Everytime I hear a Brit talk about their 'proper' English I feel like

[LilKim]

smashing their skull in.

I suppose I shouldn't have had that second cup of coffee.

[RagingInMiami]

1. That would be "skull" in proper English

[MrSlayer]

2. You want to sink their boat?

[Bouncy Ball]

3. I know a fast way to get rid of people like that.

Start speaking with a REALLY BAD British accent. No, I mean horrifically bad.

They'll run.

[Skittles]

5. I've tried it on my mum

doesn't work; she just says STOP TAKING THE MICKEY OUT OF ME :o

[Zuni]

6. Bloody 'ell

[KurtNYC]

27. And as they start to run say "cheerio"

They love that (sarcasm off)

[CaliforniaPeggy]

4. Now now, LilKim,

easy does it. After all, they were speaking English long before we were, now weren't they?

;-)

[qnr]

7. Just tell them since they're talking to you here, they should be speaking

proper American English.

Edit: typo

[sendero]

8. I just think...

.... that they desparately need a jolly good rogering :)

[FuzzySlippers]

9. Well, who doesn't?

:P

[Huckebein the Raven]

13. Don't we all ?

:evilgrin:

[NV Whino]

10. If you want to hear what proper English sounds like,

track down and watch Elizabeth R starring Glenda Jackson.

This is not the so-called upper crust Brit Speak. This is English as it was meant to be spoken.

Elizabeth R was PBS production somewhere in the mid 70s. My library has all 9 (I think) episodes on VHS, but I bet it's available on DVD.

[imenja]

11. they are full of themselves

and resentful because the sun has set on their empire. I really pissed of an English punk (this was in the 80s, in London no less) one time when I told him that no one would even notice their little island if another World War broke out. It wasn't a nice thing to say, but he was really getting on my nerves with his ethnocentric comments. This, of course, while he was in the process of trying to put the moves on me with my boyfriend in the next room.

I'll save my other stories about egotistical Englishmen for another post.

[moggie]

29. Most of us don't care about the empire any more

You'll still hear some of the elderly lamenting its demise, and of course it's a sore point with some of the far right, but, honestly, I don't know anyone over here who loses much sleep over it. Anyway, letting you guys rule the world now is so entertaining!

[mr blur]

32. True, nobody gives a fuck about the empire.

Good luck with building yours, though, although it doesn't seem to be going too well. Perhaps you need a King with a brain (although the lack of one never seemed to slow us down). The thing about having had an empire is that it's the history of our country growing up, getting too big for its boots, getting out of control, accepting the inevitable and living with/learning from its mistakes. Sad to watch the US embarking on a similar journey and making the same mistakes; first stage - the people to whom you bring feeedom and "civilisation" will hate you.

[imenja]

33. considering we do such a lousy job of it

and I sure wish we weren't the big bully of the world. I often think what it would be like to be from a nice friendly country like Canada.

[Moms Baby Democrat]

12. Aweyanbileyerheid! n/t

[ronnykmarshall]

15. Arrrrrr!

Sounds like ye talkin' pirate!

[Moms Baby Democrat]

16. Silly Ronny, Pirates are for The Carribean

It's glaswegian for what it's worth

[RevolutionaryActs]

14. I like they way they talk.

And they were speaking English first. :shrug:

[tjwmason]

17. I better go and hide then....

Being honest, most English people massacre the language totally so we can hardly bitch about you chaps.

[asthmaticeog]

18. I was just going to post something about

the utter incomprehensibility of cockney rhyming slang. I certainly have moments when I'll indulge in some head-scratcher syntax, but that shit's just off the map.

[TyeDye75]

21. Your avin a turkish aint ya?

[tjwmason]

25. Many linguists think that it was invented as a criminal code

And therefore is designed to be incomprehensible - at least to those who have not learned it.

[Bertha Venation]

19. Must just be your particular Brit, lilKim.

I have lots of English friends and have never heard one of them say anything like that. :shrug:

But here... have a nice cuppa decaf. :donut: :hi:

[TyeDye75]

20. I love the differences between American English

and English English.

It causes all kinds of comical mix ups.

Imagine the look on my face when an American man walked up to me at Heathrow and asked if he could...."bum a fag"

Have I gone too far?

