Posts by Joe Wylie
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Genuine New Zealand English was certainly stigmatized, and seldom heard in the media up through the 70s. And yep - there was accent training, at least for the NZBC announcers - aiming toward RP as a model.
But we're over it now, happily - and lots of our media personalities, politicians, etc, have fabulous NZ accents.What do you reckon about this, then - the prototype for Holmes (there's even a spooky physical resemblance) & Hosking, from before the days of media coaching:
http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/culture/sound-clip-aunt-daisys-beetroot-chutney
I wouldn't recommend more than a few seconds - like being hit on the head with a hammer, it feels so good when it stops. -
Walker quoted at length, in the affected accent New Zealanders used in broadcasting in those days
Walker (feel free to kick me if I'm wrong) was South African born, Oxford educated. It was the Brian Edwards/ Ian Johnstone/Austin Mitchell etc. era of imported accents.
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Damian - For me, institutionalised acceptance of child-beating is pretty much on a par with institutionalised homophobia. There's been a massive generational shift in attitude on the subject of child-raising, which the bill in question reflects. I'd suggest that the casual acceptance of child-beating being OK because 'many (if not most) parents' do it is destined for the same dustbin as sneering attitudes about 'poofters'. 'Many (if not most)' of the populace felt that such behaviour was just fine c. 1980. Some had to be dragged kicking and screaming, but we grew up.
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I was talking with a friend about recycled jokes. The example of a George Bush joke came up, how it had done the rounds before as a Nixon version.
Essentially, Bush is out jogging, falls off a bridge into a raging torrent. Before his minders can get to him a bunch of kids who happen to be on the scene pull him out.
Bush offers to grant their wishes in return for saving his life. One asks for a trip to Disneyland, another wants to ride the space shuttle. No problem, says Bush, but when the last kid asks for a titanium wheelchair with a built-in Playstation, phone, etc. he's puzzled - "But you're not even crippled!"
"I will be after my dad learns that I helped rescue you", says the kid.My friend's ten-year-old daughter was listening. He asked her if she found the joke funny.
"Well", she says, "Only if you think that hitting kids is funny".
"OK", he says, "you tell us a funny one". So we get the Ooops-I-Did-It-Again joke about Britney Spears farting.That was around five years ago. Things have moved on, including Britney, although not necessarily for the best.
Most of the objections to the anti-smacking bill smack (bad pun intended) of the over the top nonsense from twenty years ago that was raised against homosexual law reform.
The 'I'll be charged for whacking my son/daughter in the heat of the moment' argument is just as spurious as the dopey old canard about how 'any bloke will be able to have his way with me while I'm standing at the bus stop'. -
Be that blip or jus a way of saying or what?
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Great sources of hair raising stories, teachers are.
Yes. Although not all of the ones that I recall from my schooldays were true.
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I see a few people think that it is hilarious that John Key should care about a developing underclass population here in kiwi[sic]land.
No harm in having a giggle, but I tend to be more suspicious. The same people who are currently doing handstands around Key were behaving in exactly the same way only a few weeks back whenever McCully (or whoever) tugged Brash's chain. Brash, you'll recall, advocated institutionalising the underclass into the economy by having them turn up at post offices (post shops?) on a daily basis to take whatever work was offering, in return for subsistence wages. That or starve. A few years back Banksie proposed that the high proportion of Maori prison inmates be exploited to produce handicrafts for the souvenir market (Lada steering wheels, anyone?). Until Key actively repudiates these fruitloopier aspects of National's legacy, along with the disastrous experiments of the Shipley years (Jennygrad?), a healthy scepticism is justified.
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There were a few pockets of state housing "pepper potted" just off Memorial Ave in Fendalton (Chch's Remuera) - for example, the interestingly named Otara Street - and until the Shipley era and the introduction of 'market' rentals they integrated rather well. Developers offered financial inducements to tenants to move out, 'freeing up' Housing NZ (or whatever they were called at the time) to flog off suddenly prime real estate. Hit with onerous rent increases, most tenants jumped at the offer, and the slack was taken up by Chch city Council's relatively enlightened public housing policy.
Under Key, things'll be "kinder 'n gentler", eh?
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My unscientific impression is that both genders can be equally bigotted and racist, but actual agro tends to come from the younger males (testosterone is a powerful master).
As Tony Parsons said, having testicles is like being chained to the village idiot.
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when i lived in melbourne an english friend stated quite baldly he'd never been to a country with as much visible mental illness as australia.
There was a cartoon doing the rounds during the Sydney olympics. Below a drawing of a vapidly smiling mum, dad, kids and grandpa was the caption: "Take your medication. Our foreign visitors must suspect nothing."
Is your English friend a connoiseur of this sort of thing? He'd have a ball in Chch.