27 May 2009

Best Read Outloud

For your rainy day entertainment, may I suggest reading through Lonely Planet's British Language and Culture (or a similar guide to the Queen's English) out loud with the most authentic British accents you can muster?

My sister and I did just that as we took a stroll along the boardwalk last week. Sounding somewhere between very fake tourists, Hermoine Granger and Keeping Up Appearances, we read through "Misunderstandings" and part of the section on slang in my pocket size Lonely Planet. We were giggling to learn the connotations of some common words, stumped by the pronunciations of words we'd never seen before (antenatal? bugerigar?) and outright laughing at eachothers' attrocious attempts to make it sound like we were English born and bred. A fun one (from "Misunderstandings") on how British English doesn't always mean what we think it does:

tip to dump; a rubbish dump and by extension any untidy place. [...] In some country areas there are signs that read 'No Tipping', meaning 'don't dispose of rubbish here'.

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