Professor Laurie Taylor

[Billy O Tool]

Did anyone listen to Laurie Taylor’s ‘Putting On The Style’ (R4) yesterday? It was really interesting because he was in Liverpool talking to Liverpudlian skiffle experts, including Spencer Leigh. However, Professor Taylor presented almost the whole of the programme with a 50’s style Liverpudlian accent (1). I wondered if this was because he was talking to Liverpudlians or because he was pretending to be cool?

Has anyone here ever been with a group of people from a different part of the country and found themselves adopting their accent? I don’t think I could ever adopt a Californian accent.

Notes

(1) He originated from Crosby, which is a relatively posh part of Merseyside.

[dulcinea]

dear william... i think you are being very liverpool sensitive here... i have absolutely no talent for 'speaking in tongues' despite a very keen ear... but he sounded just like regular laurie taylor to me... i do think it is perhaps natural to fall into 'more of' a local brogue in conversation with people who speak the language you spoke for a long time in your life... (never mind where he lived,, you don't know who he mixed with...} i think i do adjust my lingo when i am with people who are not from my usual crowd... in order to ensure good communication (i do have occasions where i almost speak a different language to my usual one, because people use a different way to express themselves... that is when i am 'talking the talk' and i don't think it is cool, just sensible to ensure communication - i had a situation where people threatened to walk out because i used a common idiom which is not used hereabouts and was promptly misinterpreted*)...

apropos nothing... i know of a vaguely amusing incident here, where one scouser talked to another one in a bar and was nearly beaten up because it was interpreted as taking the p*ss and the guy just did not believe that my friend was from liverpool too... there you go... is it a liverpool thing?

* nothing more dangerous than people interpreting idioms literally...


p.s. is it a side-effect of becoming the city of culture in wheneverr, that liverpool speak is considered especially cool?

n.b. tiger-lil was going to find me auden's commonplace book which has a perfect item on being 'literal' in it... hello lil - might this still happen?

[lil]

I set my daughter on it....she failed and I regret that I have not redoubled my efforts.

I will enquire in Dorchester. There are a few bookshops that might look out for it.

[Tiger Lil']

I've just had a little scurry around the internet - can you give me the exact title?

I have e-mailed a chap who does book searches.

I have checked out Faber.

Will take a look at Foyles too.

[dulcinea]

lil - please don't worry about it... i thought it would be easy to borrow it from a library and look up a couple of extracts.. which is really all i was after....

thanks for your efforts.

[Tiger Lil']

ha!

A Certain World: A Commonplace Book. Viking and Faber, 1970.


Perhaps you could e-mail www.audensociety.org/ and someone might be prepared to look the bits up for you?

[Captain Nudnick]

Having a musical ear (it's the left one - I play by it) I have always picked up accents easily. Arriving in Melbourne I shared a cab with a young Aussi bloke. He came into the hotel with me, and once I'd booked in we had a couple of beers in the bar. Something I said about 'home' led him to say 'Aren't you Australian, then?' -- I'd had him fooled without knowing I was trying... it can be a bit of a problem if people think you are taking a rise out of them... he was OK though.

[Crusoe]

dulcinea said:

but he sounded just like regular laurie taylor to me...

Me, too, I’m afraid, Dulcinea, but then I was listening to the programme on a car radio, so perhaps I didn’t pick up the subtleties of Prof. Taylor’s accent.

I do find that, occasionally, my vowel sounds will change, ever-so slightly, according to the people I’m talking to and I will often end up adopting colloquialisms, quite easily but I don’t think that there’s anything that people would notice as a significant change. It may be natural to adopt slight vocal similarities to your interlocutor in the same way that people often adopt similar postures or gestures when conversing face-to-face.

dulcinea said:

p.s. is it a side-effect of becoming the city of culture in wheneverr, that liverpool speak is considered especially cool?

I think that Liverpool was trendy before that: probably at the time of “Merseybeat”. I believe that John Peel broadened his accent, when he was in America, in order to cash-in on his hip, British credentials.