Fake Accents
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AaronMalcomb
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Like Wombat I've been a bit of a mimic for as long I can remember. I can affect an accent if I'm exposed to it for any period of time though it is voluntary. Whether I watch a film or spend time with people of certain nationalities I easily incorporate their pronunciations and idioms. Even when I went to school in France my classmates didn't know I was American. But when I go home to North Dakota or when I went to college in Arkansas my speech doesn't change because I don't really want it to happen.
Really it's a skill that's only useful for telling jokes and pulling pranks. Sometimes its enough to pass off as not being foreign but if anybody talks to you very long you run into what Wombat described where they can't place your accent specifically which a lot of people can if you have a genuine accent. I do know of somebody who very successfully convinced a girl he was Scottish until the following morning when his hangover caused him to forget his ruse.
As for the wannabes... it gets on my nerves but it's mostly a behavioral thing, kind of like if you have a private conversation in a whisper even though there is clearly nobody else around. Sometimes you just can't help yourself. But when it's done repetitively and consciously, I can't help but question the motive. I put up with a lot of that in pipe bands... a lot of it.
Och aye, Laddie!
Aaron
Really it's a skill that's only useful for telling jokes and pulling pranks. Sometimes its enough to pass off as not being foreign but if anybody talks to you very long you run into what Wombat described where they can't place your accent specifically which a lot of people can if you have a genuine accent. I do know of somebody who very successfully convinced a girl he was Scottish until the following morning when his hangover caused him to forget his ruse.
As for the wannabes... it gets on my nerves but it's mostly a behavioral thing, kind of like if you have a private conversation in a whisper even though there is clearly nobody else around. Sometimes you just can't help yourself. But when it's done repetitively and consciously, I can't help but question the motive. I put up with a lot of that in pipe bands... a lot of it.
Och aye, Laddie!
Aaron
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Wormdiet
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My family is from Connecticut, although we have "newscaster" lowest-common-denominator US accents.
We moved to North Carolina when I was in middle school and my sister was in college. She now works in a relatively small town.
She "saccharrines" her accent (IE makes it sweet and sickly in a southern way) whenever she's talking to someone she thinks she needs to butter up or impress. It's annoying as hell.
One of her friends is from Scotland but married a local fellow. Her accent is truly bizarre.
I have no problem with legit Southern accents, btw.
We moved to North Carolina when I was in middle school and my sister was in college. She now works in a relatively small town.
She "saccharrines" her accent (IE makes it sweet and sickly in a southern way) whenever she's talking to someone she thinks she needs to butter up or impress. It's annoying as hell.
One of her friends is from Scotland but married a local fellow. Her accent is truly bizarre.
I have no problem with legit Southern accents, btw.
OOOXXO
Doing it backwards since 2005.
Doing it backwards since 2005.
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BrassBlower
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A good example of this is Veronica from the Archies cartoon: "AH-chee-kins, ah dee-CLAY-uh!"Wormdiet wrote:She "saccharrines" her accent (IE makes it sweet and sickly in a southern way) whenever she's talking to someone she thinks she needs to butter up or impress. It's annoying as hell.
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I do not feel obliged to believe that that same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
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Cynth
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Hmmm, that's right, I think to "slip someone a Mickey" is to put knock out drops (or drugs) in his drink to put him to sleep. I think this is supposedly one way a person could get kidnapped to be a sailor----also called being shanghaied. Does the name Mickey Finn have anything to do with this?izzy wrote:Something about slipping someone a Mickey? Or do I have that wrong? It has to do with drugs I think
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Nanohedron
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There is NO way I can sing "The Millionaire" without an "Oirish" accent. It's how I learned it, and IMHO it just wouldn't work otherwise. I usually apologise for the accent before launching into it.izzarina wrote:There's no way I'd get away with singing "Clementine" without the proper accent. I think my kids would tar and feather me if I did!I.D.10-t wrote:Ever try to sing songs like "Clemintine" without a fake accent? It sounds ridiculous.
