Help needed

[Cole Parker]

OK, I've always known I'm a little dense. It's a burden I've had to bear, much like one would do with bad breath or bunions. But because the condition is so obvious in me, I've had to learn to swallow my pride and ask for help when confused.

So I'll do that here. This is what has confused me:

http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/pop...14&src=news

Now to me, this lady seems to be talking about an es-ca-PAY. I don't know what that is! Is that some distinctly Australian creature, like a koala or a wallaby? I think it must be some four-footed canine type beast, perhaps a close relative of the dingo, because she seems to suggest people call it 'Mad Dog'. (I do love how colorful you chaps are with the language. 'Mad Dog', huh? Has someone been reading too many circa 1920s detective shoot-em-ups?)

Now I guess she could be trying to say 'escapee', but wow, she's not hitting that on the nose if that is the case, but if it is, does that mean that's the way you guys pronounce that word? Really? Again, wow! That's why I say I need help. es ca PAY.

There's another problem here, too. This Mad Dog fellow seems to have dispatched a stand over man. He did it 50 years ago, I guess, and why they're just looking for him now, why it's featured news now, seems a bit odd, but I know some provincial police departments do have a delayed sense of urgency. Or, perhaps, they simply haven?t been all that eager to go gallivanting around the countryside looking to nab anyone who has a name like Mad Dog. That's certainly something to consider.

But that isn't really my question here. My question again involves the language. I keep learning we don't speak a common one. Here's an example. See, this Mad Dog chap seems to have done in a stand over man. I don't know what that is! That isn't a job description we have in this country. Stand over man. I mean, it is suggestive. It could well be that some people are employed to spot fallen fellows and run to stand over them. I?m not sure why they?d do that, or who?d pay them to do it, but one thought is, the EMTs, madly driving through the city streets to ply their trade, might have a spotter system worked out where stand over men wear bright vests and mark victims for them.

Or is could be something else again. A fallen person could need someone to protect him from the fore-mentioned dingoes. There could be a cadre of individuals who do this piece of work, spotting fallen Aussies and standing over them until the supine decide to stand up again.

The falling down enough to need people to do this work bothers me a little, but you guys are upside down all the time and do drink a lot of Fosters. The combination of those two might explain it.

Another possibility is that these so called stand over men actually attack people on the street, then stand over them as a sign of superiority, boastfulness and macho prowess. Hard to imagine, really, but I?ve heard there?s a rough and tumble nature to life in Australia, so I suppose this sort of thing may have grown out of that philosophy.

But there?s no point in speculating as we have several well-versed people here who can certainly straighten this mess out for me and end my befuddlement.

Just make sure in doing so you don?t expose yourself to the caprices of Mad Dog. You don?t want that fellow interested in you. You can tell that just by the name.

Although, to be honest about it, it?s quite possible he?s in a home for the aged by now, and goes by his real name, Percy.

C

[Bruin Fisher]

Your guess is as good as mine, Cole. Maybe one of our antipodean chums will enlighten us both?

I think the newsreader has tried to mask her natural Aussie twang with a false Oxford plumbiness and the result is the awful 'escapay'. What the 'Melbourne stand over man' did for a living is quite beyond me.

[Trab]

I can see the pronunciation being esca-pay, as in the more commonly used melee (may lay), which is derived from the French in which there is usually an accent "acute" used as well, but not available to our English keyboards. Mel?e. (That might not even show correctly when posted, but looks just fine on my screen right now.)

As for the Stand Over man, God only knows, but not me. Maybe it is similar to he was a 'stand up guy'? I'm sure Aussies would be equally as puzzled by that statement. "Huh? You mean stand up guy as opposed to one who falls down all the time?"

[DesDownunder]

Have youse guys all been out in the noon-day sun?

I think there is a bit of assumption going on between what you're hearing and what you are thinking.

It is quite clearl to Aussie ears she is referring to an escapee, as in escape-ee.

Escapee appears in the WordWeb dictionary and is define as 'Someone who escapes,' with a synonym of 'escaper'.

The dictionary does not list the word as UK, US, or Aus. as it does when a word is colloquial to a particular culture.

Frankly I am surprised by the question as I am sure I have heard it used in Hollywood movies, but maybe I am imagining that.

