Accent-uate the Positive! - 03/16/02 05:20 AM
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.
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.
