J and I watched one of my favorite episodes this week, "Tomorrow is Yesterday," purely because it contains a reference to a manned flight to the Moon (in addition to being superb, that is).
There's so much I love about it (it's actually one of the most beautifully made TOS episodes IMO, everyone looks spectacular, flawless comedic beats and genuine pathos, the culture clashes are pretty much immaculate, etc). But my favorite scene is always going to be the one where Kirk is captured by insecure macho assholes from the US military of the literal 60s and talks circles around them with a bit of genuine fear (he does understand the danger he's in), but mostly a mixture of telling the truth in the most annoying way possible and pushing their buttons by dialing up his standard campy theatricality to comfortable effeminacy. Their bluster vs his sultry assurance is good as written but utterly delightful onscreen.
Also, one nerdy detail: the military assholes try to intimidate Kirk by listing off all the crimes he's committed, and Kirk basically responds by morphing even more fully into Cher Horowitz mode than usual and being all "sabotage? who, me??? O_O" about it with this obviously faux confusion/dismay that's just mocking them and not even trying to hide it.
But it's funnier because— okay, it's actually a quick small thing and I'm fully explaining the joke here, but:
Pretty much the only respect in which William Shatner applied zero effort in his performance was in his usual accent as Kirk. If you pay attention, it's just 100% his own Anglophone Montrealer 40s kid accent, which actually retains some features that were already dying in some Anglophone communities in Montreal, but apparently often retained in heavily Jewish neighborhoods and suburbs of Montreal for whatever reason— most notably the heavy use of the TRAP vowel. That vowel is the tensed vowel in words like trap or bath [æ] and many other words, which in this accent is sometimes used where most Canadian and US accents would use a different vowel such as [ɑ] (the vowel in lot) as in a word like ... well, sabotage.
If you pay attention to how Kirk speaks in TOS, you'll notice him using [æ] much more than North Americans usually do, or even did then, and in particular that he almost always pronounces the third vowel of sabotage with [æ] rather than [ɑ].
So in this scene, the douchebag US soldiers accusing Kirk of sabotage and other crimes pronounce it with the usual long [ɑ], as I would. And he gives them his doe-eyed, blatantly fake innocent look and mockingly asks, "Did I sabotage something?"
But this time, very unusually, he pronounces the final vowel of sabotage the way they do, with [ɑ] rather than his usual [æ]— pretty obviously because he's mocking them, echoing the way they talk back at them, but in this super effeminate way that's going to freak them out and short-circuit their brains.
Of course, they don't know that he's imitating their accent specifically. They've only briefly spoken to him and they don't know anything about him or how he usually talks. But Kirk seems to enjoy adopting aggressively fake US accents for trolling purposes, and he's in particularly fine form here.
(I'm not sure anything will surpass his extremely fake Chicago gangster accent in which he deliberately mispronounces his own name for shits and giggles, but he's definitely warming up here.)
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Hi!
I'm a French native speaker, I understand English much better than I speak it (that's my job😅 ), I used to speak Italian, but haven't practiced in so long that now I can only understand it, and I know a few things in Spanish, but please don't ask me to speak or translate Spanish content 🥲
Which, as the name suggests, is meant to be a grim and gritty setting
Except I personally can never take it completely seriously because one of the main nations in the setting is the Burach Empire. And "Burach" is pronounced like the Polish word "burak", which means beetroot
It's the Beetroot Empire
Who's the Emperor, Dwight Schrute?
I think that's my first real exposure to the "this name means something in at least one language that completely ruins the tone for anyone who speaks that language" phenomenon
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Wonder Woman: On an isolated Island I learnt all languages possible.
Atlantis: Our Tower to Babel dialect makes it possible to speak and understand any language.
Me: THIS IS FUCKING NOT HOW LANGUAGES FUCKING WORK!!
Me: Language is not a monolith! They're constantly changing by outer and inner influence and impulse.
Good Grief, French and English did surely not exist in antiquity, so how are ISOLATED empires supposed to have caught up on modern (!) languages?
For the mother dialect; A porto-language is a root of structure and vocabulary but the phonetic realization, and arbitrary system of words, and context change so drastically over time, that the derivative languages are at first listening not directly to be understood from the porto-language.
A BABBELFISH IS 1000 TIMES MORE LOGICAL THAN THIS HALF ASSED INCORRECT DEPICTION OF HUMAN COMMUNICATION!!!
Friend: Can I ever watch a movie with you without you being more embarrassing than the scientific impossibilities in the movie itself?
I don't know if the usage is the same everywhere or whatnot, but one of my favorite sociolinguistic beats is simply "The City."
What I mean is this: in most places I've lived, people locally talk about "going to the city" (but implicitly The City) without saying what city. That's because this pretty much always means one specific city, and everyone knows which one it is. They might also refer to "going to town" and this might refer to The City, but might also be a completely different place, also unnamed but not quite as absolutely obvious.
For instance: I grew up in Blaine, Washington, which is simultaneously in sight of the Pacific Ocean, the Cascades/Mt. Baker, and Canada (this is the coolest thing about it). It's mostly remarkable for the Peace Arch border crossing between the USA and Canada, which is the busiest on the US/Canada border until Detroit IIRC (though Blaine itself is a small town). When I was growing up, "we're going to spend the day in the City" almost invariably referred to a day trip to Vancouver, BC (metro population: 2.6 million), while "going to town" generally meant going to Bellingham, WA (population: 94,000). Very occasionally it might mean Blaine itself if you lived on the really rural outskirts).
OTOH, I lived more or less near Portland, OR for many years— sometimes in close suburbs like Beaverton or Tigard, sometimes a little further in places like St. Helens. Regardless, "we're going to spend the day in the City" meant Portland, but "going to town" without elaboration often meant Portland, too (though not as invariably).
Anyway, I've always been fascinated by the concept of "The City" as this unnamed but usually entirely unambiguous reference shared by large numbers of communities. People sometimes mock generic fantasy conventions of people just vaguely referring to "the City," "the Great Road," "the River," etc but this is 100% how people actually talk in my experience. I don't know how far it extends, though.
A friend was arguing that orange does rhyme, with hinge, and I was like "hinge? how?" and she told me to say repeat hinge quickly, which... changed nothing. I was actually trying to think of how you'd say that even kind of sort of rhymes, but just remembered that she more or less has the pin-pen merger and I very much don't, and she says door hinge basically like Doorhenge. It's still not a perfect rhyme but not nearly as baffling as it sounded in my own voice.
(She grew up primarily in New Jersey and Nevada, while I was raised almost entirely around the Portland area and in the far north of Washington on the Canadian border, but I don't know if that makes a different in this case! Yay to accent discoveries anyway, though.)