I'm sure y'all familiar with 'payer' being the person who pays, and the 'payee' being the person who receives the payment.

In the case of the escapee, the escaper is defined as the same thing, i.e. 'someone who escapes.'

The pronunciation is more interesting and Bruin is not far from the mark when he says,

I think the newsreader has tried to mask her natural Aussie twang with a false Oxford plumbiness and the result is the awful 'escapay'.

Since the decline of the BBC's school of proper English, (commonly known as the 'Queen's English,' Australian professional speakers are no longer encouraged to abandon our awful (to my ears) Aussie twang. I am always surprised to hear that many Americans find the Aussie accent, "attractive."

However the subject of accent enunciation, and pronunciation is a complex if not a confusing one and certainly worth a closer look, because many sins are committed by nearly every social clique for many different reasons and nearly as many different causes.

These matters are also particularly difficult for people to discuss objectively, because the first thing that has to be admitted in such a discussion is that local accents and speech customs affect how we communicate as well as what we communicate. In other words, what you hear me say, may not be what I meant, or what I hear you say may not be what you intended. Wars have been started for less.

To the case in point, I think some of us are hearing escape-ee, while others quite clearly are hearing es-cap-ee with even a few hearing esca-pay. And that is all from the one woman speaking the word.

It is particularly difficult for many people to realise that the way they have been pronouncing a word is incorrect. When we throw in the other factors of illiteracy and just plain assumptions of "my way is right, because that is the way I was taught," you might see why we so often fail to communicate reliably.

Stand over man, usually means someone who watches over someone to make sure they are doing something correctly, or as is wanted by a third-party. Stand-over-men is usually a work-place bully or a criminal activity, or both.

[Cole Parker]

So a stand over man is a supervisor. No wonder he was brutally slain by Mad Dog. Nobody likes those SOBs, especially the ones who persistently look over your shoulder.

The rest was drivel, of course. We all heard what we heard. Trying to pass it off as mere accent-disparity doesn't deserve a comment, and you won't get one from me.

c

[DesDownunder]

So a stand over man is a supervisor. No wonder he was brutally slain by Mad Dog. Nobody likes those SOBs, especially the ones who persistently look over your shoulder.

The rest was drivel, of course. We all heard what we heard. Trying to pass it off as mere accent-disparity doesn't deserve a comment, and you won't get one from me.

c

As I said,

These matters are also particularly difficult for people to discuss objectively, because the first thing that has to be admitted in such a discussion is that local accents and speech customs affect how we communicate as well as what we communicate.

The accent filter is one of the prime causes of the Babel effect (A confusion of voices and other sounds.) This effect needs to be countermanded with some effort of attention to detail, if we are to accommodate cultural differences in word usage, with a view to understanding their meaning as well as hearing the different nuances of pronunciation.

The fact remains we do tend to apply our local orthoepy (as well as meaning) to words even when they are pronounced differently by others. If the pronunciation is too influenced by another tongue however, then communication may well break down altogether.

The real problem is to accept that the customary pronunciation we are most familiar with (or the one we think we hear), may in effect, lack the sophistication of eloquence as used in the originating culture. (Latin pronunciation in ancient Rome, (for example) is far from being universally agreed upon, by scholars, and long discussions are held to discuss how Shakespeare would have heard his plays on the Elizabethan stage.)

In addition it should be understood that due to a number of influences, another culture may contribute a new eloquence of its own in pronunciation, sometimes accompanied by a new if not expanded, definition.

I support the drivel.

[Bruin Fisher]

I love this thread!

Des says all social groups are guilty of pronunciation gaffes and he's right. In Britain it has long been assumed by many that posh people talk right. That is manifestly wrong - the upper classes have developed their own version of English which is unique to them. For instance, pronouncing the word 'off' with an 'r' - 'orff', a word combined all too often into the phrase 'bugger orff' and flung dismissively at lower ranks. And poor Prince Charles gets vilified when he turns up to open a supermarket or unveil a statue and says he's 'delighted abight it'. He can't say 'about'.

