MLT Club Member David Herrick
MLT Club MemberForum Replies Created
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It’s lip-synced, but he’s clearly trying his best to duplicate the sound. I love how he wrist-flips the harmonica into instant oblivion when he has to go back to the guitar immediately at the end of the interlude.
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“I’m the drought and flooding rains.” (Bruce Woodley, “I Am Australian”)
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I remember hearing somewhere that the way they achieved that long echo after the forceful drumbeat in the intro to “Summer in the City” was by recording it in the stairwell of the studio building.
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I know next to nothing about drummers, but one prominent one that I don’t think has been mentioned here is Sandy Nelson. Does anyone knowledgeable have any opinions about him?
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I had had that same hunch, Jung, but at one point somewhere I saw two consecutive close-ups, so I knew it had to be a little more complicated: either three cameras at once, or two different takes.
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I totally agree with you, Howard, except for the “incorrigible” part. (My wife corriges me several times a day.)
My general feeling is that language change is good if it decreases the number of exceptions to the rules, and bad if it increases them. Pronunciation always evolves much faster than spelling, so the number of exceptions naturally tends to grow. You can’t force people to talk differently, but spelling reform every century or so would be like a reset button for the language. It has the disadvantage of making older writings progressively more unreadable (like Middle English), but one can always get a modern translation.
That “would of” business actually predates millennials by quite a bit. As a teacher I saw it in my first class of students, who were born around 1973, and I suspect they were far from the first. It makes you wonder whether they’ve ever read anything, or contemplated the structure of words and sentences.
Kudos to you, Jacki, on your spelling prowess! A lot of folks these days think that spelling and facts and figures are not things you need to know, since you can just “Google” them. What they fail to realize is that thinking and learning involve forging connections between pieces of knowledge that are already in your head. Google can’t do that for you, and you can’t do it for yourself if there are no pieces in your head to connect.
I had a student a few years ago who I thought might have a British accent, but I wasn’t quite sure. Eventually she mentioned that she had one British parent and one American parent. I immediately pounced, probably a little too gleefully, and said, “Okay, ‘skedule’ or ‘shedule’ (pronunciation)? ‘While’ or ‘whilst’? ‘Aluminum’ or ‘aluminium’?” She refused to commit one way or the other.
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That book sounds interesting, Howard. I am a fan of the “Strine” accent. I found a similar book when I lived in Rhode Island, full of quasi-phonetic transcriptions of the local accent. I was quite proud of myself when I went to a grocery one day and someone said to a cashier, “Suh vye see uh?”, and I was able to understand it as “Do you serve ice here?”
I must defend Mr. Webster and spelling reform, though. It can’t be a bad idea to bring the spelling of words more in line with how they’re actually pronounced. English is hard enough to learn as it is.
By the way, I say it’s “bastardization”, spelled (and pronounced) with a “z”, which is “zee” and not “zed”.
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No, Michael, you definitely should NOT say “humour”. You’d just be encouraging the monarchists among us to exhibit more bad behavior. (Or should I say “behaviour”?)
Noah Webster rocks!
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Agreed, Jacki. You never know when a parenthetical aside will develop a life of its own.
It would be nice if we could modify the title of the thread to “Brexit / English Language”.
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By the way, here’s the origin story for Three Dog Night’s name, from Wikipedia:
The official commentary included in the CD set Celebrate: The Three Dog Night Story, 1964–1975 states that vocalist Danny Hutton’s girlfriend, actress June Fairchild (best known as the “Ajax Lady” from the Cheech and Chong movie Up In Smoke) suggested the name after reading a magazine article about indigenous Australians, in which it was explained that on cold nights they would customarily sleep in a hole in the ground while embracing a dingo, a native species of wild dog. On colder nights they would sleep with two dogs and, if the night were freezing, it was a “three dog night”.
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If I may paraphrase Professor Higgins with regard to the MLT:
“Their English is too good,” he said. “That clearly indicates that they are foreign.
Whereas others are instructed in their native language, English people aren'(t).
And although they may have studied with an expert dialectician and grammarian,
I can tell that they were born… AUSTRIAN!”
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I’m sure either of them could handle the lead, but I’m thinking Lisa because I picture it as sounding similar to “This Boy Is Mine”.
Pentatonix seems to be a pretty talented group. I didn’t know about them.
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With this one MLT could really let their hair down as it were. Plus its vibe is as unrelentingly positive as are Mona and Lisa themselves. How could you not like someone who befriends frogs and wishes joy to fish?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp7KfG9AjaY
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(Sigh…) I’m guessing, Howard, that your favorite line from “My Fair Lady” is when Henry Higgins says, “There even are places where English completely disappears. Well, in America they haven’t used it for years.”