[DS1]

22. Heh, that just makes me want to talk in a 'proper' English accent

just so I can smash ~your~ skull in, instead :eyes:

[JimmyJazz]

23. What is your point?

There are a lot of British people who post here - why are you being deliberately offensive to an entire group of people?

Maybe you shouldn't have had that second cup.

[William Bloode]

24. I enjoy my trips to the UK,

And yes my hillybilly english has often been the butt of a joke or two. It's in good fun though, and not really serious. The interesting part is my observations in the UK have shown me they have as many dialects and accents as we do in the US.

[Hand]

28. Hmm...

"Hillbilly" English (i.e., what's occasionally called Appalachian Scots-Irish, etc.) is probably the closest to Shakespearean English in pronunciation, tone, etc., of any other form of the language. Like a lot of English variants, it sort of arrived in the colonies in the 17th century and existed in isolation for generations afterward.

BTW, I'm part Japanese-American... "American" Japanese as spoken by Nisei (and an embarrassingly small proportion of Sanei) is quite weird to Japanese ears--sort of an early 20th-century lingo.

:hi:

[fujiyama]

26. Bloody Hell

You sound like a rowdy fellow. Are you some sort of hooligan or something.

You must be a crazy American driving a big lorry. How dare you criticise the spelling of our words!

[Dorian Gray]

30. Hah!

I was married to a British bloke for a number of years (ended disastrously, but that's another story). He was in the RAF, and let me say that my English was closer to the Queen's English than his or his friends. They were all from Manchester or Blackpool (Northern England). They joked that my English was poor (I've heard it all!), but, at the end of the day, my New Jersey English was much closer to the proper English English than any of the slang ridden colloquialisms that they spoke! :)

They're just ribbing ya! Having lived overseas, I know that they like to tease their "younger and more crude cousins" about their ways!

[Hand]

31. Mancunian English is strange, all right.

I was talking to a lady from Manchester once and honestly couldn't understand what she was saying; seems like she was swallowing half the syllables or something: "Um f'm Munch's'ta; uts un da nofe uv Ungl'nd...", more or less. I nodded a lot...

[moggie]

35. That works both ways

I sometimes need to use subtitles for American films. This is true for pretty much anything with Nicolas Cage, for example.

[Hand]

37. Heh heh...

You don't have to be a Brit to say that!
:evilgrin:

[Lydia Leftcoast]

34. I'll hand this to the Brits, though

They're better at playing with language and thinking up interesting ways to say things than the average American is. I'm especially conscious of this since I just happen to know a lot of English expatriates at present.

I also see this in the television programming that makes it over here. Series such as Jonathan Creek, The Office, Waking the Dead, and even MI-5 are written by people with clever, subtle verbal skills.

A closer case in point: EarlG, who is an English expatriate and who writes a hilarious edition of the Top Ten Conservative Idiots every week.

[Hand]

38. I'll be damned!

I did not know that! Rule Britannia and thanx for EarlG!
:toast:

[Vladimir]

36. I can't stand a 'proper' British accent either

but the regional drawls are fucking excellent. Gimme geordie or cockney or scouse any day of the week...

[LilKim]

39. The accent has nothing to do with it

It's being told you don't know what the last letter of the alphabet is.
It's being told you don't know what metal a coke or beer can is made out of.
It's being told you don't know how to pronounce controversy or schedule.
And after 9/11 it's having your spelling corrected to World Trade Centre.

And so on.

[Spider Jerusalem]

41. Well...

Differences in pronunciation are generally due to dialect...there are quite a few regional dialects in both the US and UK where pronunciation of some words differs quite markedly from the "standard". And American English has been evolving independently for over two centuries, which leads to quite a few differences. Some of them are kind of idiosyncratic; American English is pretty much the only Germanic language where the final letter of the alphabet ISN'T pronounced "zed" or something close to it ("tsett" in German, for instance).

Just tell him that he's a stupid git, that his comments are as idiotic as someone from Berlin telling someone from Zurich they don't speak proper German, and that he can stuff his linguistic superiority up his arse.

[Susang]

40. So I guess you didn't bother to read this bestseller