The year is almost one third over. In that time I think I both resurrected the ghost of ‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy and wrote about a Bob Marley documentary I saw. Texting with the GF today, for a moment she thought google speak was her friend and then google speak took a sharp left turn and threw pirates at the screen.
I speculated once that fake misheard lyrics is what killed Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy. I have a confession. I submitted a fake misheard lyric, but a very plausible one. I claimed to have thought in Redemption songs Bob Marley sang “Old pirates yes they Rabbi’s …”
Google speak has some curious dialectic quirks. I think some smart ass smart guy with English as a second language programmed it for American speech. I speak American most of the time, unless someone is having a hard time understanding my speech, then I annunciate clearly and precisely. More often than not it’s not my speech but what I’m saying that confuses people.
Until I actively did something about it (spelled the word one letter at a time) Paw came out as Paul. I went from regular American to hyper-annunciated English; paw came out Paul. Oddly enough it’s the same dialectic habit that had the guy at the pet store think he was saying wolf when, in fact, he was saying woof. If I hadn’t been following the context I would have thought he was barking mad. I know that if you and I were speaking Paw and Paul would seem very distinct. However, dropping the L is not uncommon even without local dialects; whether from Boston or Los Angeles, certain slurring and dropping of consonants are pretty common,
Most Americans when trying to do a British accent choose either cockney or Australian. The clipped speech of an educated Brit is more foreign sounding than dialects that drop consonants or, as often happens in stereotypical Austrailian add one (I don’t know why but even Austrailians I know who have PhD’s and speak publically, sometimes add an R to words ending in a vowel). Someone is about to object to that, a lot of someones are objecting to the idea that American English is … odd.
Hell, I’ll even object to the idea that education has a huge part in speech patterns. I mean with some people I think it does, but with a lot of people it has fuck all to do with it, fuck all on purpose. A simple personal example; I had this girlfriend who was born and raised in a trailer park outside of Houston. Most Americans when they hear a Texan or Oklahoma accent autonmatically take ten IQ points away from the speaker. This girlfriend practiced long and hard to rid herself of the Texan accent. She modeled her speech after national newscasters, most of whom would be very hard to pin down to a geographical dialect. When she was drunk the Texan drawl came out thick. She practiced holding her liquor and, um, everybody else’s.
My speech has some very weird backgrounds. There are two schools of thought on language development, sorry, normative language development sans neurological fuckery. With both schools the kid still learns the language first and formost from the environment, despite it taking a whole village, the environment for the early development is a mere household. Despite living in the Midwest for all but twenty years of their lives, my dad had a New Jersey accent and my mom a Philly accent. I had barely been talking a year when we moved to Cambridge England for a year, for the first time, and was immersed in a school system and community where they spoke the queens English.
I returned to the States with that accent. A kids speaking environment grows when they go to school, I just mean contact with other voices expands. I grew up in the Midwest, but in a town full of students from all over the states and the world. MSU was a renowned land grant college and the vanguard of modern farming. African princes, for instances, would attend MSU to bring new farming techniques back to their hungry countries. Still, some locals, and certainly those in outlying farming communities, spoke like extras in the movie Fargo.
When I was ten I was in a major stage production of Carson McCullers Member of the Wedding. I played a ten year old southern country boy. The director was a stickler for authenticity. A movie had been made in the fifties and the actor who played my role was Brandon DeWilde (if you aren’t a film buff I wouldn’t expect you to have heard of him). I was cast because I looked just like him at that age. They bought me white gold glass frame with window panes because that’s how it was written and how Brandon Dewilde did it. It means I had to have a southern accent, Georgia white boy plantation because that’s how Brandon did it. The play centers around a thirteen year old girl whos playmates are the kid I played and the old black maid. The three of them are in ninety percent of the play.
Seems a bit weird to say but that’s where I learned to annunciate and project. Weird because the dialect was such that annunciation was counter-intuitive, but, like everything else people do, you need to learn the rules before you break them. To effectively speak a dialect foreign to you to have to learn how to speak the common language perfectly. You can’t git iny if you can’t get any.
Shit fuck sunzabitchs. I forgot where I was going. I don’t even have a phone call to blame it on. I started typing and got to this paragraph directly and realized I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about. If I was half a hair more bored I’d read this whole entry into google speak. Oh, and maybe Siri. For some reason that’s never been explained to me, my service provider didn’t want my old iphone when I upgraded plans. I don’t think I can make calls, though I can probably call 911, but everything else works. I keep it in the bathroom to play bejeweled mist on while, um, sitting and thinking.
I’m not that bored. Yet. I guess my only point is that it’s pretty damn snarky of google speak to make Paul of Paw, but it’s not completely unfounded. Unlike auto-fucking-correct, the speech program makes assumptions of phonemics not phonetics. The assumption is almost insulting. To assume is to make an ass of hume (the H is silent ala british speak. I wonder if they program google speak differently in the UK? It doesn’t really matter, you have to teach the fucking program how to listen anyhow. Or, perhaps, there is a Paul Paw conspiracy. Guess I’ll have to wait until Dan Browns next book comes out; The Apostle Paw conspiracy).
Ok, I love you too. Shut up.
I forgot to add this, mostly because I didn’t think of it until just now.
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