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Cayden
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Nanohedron
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Heehee.Peter Laban wrote:'Mickey' in ireland generally means something elseCynth wrote: "slip someone a Mickey"
In the States, "mickey" comes from a "Mickey Finn", any sort of knockout drug slipped surreptitiously into someone's drink. Nowadays date-rape drugs fill the bill. Why "Mickey Finn", I don't know.
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I.D.10-t
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I would hate to find one of these in my drinks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey_Finn
I would hate to find one of these in my drinks.
PS Is drunk an accent?
Might have been a bar owner.Nanohedron wrote:Heehee.Peter Laban wrote:'Mickey' in ireland generally means something elseCynth wrote: "slip someone a Mickey"
In the States, "mickey" comes from a "Mickey Finn"... ... Why "Mickey Finn", I don't know.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey_Finn
I would hate to find one of these in my drinks.
PS Is drunk an accent?
"Be not deceived by the sweet words of proverbial philosophy. Sugar of lead is a poison."
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Nanohedron
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Random notes
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From Wikipedia:
Oh, and to get a little bit back on topic, I knew a couple a few years ago at the university here. He was English, she was not but she had acquired a distinct English flavor to her speech even when he was not around.
Roger
I have always heard of a different dose, perhaps specific to New York City. A small quantity of phenolphthalein was added to someone's drink and it would initiate a sudden bout of debilitating diarrhea. My father saw it done once - a couple of yahoos were trash-talking a gay guy at a bar apparently looking for trouble. The bartender slipped them mickey's. They left quickly, to the amusement of the regulars.A Mickey Finn is typically made by adding "knockout drops" (a solution of chloral hydrate in alcohol) to a drink.
Oh, and to get a little bit back on topic, I knew a couple a few years ago at the university here. He was English, she was not but she had acquired a distinct English flavor to her speech even when he was not around.
Roger
Non omnes qui habemt citharam sunt citharoedi
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Lorenzo
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(using Marlin Brando's accent ) "Why Dude, you little hypocrite, it's really no different than someone having multiple "acconts" here on C&F. You know some people like to be other than who they really are, right? That's weird, right? Just be who you are, right?"Kevin L. Rietmann wrote:What do you "self-express" by using a phony accent? Like, gawd, why don't you talk like who you are, right?
I like to lapse into dialects or imitate people a lot myself, but I'm never seriously trying to come across as being from somewhere else. That's...weird!
"Be all that you can be." (said with an Army accent)
PS: I like to give Dale Wisely--not DaleWisely--a bad time about all his usernames...hehe.
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Cynth
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I don't know how reliable this is but:
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_092.html
Dear Cecil:
Every now and then I hear someone complain about being slipped a "Mickey" in a bar. But none of my bartender friends has any idea what a Mickey is or how to make one. How about some background and a recipe? --R.B., Las Vegas, Nevada
Cecil replies:
Bartenders in Las Vegas don't know how to make a Mickey? Next you'll be telling me butchers in Brooklyn don't know how to put their thumbs on scales. Thank God there are still guys like me around to salvage these great national traditions.
That said, I'm obliged to note there's no agreement on what goes in a Mickey (AKA a Mickey Finn or Mickey Flynn), how it got its name, or even what it's supposed to do. Most people think a Mickey is a dose of knockout drops, usually administered to some hapless barfly as a preamble to rolling him. But to some it means a purgative--an agent, as my dictionary drolly puts it, "tending to cause evacuation of the bowels." One source goes so far as to say the original Mickey was a laxative for horses. This kind of Mickey you'd feed to a drunk to get rid of him.
As for what's in it--well, take your pick. A 1931 magazine article says it's croton oil, a purgative, while a slang dictionary says it's chloral hydrate, a sedative/hypnotic. To further confuse things, you sometimes see references to "croton chloral hydrate," which from the sound of it accelerates business at one end of you while slowing it down at the other. Others say a Mickey is cigar ashes in a carbonated beverage, or merely an industrial strength drink.
