mercoledì, gennaio 05, 2011

Talking Australian Part 2; Intoning, subsection 1

Australian Question Intonation is something that I first experienced culturally second-hand via Brits who were addicted or overexposed to Home and Away and Neighbours, two examples of how similar nationalities almost always manage to produce their own special brands of fucking dime-store dreck which can travel to their sister nationalities.*

Many of the people I meet here are absolutely bemused by how much British people love their shitty soapies, but of course the British people who I spoke to about it aren't confused at all. Neighbours/Home and Away are full of images of warm beaches and sun and healthy young people who aren't in the early stages of rickets or scurvy - three things that are painfully lacking in British society. Those two shit-parades of drossy television between them have made the British media's endless quest to present Australia as a barren and miserable land full of nothing but floods, fires, and man-eating creatures (so pretty please don't move there because if you've got enough money for the ticket and visa Britain can't afford to lose you) more or less futile.

So the upshot is that I've been exposed to so many Brits who use the Question Intonation after overexposure to shitty Australian television, despite the finest efforts of Stephen Fry, that moving here didn't make me bat much of an eyelash; not to mention the Question Intonation was one of the few perversions of Australian speech the F-word maintained during our years with the European Savages, while he was teaching them English.

It is making me a touch twitchy though, for reasons that will be explained in a future post, when I've wrangled the carpet pythons out of our living room; they were driven there by the flood water. Sigh.



*Canadians foisted dramatic heart-wringers The Littlest Hobo/Degrassi Junior High onto the world; the US manages all those awesome blowdried daytime soaps with the devil and incest and amnesia and whatnot; the Brits play some sort of perverted voyeuristic class-fantasy game wherein they pretend to spectate the torrid, disgusting lives of blue-collar types in Manchester and London via Coronation Street and Eastenders.

3 commenti:

Dale ha detto...

I don't have time for the soaps, it's all about Kath & Kim for me!

Hilts ha detto...

HAven'y been back to the Old Sod in a decade, but it seemed that every other soap in Ireland was from Aussieland. Sorta like many of the non-Mexican soaps (Columbian - Betty La Fea- Agrentinians ones, etc...) that dominate the Spanish language tellys here.

Dread Pirate Jessica ha detto...

If anyone needs a soap opera about people living in the sun/without rickets more than the British, it's the Irish.

Never seen Kath and Kim but heard the stories . . . someday, Dale!