different show--in "Mr. Robot," two characters were having a conversation and I was really disconcerted because there was something really dissonant in their speech patterns, and I looked up the scene online to try to understand what was happening. Turns out one was speaking Danish and the other, Swedish. I was so pleased with myself for noticing...
My wife watched it, eating popcorn while giggling/groaning the whole time.
Me, I could stand about 15 seconds. That show was about as historical as Conan the Barbarian.
Never heard of Mr Robot, but I've seen clips onine of a show where the celebrity (I guess, I'm not "with it") guests are given tasks. One is to try and elicit specific information from someone only answering in their native not-english tongue.
The actor who played Ragnar so defied my very lowest expectations that I hung on despite the essential ridiculousness of the scripts. Once they killed him off the force field was gone.
Mr. Robot (drama show) had some surprising originality to start with, but as with so many series, the first season is wonderful and then it's all downhill. They don't know what to do with themselves and they head for the cliche superstore and go to town in the aisles.
"Not real blacks"... I "love" it, meaning I find it wonderful these schmucks are displaying their racism - their actual, real and classic racism at that!- for all to see.
A certain someone, once upon a time, declared the japanese "honorary arians" so as not to violate his own dogma. This is pretty much the same thing they are doing, insisting that "race" (meaning skin colour only to boot, so even worse!) means there's a whole thing you imply must be in to, or you're not areal scotsman, I mean black I mean whatever.
There's one thing pointing out that the only way to be inuit (or swede or turk or whatever) is to be born one and a whole'nother thing to claim that just because you are X you must also think Y about Z.
/Especially/ for americans, and to a lesser extent brits/Commonwealth-ers, seeing as "american" doesn't have a set skin colour, does it?
Do you think they ever stop and think "What the Sam Hill am I saying?"? What's next, the Democrat Party handing out free fried chicken and watermelon in black majority districts? Got to love fried chicken and watermelon, or you ain't proper black like, is that the Democrats' idea of how to not be racist maybe?
Gah! It's not even my nation but such a blatant display of real true racism á la pre-WW2 really get my cylinders firing!
I wouldn't really know (I hope they have!) since I'm not american - here, black means either illegal migrant or adopted child or the rare actual come-to-work person from Africa (south of the arabised nations).
Hilariously but not surprising to me, those most offended by being called black are the africans. They are [insert tribe/ethnicity name here], not black. What they call black americans I can't write, but it would make a klansman go "Woah Nelly, slow down!".
I wrote it as I hear it, with a stop and an ascending tone at the end. Like "woe-ah!". So the real pronouciation is instad the same as when you reign in horses then?
Correct away - a native speaker always have a better "feel" for what is more correct, as one of my tutors said. As an aside-anecdote, he taught swedish, english and spanish at upper secondary level (the step right before you go off to university) and used Rese (swedish mythological creature) as an example of how native intuitive understanding of terms always edges out dictionary-definitions andbook-learning.
The closest in english is ogre, but it's not the same creature at all. In spanish I think it was orgo, which was more similar to ogre than to rese. Reason being, ogre/ogro is from Celtic tradition while rese is from Nordic such.
Just goes to show how easy even the simplest things get lost in translation (wonderful movie by the way, one of the handful I've seen in a theater this millennium).
Whoa there, seem to be rambling off on a tangent, yes?
Yep. Whoa is a one-syllable word, whether stopping old Nellie, interrupting a hasty fool, expressing astonishment, or directing the conversation to end a post (touche), but...
"...how native intuitive understanding of terms always edges out dictionary-definitions and book-learning."
That's how languages evolve, so thanks to the kids, my 2030 Merriam-Webster will probably have a two-syllable word spelled "woah"!
Also important happy news, we spotted G hanging out in the alley this morning. He seems to be completely fine and is just enjoying being able to hang out all night with his buddies. What a relief!
It must be a "thing." My feral Chaco showed up yesterday as well. He had some war wounds on his head. If I could catch him and have him neutered I would, but I can't. So he's living his life his way. I feed him & make sure there's water, but he chooses to live somewhere in the neighboring fields or under sheds or something. I'm so happy that G is back.
Put a keyboard out there for him.
LOL how did I miss this comment
I'm sneaky like my soulmate G.
Real Gs move in silence like lasagna.
Lil Wayne is right. The G is silent.
Edit: maybe oops: is he still kicking?
Edit 2 (two): That reminds! My Grandma used to say, if you wanna fart, eat beans, and if not, eat my lasagna. (for real!)
