Word: accents
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...Stoppard probably designed the play as a tool for English introspection, but excellent acting ensures that this is not lost on an American audience. While the whole cast does a good job at being British, the culture-bending trophy must go to Carmicheal's Kerner. The accent might be a little bit canned, but Carmicheal plays Stoppard's stereotypical Russian with ease; philosophical, profound and a fountain of abstract truth in a world of nicely clipped English chatter. For all this, though, he ends up being as inhibited as the notoriously uptight English; presenting the condition as something human rather...
...Where are you going?" the driver asked with a heavy foreign accent. When I told him, the cab driver flashed a grim smile. "It will take you a while." I suddenly realized that 5 p.m. Friday was not the best time to try to get to the airport from the heart of Manhattan. "Get me there as fast as you can," I said anxiously...
...inventory of 143 johns. "Red Toyota pickup--white male. gun, bat. Says he's cop, is not...Yellow Chrysler 4-door--white male, hand saw...Green Pickup with tinted windows--young white male, strangled woman till she passed out...Blue Honda, 2-door--white male, rapist, Eastern bloc accent..." The Spokane health worker, affectionately nicknamed "Mother Rubber," hands out condoms, cookies and clean needles from a Winnebago parked on East Sprague Street. Hookers too need someone to watch over them--especially when so many were winding up murdered...
...Love Affair With America," however, the tone is nostalgic, occasionally tender and only intermittently combative. It's a lovely book, and sometimes funny. Podhoretz, growing up poor in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, spoke with such a fierce Brooklyn accent that after he told a teacher "I goink op de stez" ("I'm going up the stairs"), he was placed in a remedial English class that left him speaking English of accentless, place-neutral gentility. He credits this development with much of his later success (Columbia University, Oxford, his long career among the New York intellectuals). The family back...
...America we don't have the same level of class-consciousness that is omnipresent in Britain. Here they can tell how much money you make by your accent, and those who rise from lower-class backgrounds studiously hide the trappings of success. That is changing slowly as the economic boom lifts all ships--even the fragile cockles--but it is a far cry from the culture of success we cultivate in the United States...