Bleeding Edge - A Rolling Assessment

[John Bailey]

In BE the rising inflection is explicitly associated with the West
Coast accent. The NY-ers ask questions without a question mark.

"What. That Face." is one of my favourite Pynchon lines to date.

On Fri, Sep 27, 2013 at 8:47 PM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
> Over here this way of talking has become endemic during recent years. A
> secondary Anglizismus (or: Amerikanismus) is what local linguists probably
> would call this. Actually it drives me mad ... it's like, you know, not
> sounding very, um, intelligent? They even dub old movies with this way of
> talking now, which sounds really strange and brings me to the the following
> questions: Since when are people in New York  lifting the phrases in case of
> sentences which actually are simple statements or fragments thererof? (You
> can also hear this way of talking in 'Mad Men', so it is, assumed the
> serial's authenticity, not that new, is it?) Is this way of talking also
> common in other regions of the US? Other anglophone countries? And: Is there
> a gender dimension in it? This seems to be the case in 'Bleeding Edge', 'Mad
> Men' and the contemporary German reality: It's mostly women who talk that
> way. So if it's really around since at least 1960 my thesis would be that it
> originally was kinda compromise formula for women entering male job domains:
> Like still sounding sweet while making statements and, you know, claims?
>
> If you think that I sound like a sexist grammar fascist you're probably
> right.
>
>
>
> On 27.09.2013 00:01, alice wellintown wrote:
>>
>> The talk is zapping and yapping along at a new york minute. Notice too,
>> the interrogatives, the lifting of the phrases that get question marks.
>> New York Runs on Dunkin and Dots ...?
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEBZkWkkdZA
>>
>
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