I am very happy to hear that
And now I feel good about announcing my new boys- I took the advice of folks here and got two- two 3 mo old black cats one short hair and one long hair (possible Maine Coon). The Long hair was out of the crate first- instead of showing nervousness, he plopped down on the rug, started messing with one of the dog's stuffies and started purring. I took that as a good sign. The shorthair was shier, but he's making friends too.
It feels good to have kittehs around again.
PICS OR IT DIDN'T HAPPEN!
OK, but I'm at work right now. :)
PICS OR IT DIDN'T HAPPEN
Since you asked so nicely, LOL!:
https://postimg.cc/hQxydD2n
I wish this was an image board, I think we would have such fun with it.
Another one, the dog is such an attention hound.
https://postimg.cc/NKN4L2QT
So glad for you, SimComm! What a great way to start the holiday weekend!
Perhaps Bonnie has been influencing G to "walk on the wild side?" 😸
Mrs. "the Knife"
It's possible! One of my trips around the block looking for G I found Bonnie hanging out with the local "cat gang" -- maybe G rolls with them now!
It's like he named himself!
awesome news! my childhood cat Bucko took off for 3 months one time. go figure...
We had one that went missing for over a year. Then we discovered her living with another family 4 blocks away.
"Where are you going?"
"Out."
"What are you going to do?"
"Nothing."
"Who are you going out with?"
"No-one."
"When are you coming home?"
"Don't know."
Cat-owner talking to cat, or parent talking to teenager, you tell me.
I came here for this news! 🙏
Great news! Those orange cats have a mind of their own.
Very well. The dog adores them and they had no fear of him even when they first arrived. They're sleeping with me now and the short haired one is VERY cuddly and will likely become a bed hog later in life. It is really nice to wake up under a pile of kittens every morning, it gives meaning back to life. 😄
Woo hoo! Pet harmony is very important!
I hope yours is settling in after the big adventure!
He's just now getting interested in going outside the fence, and only for a couple hours at a time. Mostly he's happy inside taking naps and getting lavished with attention.
It's a tough life.
Imagine if they held a national selection (I mean election) and no one showed up? Imagine if we all chose to watch anything but politics for the next year plus? Imagine if we did what a lot of us did during the "covid" hustle and just shut it all off? The only way these people are successful at dividing us and causing fear, hate and confusion is when we participate in it. I will be opting out.
I predict Biden and the Dem establishment will engineer a LBJ "exit".
https://amac.us/shades-of-lbjs-cronkite-nightmare-biden-loses-cbs/
Also, my man Tristan Justice:
https://thefederalist.com/2023/05/25/the-fbi-knows-what-car-was-used-in-j6-dnc-pipe-bomb-but-refuses-to-identify-prime-suspect/
Also, my woman (that sounds weird; maybe I'll switch to using "human") Margot Cleveland:
https://thefederalist.com/2023/05/26/heres-what-the-irs-whistleblower-will-tell-lawmakers-about-the-hunter-biden-probe-behind-closed-doors/
If all those good things are "whiteness," I sure wish I wasn't born so beige.
Promptness is racist?
When reality encounters modern technology, it learns that simultaneous use of intersecting runways doesn't care about the race of the pilots.
So hang on, does that mean if I show up at the African American History Museum one minute after closing, they still have to let me in or else they’re the museum face of white supremacy?
I find it hilarious when MSNBC or CNN have a bunch of black anchors on at once -- at the very same time, a half screen (2) or a full screen (4) -- complaining about all the systemic racism. WTH? Would they even be on TV is we were indeed stuck in the pre-Civil Rights (or earlier) era? Do viewers actually see how ludicrous it is for such elite affirmative-action no-talent check-the-box high-and-mighty to pretend they have been subjected to any racism?
Lately there's been some banking commercial on too, that shows several blacks sitting at a table, discussing how the oldest woman there has been their banker for over 20+ years. I don't see how that would even be possible if we've been living with "systemic racism" and "white supremacy" all this time!
Not to mention Barack Obama being elected twice. Something that would have been impossible if a whole lot of "white supremacists" wouldn't have voted for him...
exactly! whereas now, half the country (i.e. "MAGA" [scary music]) are "white supremacist racists." Even the non-whites -- how ludicrous is that?
And their message is insidious: If you're successful then you're not REALLY black.
But how do they explain their own success?
They hold up someone more succesful, and not-black, as an example of them not being succesful.
Should they become A-number 1, King of New York, they will hold up their "struggle" as a proof of their essential magical blackness.
They are actual honest-to-any-god-you-name real racists.
They never mention it.
Could someone please explain to Joy Behar that by insisting that Black Americans must be Democrats makes her the actual RACIST!
