On 03/01/2015 17:53, Rick Johnson wrote:
On Saturday, January 3, 2015 4:39:25 AM UTC-6, Mark Lawrence wrote:
I used to get very confused watching the old westerns. The child when
talking about "more" and "paw" wasn't referring to possibly an
adjective, noun or adverb and a part of an animal, but what we would
refer to in the UK as "mum" and "dad" :)
Early Americans are easy to satirize since most were
schooled at home by illiterate parents. I believe the
"redneck vernacular" substituted "mother" and "father" for
"maw" and "paw" respectively. Which is not surprising since
most uneducated folks tend to favor single syllable
simplifications of words over their multi-syllable
counterparts.
Widespread centralized free schooling did not exists until
almost the 1900's. Heck, looking back at American history,
the world *SHOULD* be in awe. To go from a rag-tag
illiterate bunch of cowboys, to the worlds most powerful and
technically advanced society (in roughly one hundred years!)
has to be the most amazing transformation in the history of
the human society.
I suspect that the engineers who pushed the railways across North
America were hardly "a rag-tag illiterate bunch of cowboys". I won't
mention that the transformation involved wiping out 99% of the
indigenous population.
Of course with all success stories, timing and luck had a
little to do with it, but it was undoubtedly the rebellious
and self reliant nature of Americans that made them so
successful. So before you go and spouting off about how dumb
Americans are/were, ask yourself, what greatness has *MY*
country achieved in the span of a century?
I'm not entirely sure how a little bit of gentle teasing about accents
in fictional films translates into "spouting off about how dumb
Americans are/were" but there you go. Hardly a century but I believe
that the British Empire covered 25% of the land surface on the planet.
Quite an achievement for a tiny patch of islands sitting off the coast
of Europe. However I suspect that a large number of people were glad to
see the back of us, although I still think it audacious for those people
to actually want to run their own countries.
*school bell rings*
PS: I've recently developed an industrial grade scraper
specially designed for removing dried egg residue from the
human face with a "minimal" amount of collateral damage. If
any of you are interested in volunteering your egg covered
faces for testing i would be thankful! Please send me a
private message as the alpha phase begins soon!
I believe that this has already been done. Should I ever need one I'll
probably get a cheap one, complete with its "Made in China" sticker,
from one of the many £ stores that are springing up in the UK.
--
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask
what you can do for our language.
Mark Lawrence
--
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
