I work for a large company in the Midlands. It encompasses a lot of skill sets, and the staff come from all over Britain (and Ireland) and France. I'm constantly blown away by the accents. You are usually constantly changing mental gears in meetings to accommodate the massacre of the language by the current speaker.
However, the worst of the lot are local to Birmingham. The business is based in Dudley, formerly a small town outside Birmingham (no Milum, not that Birmingham) but now part of the conurbation which takes in the whole area including Wolverhampton. Even within that area, the range of accents or brogues is impressive, even if the brogues themselves usually aren't.
A Brummie (person from Birmingham, or Brum) always sounds as if he or she is moaning about something, even when he or she is deliriously happy - or perhaps especially when deliriously happy.
These verbally-challenged clods have the temerity to criticise my accent, of course. So I fight back. Dudley is pronounced by most of the English-speaking world as "Dud"+"lee". But not in Brum. There, it's pronounced "Dould"+"laaay", the "Dould" sounding like "could" or "would". So I started saying "... Dudley, oh, sorry, you won't understand that, Douldlaaay."
I stopped saying it after a while - a joke is a joke after all - but others have taken up the clarion call. I was in a meeting yesterday when one of the analysts on my team, who hails from Essex (yes, there are boys from there as well as girls), said "And on Wednesday we'll be back in Dudley - sorry, Douldlaaay - to help the developers." Everyone from my team creased; everyone else just looked confused. That made my team even more helpless. The analyst who said it was just beside himself when he realised what he'd done. He went bright red and glared at me.
It's probably time for me to move on! My work here is done.
Interesting story CK, and this is an interesting phrase that I had never heard before. Am I to assume, from context, that creased is like cringe; a furrow of ones brow, drawing your face together and squinting your eyes? I can just picture it!
Ooh, I can answer that question! My old friend Philip told me that a creaser is something that makes your face creased by a wide smile. (Believe me, I was envisioning something else entirely.)
Ladymoon, be our guest, but! Us brits are not shy in adopting argot from all over the world, so we are more than chuffed when others take a liking to ours.
That's a great story, CapK, but my wonder is that the Essex guy was embarrassed by it - on the whole, people from different regions aren't particulary over-sensitive to people taking the gentle mick out of accents - so long as it is done in a friendly fashion. Yorkshire people don't even think you are taking the mick - they just think you are trying to "talk proper" !!
At the risk of offending US'ns on the board: When I was working on a macadamia nut plantation in Oz, there was one bloke in the nursery who used to talk to me in a US accent. I'd then adopt a US accent to reply....This went on for a few days before one of the other women said to me, "I'm sorry, Ian's such an asshole, making fun of your accent like that." I said, "He's making fun of my accent? I thought we were both making fun of American accents!" What he was doing was definitely not Canajun, eh. - On a similar topic: I managed to pick up a few Australianisms, but.
Whilst "teasing" is a fair enough translation of the phrase, another one is, "poking fun at."
But it's so much more than that. "Taking the Mick" implies an element of gullibility on behalf of the Takee and intent by the Taker to string along the Takee for as long as possible. It suggests sarcasm. It is not...
"What were you thinking wearing that bad Hawaiian shirt?"
It's more like...
"Love the shirt, mate. Where did you get it? How much was it? Wow, that's cheap. I might have to get one myself. Bet the missus loves it. You should wear it to work one day." Ad nauseum (or ad nauseam if you prefer).
yup - down here in Oz, "creasing yourself" is a very common phrase - and it generally means being very amused indeed - I like Bingley's allusion to laughing so much that you bend double. Also - "taking the mickey" is probably even more common here although I have no idea of it's origin. I am fascinated by the the "micturation" suggestion, but can't relate bladder contractions to sarcasm. Well, not easily anyway. . . . An equivalent (albeit less common) slang phrase to "taking the mick" is "having a lend of", as in "Do you really like my Hawaiian shirt or are you having a lend of me?"
Never heard 'having a lend of' before, but there's another one that I have heard which is 'pulling your chain' as in 'don't take any notice of him, he's just pulling your chain'
Yes rkay we have "pulling your chain" here, though a much more common alternative is "pulling your/my leg". A popular expansion of leg-pulling is the phrase, "Oh yeah sure mate.(US equivalent = "Yeah, right", which proves that two positives can make a negative) Pull the other one - it plays Jingle Bells."
Oh and thanks maverick!! I can't believe that as an aussie I didn't think of that."Taking the piss" is not only a regular phrase here but it is almost national pastime, and we are especially good at taking the piss out of ourselves!
There's also pulling my string. Somewhere in the recesses of memory there's a country-western lyric that goes: If ya wanna see me do mah tha-a-ang, pull mah stra-a-ang.
I've always had the impression that pulling someone's leg is essentially good-humoured, whereas pulling (or rattling) someone's chain is intended to set off a major tantrum from the pullee.
Jackie asks:Is any of this related to slipping someone a mickey?
I think she was being humourous, but I looked it up anyway for my own edification. Mickey Finn:
NOUN: Slang. An alcoholic beverage that is surreptitiously altered to induce diarrhea or stupefy, render unconscious, or otherwise incapacitate the person who drinks it. ETYMOLOGY: Probably after a notorious Chicago bar shut down in 1903, allegedly because its customers were served spiked drinks and then robbed.
ONCE UPON A TIME, back in the 1880's of the last century, there was a saloon-owner in Chicago whose name was Michael Finn. No, Mr. Michael Finn did not invent the Mickey Finn. The guy who ran the saloon right across the street from Mr. Finn's did that.
Edit: according to this account, the original Mickey Finn did render the victim unconsious. It neutralized an obnoxious drunk by a different means: strong purgatives. [bill, am I being suitably euphemisic?]
In the course of looking this up I found a new usage:
mickey n. The resolution unit of mouse movement. It has been suggested that the `disney' will become a benchmark unit for animation graphics performance.
This is per dictionary.com, which cites as its source the glossary at http://www.jargon.org. Bill, take a look and tell us what you think of the latter. With luck, you'll find some interesting word-posts for us there!
Disclaimer: Wordsmith.org is not responsible for views expressed on this site.
Use of this forum is at your own risk and liability - you agree to
hold Wordsmith.org and its associates harmless as a condition of using it.
So I fight back. Dudley is pronounced by most of the English-speaking world as "Dud"+"lee". But not in Brum. There, it's pronounced "Dould"+"laaay", the "Dould" sounding like "could" or "would". So I started saying "... Dudley, oh, sorry, you won't understand that, Douldlaaay."
[swoon]