It's even worse than that........Joy insists that the "correct" black experience is one that experiences systemic racism -- yet black Americans overwhelmingly live in large, Democratic-run cities. (Baltimore, Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago)
If these people ARE experiencing systemic racism, it's the democrats who are responsible!
The truth that should never be spoken...because it's racist to speak the truth.
It's quite a nice set up for the Left.
Joy Behar, et al are not race baiters; they're slave masters.
The truth hurts.
You're much too nice.
"Slave masters" is surely apt, but even more so they resemble the black african tribal leaders who sold neighbouring tribes to slavers.
Here, we call such people (regardless of pigmentation) for "Funktionshäftling" (the formal german term) or the better-known "Kapos".
For anyone not recognising the term, kapos were KZ-camp inmates who volunteered for guard/overseer/taskmaster duty. It is extremely derogatory so use with caution.
Genau! And in the name of being virtuous, they do not see their self appointed “supremacy.”
Some of them do, and they are the most evil.
Re: "slave masters"
Yep. The Democrat plantation enforcing political apartheid.
Exactly. Really is a shame. This has been going on for 70-80+ years in most urban centers.
It's so easy to see from the "outside". You'd think it'd be even easier to see it where your feet are planted.
LIKEx100!
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/anchorwoman-fired-after-asking-question-regarding-baltimores-3-recent-mayors-all-female-african-americans-210700286.html?soc_src=social-sh&soc_trk=ma
Mary Bubala fired for bring correct. Stop electing dumb leaders.
This is among the greatest problems in America. Piss poor leadership without holding leaders accountable - combined with the futility of not being able to. #TheMediaIsTheVirus #TERMLIMITS ! #PaperBallots #VoterID #Seeyaonthebeach
Seems to me that "identifying" as Democrat, makes one, by definition, raaaacist!
That's because Kindi flipped the definition, a recent (and perfect) example of Orwell's double-speak.
And before Musk arrived with his big fat checkbook, Twitter was a Far Left Social Network and it cannot be denied, that all these loons were perfectly fine with that!
One of the most impressive Covid documents I’ve read to date got me to thinking about the tsunami of unexposed Covid scandals. By my count, there are at least 10 … and they are all massive.
https://billricejr.substack.com/p/cataloging-a-tsunami-of-covid-scandals
Oooh! Oooh! Is it the same playbook as the last half dozen presidential elections?
I.e.: "This Republican candidate is even more Hitlery than the last one, somehow!"
If DeSantis manages to get the nomination, just wait for *Trump* to start getting Strange New Respect(tm).
See: Romney, McCain, Bush, and even fucking Dick Cheney.
What are the odds the GOP could keep finding Worse-Than-Hitlers?
103% chance of success with a +/-2% error rate according to latest MSNBC poll.
The neo-lib playbook of creating straw men and sowing hate is getting tiresome. The shrinking of legacy media and the growth of Substack are hopeful signs that the public is catching on.
As I said in another comment, embrace the "racist" label to defang its power.
Saw these t-shirts on Etsy:
https://www.etsy.com/search?q=racist&ref=search_bar
Edited to add--what's funny is most of the shirts (after the first dozen or so shown) are seriously delusional by calling others racist or implying others are racist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev373c7wSRg
good one! 🤣
Well, this is what happens when people don't fight back against idiotic terminology fast and hard from the start. These morons got to trample all over the landscape and you can't clean up while they're still rampaging.
We have *ethnicities* and *cultures.* We have philosophical foundations to every culture. Religions are philosophical foundations.
Americans are the inheritors of the fruits of the Western Enlightenment. Letting these morons call it *white supremacy* was the fatal mistake. They should have been mocked out of the room and apparently all the smart conservatives were caught with their pants down on this because the only person I see saying "fruits of the Western Enlightenment" routinely and unrelentingly is me.
America succeeded as well as it did for a considerable period of time because of the "melting pot" theory. No other nation had that. People were able to actually become American. One can have French citizenship but the French will never really believe you've become French. As I understand it, the Japanese won't even give you citizenship.
We need to confront every stupid remark with questions. "What is 'white'?"
It used to be recognized everywhere in every nation-state that people had micro-local cultures, even if they shared the same ethnic heritage broadly across the territories that became their nation-states; that's why every country has a standardized form of the national language (or languages) taught in school, because there are so many dialects. Go look up how many dialects of Dutch are spoken in a small country like Belgium. We let too many morons in this country get away with not recognizing the essential unifying power of a commonly recognized standard form of language accessible to everyone regardless of their origins and home form of speech. I'm a garden-variety Noo Yawkuh born to English-speaking parents and I have my "official office voice" (not needed anymore these days) and my moderately well-spoken voice and my "just for friends" voice. Black people did not invent "code-switching."
