Tags:

Rex Scott

Rex Scott

4 Responses

  1. Jacob Johnson says:
    September 27, 2021 at 4:05 pm

    The beast spoken English I’ve heard on the radio, in recent memory, was from an Armenian ambassador .

  2. Allen Wilson says:
    September 30, 2021 at 4:20 pm

    I suppose that we could conjugate the “Ain’t” system of contractions this way:

    Singular:

    1st person: Ain’t
    2nd person: Aren’t
    3rd person: Isn’t

    Plural:

    1st: Aren’t
    2nd: Aren’t
    3rd: Aren’t

    The fact that “aren’t” is used for four out if six persons might indicate a decay in this system of contractions over time, as the three persons of the plural and the second person singular all became one form. Rather, it might if this system were ancient, but of course there probably never were other forms since these contractions are only about four or five centuries old?

    Just the effort of posing this whimsical proposition took quite a bit of rewriting. Precision and clarity really are difficult.

    On

  3. Allen Wilson says:
    September 30, 2021 at 4:34 pm

    And I accidentally posted before finishing.

    One reason I like to listen to some German or French music or watch old TV shows or movies in those languages is that even when I can’t understand them (which is almost all the time with French) I still can tell that correct speech is being used in most of it, therefore it pleases the ear and just sounds better than the English in most all modern media. They don’t seem to have fallen as far as the English speaking world has quite yet. As for English, I’ll take the coarsest speech of Bogart over the most polite speech of modern actors (who seem to sound trashy and savage at their best), for Bogart’s worst was civilized by comparison. I would prefer the posher English actors of fifty or sixty years ago over anything from today.

  4. Frank Brownlow says:
    October 4, 2021 at 3:57 pm

    50 or 60 years ago English actors had to use what we called ‘RP’, ‘received pronunciation, but almost no-one in Britain speaks in RP now, and public speech–on the BBC, on the stage, in the courts, in the church, and the schools is a free-for-all.