Most word books say the origin of "Mickey Finn" is obscure. But Cecil has come across one colorful if not necessarily reliable explanation in Gem of the Prairie, a 1940 history of the Chicago underworld by Herbert Asbury. Asbury claims the original Mickey Finn was a notorious Chicago tavern proprietor in the city's South Loop, then as now a nest of hardened desperadoes. In 1896 Finn opened a dive named the Lone Star Saloon and Palm Garden, where he fenced stolen goods, supervised pickpockets and B-girls, and engaged in other equally sleazy enterprises.
Around 1898 Finn obtained a supply of "white stuff" that may have been chloral hydrate. He made this the basis of two knockout drinks, the "Mickey Finn Special," consisting of raw alcohol, water in which snuff had been soaked, and a dollop of white stuff; and "Number Two," beer mixed with a jolt of white plus the aforementioned snuff water. Lone Star patrons who tried either of these concoctions soon found themselves face down in the popcorn. At the end of the night they were dragged into a back room, stripped of their valuables and sometimes even their clothes, then dumped in an alley. When the victims awoke they could remember nothing.
Finn evidently paid off the cops but became such a nuisance even by Chicago standards that his joint was ordered shut down in 1903. He was never prosecuted, however, and after a brief hiatus returned to bartending, having sold the MF recipe to other tavern owners. Eventually "Mickey Finn" became the name for any sort of knockout punch. How lucky we are that no one sells things like that today.
--CECIL ADAMS
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_092.html
Dear Cecil:
Every now and then I hear someone complain about being slipped a "Mickey" in a bar. But none of my bartender friends has any idea what a Mickey is or how to make one. How about some background and a recipe? --R.B., Las Vegas, Nevada
Cecil replies:
Bartenders in Las Vegas don't know how to make a Mickey? Next you'll be telling me butchers in Brooklyn don't know how to put their thumbs on scales. Thank God there are still guys like me around to salvage these great national traditions.
That said, I'm obliged to note there's no agreement on what goes in a Mickey (AKA a Mickey Finn or Mickey Flynn), how it got its name, or even what it's supposed to do. Most people think a Mickey is a dose of knockout drops, usually administered to some hapless barfly as a preamble to rolling him. But to some it means a purgative--an agent, as my dictionary drolly puts it, "tending to cause evacuation of the bowels." One source goes so far as to say the original Mickey was a laxative for horses. This kind of Mickey you'd feed to a drunk to get rid of him.
As for what's in it--well, take your pick. A 1931 magazine article says it's croton oil, a purgative, while a slang dictionary says it's chloral hydrate, a sedative/hypnotic. To further confuse things, you sometimes see references to "croton chloral hydrate," which from the sound of it accelerates business at one end of you while slowing it down at the other. Others say a Mickey is cigar ashes in a carbonated beverage, or merely an industrial strength drink.
Most word books say the origin of "Mickey Finn" is obscure. But Cecil has come across one colorful if not necessarily reliable explanation in Gem of the Prairie, a 1940 history of the Chicago underworld by Herbert Asbury. Asbury claims the original Mickey Finn was a notorious Chicago tavern proprietor in the city's South Loop, then as now a nest of hardened desperadoes. In 1896 Finn opened a dive named the Lone Star Saloon and Palm Garden, where he fenced stolen goods, supervised pickpockets and B-girls, and engaged in other equally sleazy enterprises.
Around 1898 Finn obtained a supply of "white stuff" that may have been chloral hydrate. He made this the basis of two knockout drinks, the "Mickey Finn Special," consisting of raw alcohol, water in which snuff had been soaked, and a dollop of white stuff; and "Number Two," beer mixed with a jolt of white plus the aforementioned snuff water. Lone Star patrons who tried either of these concoctions soon found themselves face down in the popcorn. At the end of the night they were dragged into a back room, stripped of their valuables and sometimes even their clothes, then dumped in an alley. When the victims awoke they could remember nothing.
Finn evidently paid off the cops but became such a nuisance even by Chicago standards that his joint was ordered shut down in 1903. He was never prosecuted, however, and after a brief hiatus returned to bartending, having sold the MF recipe to other tavern owners. Eventually "Mickey Finn" became the name for any sort of knockout punch. How lucky we are that no one sells things like that today.
--CECIL ADAMS