The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #46334   Message #687709
Posted By: Fossil
11-Apr-02 - 05:43 AM
Thread Name: Worst accent or what?
Subject: RE: Worst accent or what?
For the UK contingent, here's one from a little known part of the country, Birmingham.

Noted for its distinctive speech patterns and vile (sorry, vowel) sounds (putting it moildly).

Real Brummies - Black Country types - always had issues with places like Solihull (pronounced "Sow-li-'ull"), a rich dormitory-suburban area south of Birmingham, which was regarded as either "aspirational" or over-refined and "posh" (sorta like Nob Hill in San Francisco, I suppose). People who lived there were all supposed to be effete upper-class twits, not real working class.

As a displaced Londoner, I used to work in Solihull and mentioned this fact to a Brummie of my acquaintance one day.

"Oh, Solihull", he said... "Where sex is what they bring the coal in...". I cracked up.

Say it out loud - it might make sense!

Here's another one.

Enoch and Eli are typical working-class Brummies. One day, Enoch is walking along the canal towpath and spots Eli giving artificial respiration to someone he had half-dragged out of the canal. The victim is choking up gallons of the dirty canal water and Eli is working frantically.

"Oi" says Enoch "Watcher doin'?"

"Oi'm savin' 'is loife, in't oi?"

"Well, tek' 'is arse outta t'coot, yaw'll poomp it droi!"

("Cut" = a Midlands synonym for a canal. Pronounced as written)