Tell us something.: I'm a fiddler and, latterly, a fluter. I love the flute. I wish I'd always played it. I love the whistle as well. I'm blessed in having really lovely instruments for all of my musical interests.
Location: Unimportant island off the great mainland of Europe
benhall.1 wrote:... although I'm used to squirls now.
Well, how do YOU say it? Squirrelles?
Shhh! I'll let you into a secret. Now there's not a lot of people will tell you this, but, if you really want to fit in when you come over here ... we pronounce it "squire-ulls". It's from our feudal past. Not that our past had no point to it, you understand. Feudal. Ideal government system, yes? Good.
Tell us something.: I'm a fiddler and, latterly, a fluter. I love the flute. I wish I'd always played it. I love the whistle as well. I'm blessed in having really lovely instruments for all of my musical interests.
Location: Unimportant island off the great mainland of Europe
Tell us something.: I'm a fiddler and, latterly, a fluter. I love the flute. I wish I'd always played it. I love the whistle as well. I'm blessed in having really lovely instruments for all of my musical interests.
Location: Unimportant island off the great mainland of Europe
Tell us something.: I'm a fiddler and, latterly, a fluter. I love the flute. I wish I'd always played it. I love the whistle as well. I'm blessed in having really lovely instruments for all of my musical interests.
Location: Unimportant island off the great mainland of Europe
Did you know that one of the most hilarious-sounding British idioms, to a Merkin, is "knock you up in the morning"?
BTW, Ben, I'm still waiting for "fleadh" and "error" in the contexts you heard them.
"Even heroes have Fleadhs."
"It's the end of an error."
And what's wrong with "knock you up in the morning"? I offered to do that for a female American colleague when I worked for Price Waterhouse a long time ago. Never saw her again. Goodness only knows what happened to her ...
Tell us something.: I'm a fiddler and, latterly, a fluter. I love the flute. I wish I'd always played it. I love the whistle as well. I'm blessed in having really lovely instruments for all of my musical interests.
Location: Unimportant island off the great mainland of Europe
benhall1 wrote:Actually, "indeedy-doody" is used over here fairly often. I've been using it since I was a kid. In a sort of quaint, broadly grinning, sort of way.
Is it indeedy? Only after a surfeit of Dukes of Hazard or some such. I think that's just Ben. He's one of a kind, fortunately.
I respect people's privilege to hold their beliefs, whatever those may be (within reason), but respect the beliefs themselves? You gotta be kidding!
I'm still not clear, Jem. The thing is, you and I spell differently just to convey sound, and these spellings are sometimes entirely at cross-purposes. Do you mean to say you pronounce it kind of like "squeer-uls"?
I mush it together and say "squerls". Kind of like "pearls", only flatter & uglier. Definitely not "pearls" as in a plummy accent.
"If you take music out of this world, you will have nothing but a ball of fire." - Balochi musician
benhall.1 wrote:"Even heroes have Fleadhs."
"It's the end of an error."
Aha. That last one makes for cracking pun.
I recall a campaign button from 1984 with a picture of Reagan's face and the caption "End of an Error". Even without the benefit of hindsight at the time, it seemed overly hopeful, though in the buttonmakers' defense it was before Mondale secured the nomination.
Using a (largely) standardized spelling system to deconstruct differences in pronunciation is a tricky business; where pronunciation of "r" is concerned, it's a veritable game of rhoticity chicken. (Having grown up in a non-rhotic area (eastern New England), I'm used to the confusion. There was a kid in our neighborhood that everyone called "Todd Jumpa", so I assumed his surname was Jumper, but it turned out to be Giampa.)
