Aug 05
Click for larger imageGood Show Sir Comments: Is Tit Ting a Thing?
Published 1980
(Average: 5.05 out of 10)
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Good Show Sir Comments: Is Tit Ting a Thing?
Published 1980
(Average: 5.05 out of 10)Loading...
(9.25 out of 10) (9.18 out of 10) (9.02 out of 10) (8.97 out of 10) (8.93 out of 10) (8.93 out of 10) (8.93 out of 10) (8.92 out of 10) (8.89 out of 10) (8.88 out of 10)
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August 5th, 2021 at 9:30 am
Somehow Dick isn’t naked on his own cover of The Watery Dormouse of Dread. But everyone else is. Standards are slipping.
August 5th, 2021 at 9:54 am
L’HOMME NUDISTE DANS LA PLANÈTE DES FEMMES AVEC ARAIGNÉES GIGANTES
August 5th, 2021 at 9:54 am
Another chapter in the saga of the man who just won’t pull up his pants.
August 5th, 2021 at 12:10 pm
Dick Blade – sentient erection. Good Blade page. More French dumplings in the first article.
https://pulpfiles.wordpress.com/category/richard-blade-series/
August 5th, 2021 at 1:26 pm
I’m assuming the French version of Dick Blade teleports to a dangerous planet and immediately surrenders.
August 5th, 2021 at 1:42 pm
Somehow I don’t think the French have fully appreciated the subtle subtext of the Dick Blade oeuvre.
August 5th, 2021 at 6:49 pm
So, Dick Blade and the Water of the Dormouse of Dread?
@Tor Mented: cheap shot, sir.
August 5th, 2021 at 7:06 pm
@Bruce A Munro: agreed – it’s not fair to characterise France as always surrendering. Had they done so in 1778, Americans would know how to spell.
August 5th, 2021 at 11:20 pm
No naked Dick? J’accuse, Plon!
So did some grad of L’Institut de l’Artiste Inconnu churn out an endless supply of these covers, “suitable” for generic SFF, the only requirements being a dude’s head and 1-5 naked chicks, plus visible waves?
@fred: they commented here for a little bit, but I guess reading all those Blade novels broke their spirit.
@Francis: c’est vrai. They ignored the stripping and greasing up that happens at the beginning of every book?
@Bruce: The Water of the Dormouse of Dread sounds like something neither Dick nor the naked ladies (of France, who dance with no pants) would want to be exposed to.
@Tat: pff, it’s you Brits who surrendered your spelling to the French, what with all the excess u’s and the -re endings.
August 6th, 2021 at 12:34 am
@GSS ex-Noob: nonsense, that’s what we agreed on as the correct spelling, while we were inventing the language, before Noah Webster’s attempt to make illiteracy the thing the US has in place of a culture. If there’s any excess it’s pretentious yanks turning ‘burgled’ into ‘burglarised’, ‘transport’ into ‘transportation’ and ‘bog’ into ‘comfort station. And you not only fail to realise that putting a Z where an S should be is wrong, you can’t even pronounce ‘Z’.
And let’s not start on your place-names: ‘Chicago Illinois’, ‘Des Moines’ and ‘Arkansas’ aren’t even wrong the way the French would be. You haven’t been around long enough for our excuses to work, as in ‘Leicester’ and ‘Derby’.
August 6th, 2021 at 4:21 am
History is written by the wieners.
August 7th, 2021 at 3:44 am
@Tat: Ah, but you forget many of our names came from Englishmen trying to say/write the local names. Since you can’t even pronounce/spell your own places like “Leicester” and “Derby”, you had no chance with all the many Native American languages (and Spanish). Take that, Chomondeley of Worchestershire!
And your “correct spelling” is in fact French, and they know that at Oxford. You don’t pronounce the words that way either. Your Frenchification (which is also de-Latinizing) wasn’t codified till about the same time Webster made his spelling read more like people say words. The great Dickens still preferred his words without the extra “u”, long after the American Revolution.
And don’t get me started on throwing in “r” sounds when there isn’t an “r” in the word and vice versa. When did you start that, and why does it still afflict Boston, MA? (Though I can’t blame you for what they do to their vowels; must be Satan)
@BC: So true. Particularly Blade’s history. If his “little Dick Blade” didn’t function, he’d never rise (ahem) to be the leader of all those barbarian people the way he always does.
August 7th, 2021 at 4:30 am
@GSS ex-noob: you seem to be arguing against people from posh bits of America, not me or anyone who talks like me. We don’t all sound alike (there are more accents within fifteen miles of Manchester than in the whole US and Jane Leeves can;t do any of them)* That rhotic thing is a Tory affectation. A nation unable to pronounce the letter T (or A, or O) is on thin ice pontificating about such things and, in case you missed the memo, there is no such thing as ‘The British Accent’ (still less ‘Briddish’).
Then you confusedly claim ‘ Webster made his spelling read more like people say words’ – in which case it would be ‘culla’ and ‘naybur’. This after complaining that this is exactly what had happened in England in the 15th Century (and then we changed but American English hasn’t caught up yet).
