Accents (was: Profanity in Russian speech WAS Re: HP in translation

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

Laura Ingalls Huntley wrote in
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPFGU-OTChatter/message/32047>:
>

<< <rant> Oh, and if I could just get my peers (or at least my cousins
and brother) to quit saying "friggin'" every other friggin' word, my
sanity would be greatly improved. ^_~  I mean, what *is* that?  Why do
they feel the need to use it so often?  How, in the name of all that
is holy, can I make them stop? </rant> >>

You probably CAN'T make them stop, and may be amusing them by trying.

They may keep repeating the same adjective because they like the
rhythm that it gives their speech -- a somewhat monotonous rhythm, but
the drum or bass doesn't have to be fancy to lay down the melody track
on it.

Anthropologist Edward T. Hall wrote of US soldiers (in the 1950s) that
 they learned in informal training that using an F-word as every part
of speech in each sentence was a signal that this is an ordinary
communication; the excessive profanity being skipped when it is an
emergency.

<< Ha!  If people ask, I generally tell them that I don't have an
accent, but what I really mean is that I have the same accent as
roughly 80% of people on American TV. >>

It is said that when television came in (I don't know what they did
for network radio before then), the networks decided what accent would
be standard, and chose that of Salt Lake City. It seems to be that,
even then, the accent of Salt Lake City would have been a 'melting
pot' of different regional accents joined together.

<< I was living in Scotland last semester, and one of the weirdest
things for me was that the vast majority of British people I met in
passing (store clerks, etc.) couldn't tell I was American from my
accent. >>

I don't know about your accent, but my acquaintance Gail Barton (the
artist) grew up in Arvada, Nevada. I guess Arvada is a Denver suburb
now, but it was settled by miners and apparently is recognized locally
as having an Arvada accent. Nothing that I ever noticed. But she said
that when she visited Britain, she got into a conversation with an old
lady on a bus who said: "You must be from Wales" because of her accent
(answer: "No, my great-grandfather was from Wales").

I declare this a place to throw in a comment on Carol's comment on
Russion accents. Over the years, on the radio I have heard a lot of
clips of voices with Russian accents, and it seems to me that there
are at least three different Russian accents, one of which is quite
sexy, and the others are hideous.