I’ve noticed recently that people here are saying ‘I am bored of that’ rather than ‘bored with’ or ‘bored by’, possibly there is some confusion with 'tired of'. Presumably this is another example of the growth of what we call Estuary English. I’m wondering if this particular usage has appeared outside the UK as yet? In fact, is Estuary English spreading abroad at all or remaining just a home grown phenomenon?

Estuary English is a combination of Cockney, London (not the same as cockney)mixed with a bit of Aussie from the soaps and some Americanisms. It is a genuine and growing phenomenon and I call it that because its growth has been phenomenal. Its growth centre was probably southern Essex, on the north side of the Thames estuary, and jokes about Essex girls have been around for some time now. If you Google Essex girls I’m sure you’ll find some; they tend to be in the same vein as jokes about blondes. There are a number of websites that talk about Estuary English, but here’s one to start you off. Try it, its interesting.

http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/chimp/101/phonetics/estuary.htm

Prominent speakers of Estuary English include footballers, their wives and those low-level media personality lads and laddettes who are well known for being well known and whom we love to see flashing their bits and pieces in the tabloids. These exhibitionists of both sexes have become role models, mainly because they make so much money with so little apparent effort. That’s fine as far as the exhibitionism and the money goes, but gives a problem in the area of communication skills.

Wow, this is fascinating, dxb!   Er, don't estuaries contain effluent, or used to? (I was wondering if that had something to do with the appellation!) I saw one thing that would definitely set my teeth on edge: the change of /st/ and /str/ to the sound of /ʃ/ in she. SSHtation? SSHudder!
The disagreements sound like the everlasting ones between the old-fogey-sticklers and the young up-and-comers who say so-what-if-it-ain't-like-it's-always-been-we-like-it-this-way.
I thought it was particularly interesting that some young people like it because it "blurs social lines".

Cross threading to the innate superiority of Macs: On my Windows machine at work I saw that symbol that Jackie put in there as some silly swirly line; on this superior Mac I see it as it should be, a simple square.

Fascinating article. I've noticed a fair amount of this while listening to certain UK music. Damon Albarn of Blur, a product of the UK public school system, has been lambasted in the UK press for his purposeful down-speaking (did I just coin a word?). There's currently a little Mancunian hipster named Mike Skinner whose debut album is chock full of "Mockney" pronunciation. Seems as if the trend has gone way beyond the Thames basin. Another interesting trend is the borrowing of Scots slang by hip Londoners after the rise in popularity of Irvine Welsh's novels.

Not much different from suburban wannabees from Iowa using urban street slang, innit? or should I say a'ight?

In the article, that square was an elongated S. I tried the [pre] thing--it didn't work, as you saw.

for the sake of making this even more boring, are we talking about ~(tilde) , in place of the ? which I see?

She had the IPA symbol for the sh sound. The square was the Mac's miserable attempt at displaying it. I saw it properly on my PC at work. I copied and pasted into a .txt file and did a hex dump of the file. It showed up as a three byte Unicode something or other. Anyone interested I'll look it up when I get back to work. It was 00 83 20 or something like that.

My "superior Mac" comment was irony

My "superior Mac" comment was irony


oh, I got that... as much as it hurt

OS 10.2.3 showed me a ?

you 'guys' talking about one of these? §

I don't know fella', are we?

one of these? §

Naw, that's just straight extended ASCII, no Unicode needed there.

I thought not--but it is an elongated S, of sorts.

Mercy me, go and look at it in the link. I sincerely apologize for not knowing what it's called. I looked at my Ramsch list http://www.ramsch.org/martin/uni/fmi-hp/iso8859-1.html, but it doesn't have it.

Mercy me, go and look at it in the link.

ah, but there's the rub, not? until we find a picture of it, I'm not going to be able to see it, because it's not in my font set anywhere...

yippee! after much searching, I found a Unicode font for macs:

http://www.sil.org/~gaultney/gentium/download.html

I use Moz for OS 10.2.3, and needed to go into my prefs and tweak the Font/Unicode settings to read the new font, but now I can see all the marks.

Apple should have done this in the first place...

now I have to figure out how to type all these funky characters...

ok, for a look-see...

http://www.sover.net/~rgrow/extra/esh.html

An esh! Now, why didn't I think of that?! [rolling eyes e] Thanks, eta.

My Windows machine shows a blank square in Jackie's post and on the Estuary page.

Bingley

Given my current location, regional accents have become something of a stock-in-trade joke. The Estuarine English is indeed very common and it's spreading. My 11-year-old goddaughter, brought up in Northamptonshire (better known as "me-duck" country) does lots of somethinks and innits and the loike in her everyday speech and it's driving her parents, who are paying through the nose to send her to a private school, nuts.

But even that pales into insignificance, from the humour point of view, beside people I work with in the Black Country, with Black Country accents so broad you could build a house on them, aping their southron EE-speaking neighbours. The number of times I've had to bite my tongue!

- Pfranz