Until we get people thinking about reality again, and not all this bilgewater propaganda from every side, we don't have a hope in hell.
[edited for grammar]
Yep. And growing up in the 80s/90s, we were making HUGE strides towards a color-blind society (which today they call racist!). Nobody cared where you were from, they cared who you were.
Diversity IS our strength, but democrats reduce diversity to your superficial characteristics and ignore diversity of thought and opinion, which are way more important.
Succinct & discerning
Growing up in the '50s and '60s, kids of many different ethnicities went to after-school religious/ethnic studies too; nobody ever thought that becoming fully American meant a repudiation of one's particular ethnic heritage. All those Hollywood movies about the guys and gals ashamed of Sicilian grandma or Greek aunts and uncles were probably a bit of dramatic over-exaggeration. Certainly many people experienced lots of prejudice from the groups that had come over earlier and fought their way into mainstream acceptance, but they were still on their way into the mainstream too. And plenty of them or their immediate ancestors had come here because of local/regional etc. prejudices over there in the first place. They understood a little better how the world in general works.
Far as I know, the Irish have never demanded reparations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsg29nIkl5o
Neither have descendants of indentured servants who came from other countries and had to work off their passage.
To think we were once such a people who could produce that...
And had a population that understood the entire movie was making FUN of racists!
Maybe the most nefarious plot in all of our history is whatever killed the Borscht Belt.
You said it much better than me, just wanted to tell you.
When my grandmother was born, local dialects were so heavy you would't hear them as swedish at all - people spoke their village-dialect and "school-swedish" and would rapidly learn the new dialect when they moved.
In this area, some villages still used runic script mixed with roman letters in the 1920s, to represent the sounds correctly. Further north is even more convoluted as it is either a blend of sámi language, rural norwegian dialects (if on the western side, otherwise it's finnish) and local swedish plus a sprinkling of gypsy words and the odd old german or russian expression, swedish-ified.
I was given a complete dictionary of the local dialect - with subcategories for distinct individual variations for various villages! A friend had noticed it at an antiquarian and got all 27 volumes for onlythe eq. of $70, a real bargain.
Didn't New York still have different cants/dialects for different burroughs/districts in the early 20th century?
"Didn't New York still have different cants/dialects for different burroughs/districts in the early 20th century?"
Always been so. This used to be well-understood as normal. I remember reading about Sean Connery's early years in acting and how he was warned he needed to lose his heavy Scots accent and it's funny how TV shows set in various parts of the UK will often have subtitles because the accents are so difficult to understand if one isn't a local.
My parents--both born here, both raised pretty much bilingual and neither having gone further than HS, spoke what for New Yorkers was a pretty much unaccented English. I suspect the teachers of their era worked very hard to ensure the incredibly diverse student bodies learned to speak in a manner that would lead to as much upward mobility as might be hoped for.
Someone murdered that common sense and it ain't getting resurrected.
Was that way in Stockholm when I grew up there (part-time).
You had "rikssvenska", i.e. "the Realm's Swedish" which is the common variety heard on TV and radio and what pretty much everyone speaks now, then you had your local cant or at least a very distinct pronounciation (more of a sociolect as Stockholm was and still is rather heavily segregated based on income/class though population replacement via invasion-migration has edged the class-thing out), and the the unique dialects like Söderslang (South Side slang, think swedish eq. of Cockney Rhyming slang) and Knoparmoj (Chimney sweeps' cant - a peculiar blend of gypsy, jiddish, swedish criminal cant, all mixed up with nonsense-words foradded confusion).
So "What time is it?/Vad är klockan?" would become "Vad kritschar dinkan?" - "kritschar" and "dinkan" are not "real" words, the point being to be able to have private conversations in public.
Of course, my scribblings doesn't do it justice - like all such things it must be heard in contrast and comparison to the official version of the language. It's sad since modern swedish is based on Stockholmian mid-century upper class sociolect which is much more staccato-like than the sing-song dialects of the rest of the country (save Scania and Gotland) in which the entire sentence often is spoken like one longword (to an outsider that's what it might sound like). Scanian has it's own unique sound, being a mix of swedish, danish, dutch, and german pronounciations. Gutemål (Gotlander tongue) is the still in-use language spoken there over 1 000 years ago, so if onewants to hear what gotlander vikings may have sounded like, that's a living link.
