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Semiwhatics?
by Dave Trott, Mar 27 2009, 11:05 AM
One day, years ago, my Uncle Mick said to me: “How’s your advertising agency going, Dave?” It was GGT at the time, and I said: “Yeah, it’s going great Uncle Mick.”
He said: “What are the blokes you work with like?” I said: “They’re brilliant. There are guys from: Yorkshire, Manchester, Newcastle, all over the country.” He said: “You all get on okay?” I said: “Yeah, they’re a good laugh. Except they make fun of my accent.”
Uncle Mick was shocked. In broadest cockney, he said: “But you ain’t got no accent. You talk normal like what the rest of us do.” And I realised, it’s all comparative.
Uncle Mick, all my family in fact, had lived their whole lives where everyone spoke like them. So, because there was no comparison, effectively there were no accents.
<span style="font-weight: bold">For a thing to exist as an entity it has to be defined by that around it which isn’t it. Freud calls this the move from Id to Ego. When we’re born, all we know is consciousness. We don’t know some of the things we experience are us, and some aren’t. Gradually we learn that we are defined by the skin that surrounds our body.
Anything inside that skin boundary is us. Anything outside it isn’t us. Talking about skin and identity, I’ve talked to some of my black-British friends about this.
They say that when they grew up they just felt black. Because that’s what made them different, so that was what defined them. The first time they left the country and went abroad, they felt British. Because, in that situation, that was what made them different and defined them.
If no one ever tells you you’re different, you never know. I never knew a lot of the language I grew up speaking was slang. It was just language. </span>
by Dave Trott, Mar 27 2009, 11:05 AM
One day, years ago, my Uncle Mick said to me: “How’s your advertising agency going, Dave?” It was GGT at the time, and I said: “Yeah, it’s going great Uncle Mick.”
He said: “What are the blokes you work with like?” I said: “They’re brilliant. There are guys from: Yorkshire, Manchester, Newcastle, all over the country.” He said: “You all get on okay?” I said: “Yeah, they’re a good laugh. Except they make fun of my accent.”
Uncle Mick was shocked. In broadest cockney, he said: “But you ain’t got no accent. You talk normal like what the rest of us do.” And I realised, it’s all comparative.
Uncle Mick, all my family in fact, had lived their whole lives where everyone spoke like them. So, because there was no comparison, effectively there were no accents.
<span style="font-weight: bold">For a thing to exist as an entity it has to be defined by that around it which isn’t it. Freud calls this the move from Id to Ego. When we’re born, all we know is consciousness. We don’t know some of the things we experience are us, and some aren’t. Gradually we learn that we are defined by the skin that surrounds our body.
Anything inside that skin boundary is us. Anything outside it isn’t us. Talking about skin and identity, I’ve talked to some of my black-British friends about this.
They say that when they grew up they just felt black. Because that’s what made them different, so that was what defined them. The first time they left the country and went abroad, they felt British. Because, in that situation, that was what made them different and defined them.
If no one ever tells you you’re different, you never know. I never knew a lot of the language I grew up speaking was slang. It was just language. </span>
