[BITList] Learn How To Speak Propah English - Ted Heath

[HUGH]

Colin,

Many of his vowels were strangulated, and he had a slight tendency to say such as "pwonounce" for "pronounce", but there are wide variations all over the UK in the way people pronounce vowels.  What caught my ear, but not that of the "presenter", was the total inability or reluctance to sound a letter "r" at the end of a word, and sometimes in the middle of a wo-d.  I once spent a fruitless half hour trying to convince a lady from Southampton that many of her vowel sounds were diphthongs, she having criticised mine.

Peter Sellers was good at taking off  the upper class accent and pronunciation.  One of his characters, reminiscing about how he and Nanny used to take rotten fruit and nutritious scraps round to the tenantry, commenced his tale thuswise : "I ve-ee weh wemembah."

On a different tack, I read that the New York hurricane had been downgraded to a Scottish summer.

Hugh.
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