Wonder what you think of the bizarre stilted fake accent the showrunners of "Vikings" came up with for no sensible reason.
And turning to a different show--in "Mr. Robot," two characters were having a conversation and I was really disconcerted because there was something really dissonant in their speech patterns, and I looked up the scene online to try to understand what was happening. Turns out one was speaking Danish and the other, Swedish. I was so pleased with myself for noticing...
My wife watched it, eating popcorn while giggling/groaning the whole time.
Me, I could stand about 15 seconds. That show was about as historical as Conan the Barbarian.
Never heard of Mr Robot, but I've seen clips onine of a show where the celebrity (I guess, I'm not "with it") guests are given tasks. One is to try and elicit specific information from someone only answering in their native not-english tongue.
The actor who played Ragnar so defied my very lowest expectations that I hung on despite the essential ridiculousness of the scripts. Once they killed him off the force field was gone.
Mr. Robot (drama show) had some surprising originality to start with, but as with so many series, the first season is wonderful and then it's all downhill. They don't know what to do with themselves and they head for the cliche superstore and go to town in the aisles.
"Not real blacks"... I "love" it, meaning I find it wonderful these schmucks are displaying their racism - their actual, real and classic racism at that!- for all to see.
A certain someone, once upon a time, declared the japanese "honorary arians" so as not to violate his own dogma. This is pretty much the same thing they are doing, insisting that "race" (meaning skin colour only to boot, so even worse!) means there's a whole thing you imply must be in to, or you're not areal scotsman, I mean black I mean whatever.
There's one thing pointing out that the only way to be inuit (or swede or turk or whatever) is to be born one and a whole'nother thing to claim that just because you are X you must also think Y about Z.
/Especially/ for americans, and to a lesser extent brits/Commonwealth-ers, seeing as "american" doesn't have a set skin colour, does it?
Do you think they ever stop and think "What the Sam Hill am I saying?"? What's next, the Democrat Party handing out free fried chicken and watermelon in black majority districts? Got to love fried chicken and watermelon, or you ain't proper black like, is that the Democrats' idea of how to not be racist maybe?
Gah! It's not even my nation but such a blatant display of real true racism á la pre-WW2 really get my cylinders firing!
https://youtu.be/We6Qr9-dDn8?t=59
The view that all black people must vote the same is the real racism.
IMO - he is one of the most racist politicians... ever! Sadly.
To the paternalistic neo-lib and neocon, Blacks have to be dysfunctional to be "real". Do they think middle class Blacks haven't noticed this?
I wouldn't really know (I hope they have!) since I'm not american - here, black means either illegal migrant or adopted child or the rare actual come-to-work person from Africa (south of the arabised nations).
Hilariously but not surprising to me, those most offended by being called black are the africans. They are [insert tribe/ethnicity name here], not black. What they call black americans I can't write, but it would make a klansman go "Woah Nelly, slow down!".
Love your posts, M. Rikard!
Off topic and unimportant, but maybe of interest to you:
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2018/1/13/18378007/keith-jackson-and-the-origin-of-whoa-nellie
(I seem to recall I had permission to correct your English: it's whoa, not woah. Have the kids got to you? ;-) )
Haha!
I wrote it as I hear it, with a stop and an ascending tone at the end. Like "woe-ah!". So the real pronouciation is instad the same as when you reign in horses then?
Correct away - a native speaker always have a better "feel" for what is more correct, as one of my tutors said. As an aside-anecdote, he taught swedish, english and spanish at upper secondary level (the step right before you go off to university) and used Rese (swedish mythological creature) as an example of how native intuitive understanding of terms always edges out dictionary-definitions andbook-learning.
The closest in english is ogre, but it's not the same creature at all. In spanish I think it was orgo, which was more similar to ogre than to rese. Reason being, ogre/ogro is from Celtic tradition while rese is from Nordic such.
Just goes to show how easy even the simplest things get lost in translation (wonderful movie by the way, one of the handful I've seen in a theater this millennium).
Whoa there, seem to be rambling off on a tangent, yes?
Yep. Whoa is a one-syllable word, whether stopping old Nellie, interrupting a hasty fool, expressing astonishment, or directing the conversation to end a post (touche), but...
"...how native intuitive understanding of terms always edges out dictionary-definitions and book-learning."
That's how languages evolve, so thanks to the kids, my 2030 Merriam-Webster will probably have a two-syllable word spelled "woah"!
I think my horse will still understand.
VANITY FAIR, THE ATLANTIC, & TIME magazines are all as honorable and decent as any ten-cent whore.
Hey! Don't go insulting 10-cent whores! At least they're honest about what they're doing.