Thursday, October 07, 2010

"Speak English or else"

"If the pillory suffices, there is no need to resort to the gallows" is one of my new favorite phrases.  (another fave: "I seem to have come without my gunbelt.")


I found this phrase in one of my must-read blogs "veteran drudge John E. McIntyre's YOU DON"T SAY, this morning, and through linkage there, found this:  Speak English or else which just cracked me up.

8 comments:

Heidi said...

I think the best part about that is the comment where the man who proposed they make English the official language tried to defend what his intent was and only made it worse for himself.

I love the pillory/gallows phrase. I'll swipe that one for my occasional status if you don't mind.

David Ivory said...

He's also wrong.

He doesn't speak English, he's speaking Merikin - with his accent on the first syllable. Many speakers emphasise the second syllable. That's why you get misCHEEvious, and ofTen... and his cloth ears hear nucular when we're saying niu-CLEE-AR.

His complaints about accent show him up to be parochial when I'm sure he's attempting to be the reverse.

But we can't win can we? It's 400 million Merikins against 1.3 billion... oh wait... we're in the majority if you include all the benighted ex-colonials who speak something more approaching the Queen's English.

So 2nd syllable stressing rules okay... as well as using s instead of zeds when -ising words. Which pretty well makes me a speaker/writer of either strine or nizild.

PS.

You really will never understand how all those red underlines in my writing are an attack on my identity... it's like McIntyre is proofing reading my emails!

TERI REES WANG said...

We have a thing...an in the game response, when one of us thinks we may have been falsely accused of some odd habit, or misquoted on some comment.

..."ain't be got no weapons".

It's delivered with a quick head turn, and an over the shoulder shout, as if the Po-Po already got you down on the ground, and the slapping cuffs on.

Cheers!

Ricky Bush said...

My favorite phrase has always been 'What we have here, is a failure to communicate' every since I saw COOL HAND LUKE.

Julie Weathers said...

Yes, I also love it when people discuss the Marine Corpse. That had to resonate with the corpsmen.

Steve Stubbs said...

Who was it who said "Abandon hopefully, ye who enter here"? Yah, yah, I know Dante said the original version, but this one is better. He did not like the common misuse of the word hopefully. Whoever he was he died recently so he won't care that the rest of us do not remember him, whoever he was. He's dead.

Hopefully he is in a better place now.

Hoo yah.

Alex said...

Ricky, that's funny because mine is "I can eat fifty eggs."

Stephanie Barr said...

I thought it hilarious even if many of his complaints aren't "English" per se.

Good luck finding a real monitor given the fluidity of English and the likeliness of a lynch mob should someone really set himself up as one.