Oxford doesn’t know shit – they put commas in the wrong places. I somethimes think it’s all an elaborate hoax to troll the wannabes at Harvard and Yale. Dickens, as he never stopped telling everyone and writing up in thinly-disguised autofiction, skipped most of his schooling. Who knows, maybe a decent teacher might have got his sentences down to manageable proportions.
As for my ability with Native American place names, I’m married to someone from near Mashpee (where they teach the indigenous language in primary school). I do better here than the Portuguese-descended locals. I’m assuming the ‘you’ there was the Pilgrim Fathers, who were kicked out of England for being too mad for Cromwell.
And we can pronounce and spell Leicester and Derby – it’s everyone else who gets it wrong. You lot can’t even say ‘Birmingham’ correctly. (As for ‘Worcestershire’ – if you;re going to use a cheap shot, check it before embarrassing yourself.),
Counting India, I Australia, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh (and so on, statistically US English is the anomaly, not correct English from the source. We can agree that Canada is a bit weird.
(*This is, of course, the killer argument against the attempts to introduce phonetic spelling in the late 60s – imposing a ‘correct’ spelling that doesn’t work in different accents was doomed to failure. Retaining the older spelling also reveals family resemblances that indicate more accurate meanings and use.)
August 7th, 2021 at 4:41 am
“England and America: two countries separated by a common language.” –
Churchill, or possibly George B Shaw or maybe Oscar Wilde, all of which knew something about language.
August 8th, 2021 at 12:59 am
@Tat: Except I’ve heard non-rhotic coming from extremely non-posh people, like a guy I know from Oop North, educated entirely in normal people’s schools. And the extra “r” from everywhere in the Commonwealth except Canada. White New Zealanders do it, although they also do things to the spoken language that even the Aussies, never mind Brits, Americans, and Canadians cannot approve of.
I’ve known exactly one man who went to Eton, and he spoke very plummy indeed, except his accent had been softened by later schooling in Canada, hanging around with disreputable showbiz types in London, and living in Scotland (where he got his r’s back). He could turn on posh when he wanted to, but mostly he sounded very well-educated, but not like a Tory bastard who would as soon drown you in the
TemsThames as look at you (That was his brother).They do a nice sauce in Wor-kester-shyre, though. I may have been thinking about dinner when I posted that.
Webster actually wanted to simplify it more, but Americans said “No, Noah, that would be silly.”
There are plenty of different accents in the US as well. Chicago has different ones from different parts of town, in NYC the Bronx and Brooklyn accents differ (as do accents by age), there are at least 2 slightly different ones in LA among the Anglo population, and urban Northern and Southern California have dialects that differ not only in accent, but wording, which doesn’t take into account the different rural accents. The stereotypical California accent is really a San Fernando Valley one, which you aren’t going to hear on the West Side of LA. In the 80s, I knew a guy who could distinguish the accent between 2 adjoining suburbs of Denver — I could only manage it between opposite sides of town. And the South has at least as many accents as Britain. I can pick out 4 different Texas accents, one of which doesn’t sound “Southern” at all, and not counting GW Bush Jr. who’s developed his own along with his own language.
I’m not as good with Canadian accents, though I know they differ as much as any. I can only tell Ontario (the stereotypical one), Quebec, the Maritimes, and Vancouver apart. I can pick out a few Scottish ones, mostly Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, and West Highland. Not good at all with Irish, though I can tell them from “Oirish”.
I am not as familiar with the accents of non-white people, though I did once translate on a bus* between two Cantonese ladies and the Southern Black bus driver, both of whom were speaking English that I could understand with no problem, but they couldn’t understand each other, even living in the same city.
Still, you should be proud of Hugh Laurie for going from a completely awful “American” accent during “A Bit Of…” (a country 3000 miles across and he couldn’t hit ANY of them!) to a near-perfect generic one in “House”. I only caught him out on his vowels a few times, and then they changed the backstory to cover that.
Anyway, we’re all screwed thanks to spelling being codified back when all the -gh either didn’t leave or crept in, and posh bastards throwing in silent letters.
Let’s call the whole thing off.
The people who really need looking askance at are the ones who’ve decided to have their time zone be half an hour off. Or 45 min. like Nepal.
* Where I was NOT reading a book with an embarrassing cover, else no one would have spoken to me.
August 8th, 2021 at 8:06 pm
@GSS ex-noob: I suggest we just watch ‘Allo Allo’ and have done with it. So long as nobody accuses anyone else of having ‘an accent’ and claiming not to themselves.
August 10th, 2021 at 12:29 am
@Tat: And it’s NOT pronounced “Bouquet”.
April 2nd, 2022 at 3:09 am
Sigh… Thanks B and Bruce for trying…
When you’ve been around as long as I have, you may realize that snobbishly criticizing each other’s accents, spelling and the evo/devolution of language is a petty waste of time. Got better things to do.
Now, how ’bout we get back wasting our time by sharing our creatively snarky critiques of delightfully horrid SF cover art? Like who is this art school failure who is obsessed with drawing boobies but has to not so subtly fade out legs and feet? This seems to be a regularly occurring situation, and I for one would like to know what’s up with that…