Now Accents?

Great Cicero’s bleeding adenoids, have we come to this?

Linguist Dr Rob Drummond, who works at Manchester Met University, argued using accents for comedic effect in sitcoms like Fawlty Towers, where Andrew Sachs famously portrayed a clumsy Spanish waiter called Manuel, promotes ‘lazy stereotypes’ and can be ‘pretty damaging’.

Damaging to whom, exactly?

While my native accent is pure Johannesburg WASP (often mistaken for British in America, but never in Britishland), I love doing accents.  While some are not so good (my Texas twang fools absolutely nobody), my Indian-, French- and even German-accented English are all pretty good.  (Afrikaans-flavored English, of course, is second nature.)  My Scottish accent is passable outside the U.K., but nothing beats my Australian — I’ve fooled even native Aussies into thinking I was pure Ocker, and having armed myself with some Strine slang, it’s unbeatable.

And if I live somewhere for any lengthy period of time, the native accent is easy — when I lived in north Jersey, even some of my NJ buddies could be fooled when I called them up and asked in my best Hoboken Nasal, “Yo, howya dooin’?”

So now I can’t do accents anymore, in case someone is “damaged”?

Fuck that.

Take That, Jews

Reading this wokist nonsense recently, I came across this fine sentiment:

PARC would also ban “culturally appropriative language,” such as the word “tribe,” which “was historically used in a dehumanizing way to equate indigenous people with savages.”

So… let’s hear it from my Jewish Readers*.  (When they’re done laughing.)

Were you triggered?  (And I don’t mean “Were you tempted to pick up a gun?”.)


*For Readers unfamiliar with the jargon, Jews traditionally refer to each other as “Tribe”.

Quote Of The Day

From Ace:

“There is no end to the wokification of hobbies. Cooking, knitting, Magic the Gathering, comic books, RPGs; movies and sports — the Nazi infiltrators take over each and every hobby and group to make sure you are never free of constant pro-Nazi propaganda messaging.”

Curiously, our shooting hobby seems to be more or less immune to this bullshit.

Although I expect that any day now, the NRA will issue a statement that they’ll be adding board members from the ranks of the Brady Foundation and Violence Policy Institute in the interests of “fairness” and because “all points of view are important”.

You heard it here first.

Hitting Back

Here’s a little something to make your day:

A linguistics and education professor from Michigan State University claims that telling somebody that you can’t understand him is an example of “linguistic racism.”
More specifically, it’s “racist” to ask a person to repeat what he said because you “don’t understand [his] thick accent.”
Another example is someone “openly say[ing] only English is to be spoken in the workplace” despite the presence of multilingual employees.

This is one time where I wish I was still back in college, and specifically, at Michigan State in this little turd’s class.

Because from then on, I would only speak to him in Afrikaans, and submit all my papers in Afrikaans.  Then, if he attempted to change or penalize that, I would label him a linguistic racist and file disciplinary charges against him, using his own precept as the basis.