The Hard Times – Punk News Comin’ Your Way! [Unofficial]Man Referring to Everyone as ‘Cunt’ After Two Week Australian Vacation
Sentence firstThe Trouble with Harry’s grammar
Alfred Hitchcock’s comedy-thriller The Trouble with Harry (1955), amidst all its talk of murder and romance, has a fun little exchange of sociolinguistic interest between John Forsythe (‘Sam Marlowe’) and Edmund Gwenn (‘Capt. Albert Wiles’):
Marlowe’s correction is notable for being relatively polite. Those who correct others’ speech uninvited often do so in a rude and judgemental way. Marlowe corrects Wiles gently and off-handedly, as though automatically correcting a child. Indeed, Wiles doesn’t even notice and reacts as if Marlowe had merely echoed him. For good measure he adds another nonstandard usage: past tense say for said.
That Miles doesn’t pick up on the prescriptive nudge also chimes with what happens when children have their speech corrected – they tend to repeat what they said rather than immediately adopt the ‘proper’ form. Abby Kaplan, in her excellent book about language myths, Women Talk More than Men, reviews the research and concludes:
Some parents tend to repeat or expand on their children’s utterances, but it is unclear whether children actually use this kind of feedback to correct their own speech. Since there are societies in which this kind of interaction is rare, it is unlikely that repetitions and expansions are absolutely necessary for language acquisition.
Of course, Captain Wiles has already fully acquired his language: it’s just that the variety or dialect he uses differs in some respects from standardized English, prompting Marlowe’s useless intervention.
The script for The Trouble with Harry was written by John Michael Hayes. I don’t know if the same exchange appears in the source novel by Jack Trevor Story, but Hitchcock obviously liked it. He featured another linguistic allusion, to Alfred Korzybski and his General Semantics, in The Birds:
Hitchcock’s interest in usage also manifests in a letter he wrote to Ernest Lehman, writer of North by Northwest, in which he wondered, in a parenthetical aside, if his use of while should be whilst. I covered the whilst, amongst, amidst issue in a previous post.
#AbbyKaplan #acting #AlfredHitchcock #AlfredKorzybski #dialect #EdmundGwenn #ethnolinguistics #film #GeneralSemantics #grammar #humour #language #languageAcquisition #linguistics #prescriptivism #sociolinguistics #TheBirds #TheTroubleWithHarry #TippiHedren #usage #whilst
Nikki WordsmithDialect means a variety of a language spoken in a specific region, social group, or community. It often includes unique words also known as vocabulary. Then, pronunciations, and sometimes grammar rules that differ from the standard form of the language.
https://nikkiwordsmith.com/what-is-dialect/
Stan CareyFun to see the Irish idiom "make a hames of" in a national news headline: https://www.rte.ie/news/2026/0417/1568809-odonovan-protests/
I wrote about the expression in 2012: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2012/11/07/making-a-hames-of-it/
#language #IrishEnglish #dialect #idioms #phrases #words #blogpost
Strong Language"This is not about encouraging rudeness or bad behaviour, but rather celebrating diversity and just acknowledging that swearing is, for a lot of people, a day-to-day part of life"
Linguists at University of Sheffield study regional insults and swear words:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/apr/15/swearwords-census-regional-dialects-language-britain
#swearing #insults #dialect #research #linguistics #dialectology
"Without knowing, I had used that thing for which the English reserve a visceral dislike: their language, loaded and aimed by the old enemy."
—Eavan Boland, on using the word "amn't" in a London school at the age of 6 or 7
Mab_813I'm surprised to find out that bavarian (austro-bavarian) dialects are considered "vulnerable" according to wikipedia.
Uhmm what?
How many millions of speakers does a dialect need to be considered "safe"?
Droppie [infosec] 🐨
afaict this reeks of being potentially just gen-ai-slop, but if not then at the very least the machine-generated voiceover & non-disable-able onscreen transcript were an unending misery for me to endure. yet, despite that, much of this was simply hilarious.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eYjd3B-VMQ
#language #lexicon #grammar #idiom #dialect #straya #strayan #code #codebreaking
How Australian Slang Accidentally Became the Most Effective Code the US Military Could Never Crack
Droppieothers have already posted & discussed this several hours ago https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-12/precautionary-dam-inspections-after-boorowa-earthquake/106444684, but my take here is on a different track altogether.
'Freight train' earthquakesounding like a "bomb" or "freight train".It was like a freight train coming through the housein strayan state govt railways, certainly nsw's nswgr / ptc / sra, & i believe most if not all other states, we had mainline & branchline passenger services, & goods services, ie, the latter's trains were... goods trains. that was so for over a hundred years, & was still true until at least 1989. over that whole period, it was merely merkans who had freight trains, not us.sometime over the intervening decades, no doubt as part of the toxic global spread of merkan cultural imperialism since the 90s, & pathetically lazy media, strayans went merkan with our raily lingo just as we also gave up the fight in so many other cultural areas.
these days, i expect, if any old timers were to talk of goods trains, most strayan peeps would not know what was meant.
farque me dead, jfc 🙄🤦♀️🤬
#railways #goodstrains #lingo #dialect #culture #fuckmerkanmangling #fuckmerkanculturalimperialism
Saw this sentence with both the Irish English "give out" and a standardized-English "give out":
"The banks often give out¹ that the rules are too tight and they can’t give out² the money people need."
¹ complain
² issue, distribute
Source and commentary: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2013/09/07/giving-out-irish-style/
#language #dialect #idioms #IrishEnglish #EnglishUsage #phrases