Of course the ultimate arbiter of correct English pronunciation is..... me! As everyone knows, the right way to speak is the way I speak, or from your point of view, the way you speak. But even I have a few idiosyncrasies - I say the word 'exit' as 'egg-zit' whereas the very nice man who accompanies me on long lonely car journeys and about whom I secretly fantasize, and who lives in my Sat-Nav device, often tells me 'at the roundabout, take the second eck-sit' which I think is more correct. I wouldn't dream of arguing with him, anyway.

[Bruin Fisher]

Have youse guys all been out in the noon-day sun?

I'm sure y'all familiar with 'payer' being the person who pays, and the 'payee' being the person who receives the payment.

In the case of the escapee, the escaper is defined as the same thing, i.e. 'someone who escapes.'

I don't think any of us are unfamiliar with the word escapee, are we? We all knew what the newsreader was trying to say, but those of us unused to listening to Aussie-speak heard escapay instead.

If the English language had any proper structure about it, there would be a problem here:

In the sentence 'I pay you', the payer is the subject of the sentence and the payee is the object of the sentence. So an escaper should be someone who escapes, while an escapee should be someone who has the escape done to him - the one who is escaped from, perhaps. But we have chosen to reject the word escaper and use escapee for the one who escapes. Illogical, as Mr Spock would say.

To the case in point, I think some of us are hearing escape-ee, while others quite clearly are hearing es-cap-ee with even a few hearing esca-pay. And that is all from the one woman speaking the word.

We do train our ears, tune them in to allow for regional accents. I'm sure almost all English speakers can understand American because we hear it so often. Aussie, or Newcastle, or Glasgow, are more difficult because you don't hear them on Miami Vice.

Stand over man, usually means someone who watches over someone to make sure they are doing something correctly, or as is wanted by a third-party. Stand-over-men is usually a work-place bully or a criminal activity, or both.

So is a stand over man a supervisor or a criminal? I'm left unsure. I've never heard the term before.

[DesDownunder]

Good one Bruin, I should have guessed you would be the final arbiter of English pronunciation, along with me of course.

Your quote of Prince Charles is not only priceless, but also brings to mind the difference between voice elocution lessons, so beloved of the upper class or pretenders there to, and the actors lessons in voice production. It also brings to mind aristocratic gay men talking about "May Husband and Ay."

While there are similarities in both such as diction, the elocution lesson has as it aim, to speak properly, precisely, correctly, and some would say pretentiously, while the actor must learn how to produce his voice in the fashion of a character he is playing and yet still remain intelligible to the audience.

So the actor has to be able to speak when needed with an Aussie twang, or an upper class English aristocrat, an Southern American drawl, or a Californian dude, not to mention various other nationalities like French, German or even Russian. Any of these languages will accent syllables differently from each other giving the audience the clue as to the character's origin and nature.

Laurence Olivier was a master at characterisation through voice inflection. As the Nazi Rudolf Hess in the movie, The Wild Geese, he needs only to wordlessly "mmmm" and the audience knows his evil, his cunning, his contempt for humanity.

In Australia we are bombarded with "English" from every other nation on Earth and despite our lowly colonial origins we are able to decipher most accents from America and the UK without problem, although Welsh and Scottish can pose a problem. As for foreign telemarketers, I thankfully recognise the need to hang up the phone before I am tempted to decipher what they think is English.

Of course we in Australia, see it as our duty, to parody nearly all of these in a most politically incorrect manner, usually worsening (or improving) in direct proportion to the amount of beer consumed.

The truth of the matter is that accents are a result of the effects of vocal laziness, intellectual inhibition, and local speech patterns combined with some degree of illiteracy of the culture itself. This is both colourful and a source for good dialog.

I have been much amused and distraught to watch CEO's of large companies fumble over words and then invent some new word that sounds like the one they wanted and thought would impress people.

However even if we had common educational values for teaching English, localisation would soon undermine it, although I expect to see the Internet and mass media moderating extremes over time.

Youth will fortunately continue to confound not only the elderly but also their own cultures in general with their latest speech inventions (and contractions.)

****

Bruin yes, that is what I was trying to say...illogical.

[Cole Parker]

And so, with yet another reply, we still are devoid of a satisfactory explanation of 'stand over man'. Probably no one else, but Bruin and I are curious!

I too rue the disappearance of provincial accents. It used to be that one could tell where someone came from in the U.S. by his speech. But TV has had a significant effect on stabilizing the way we all sound. Listen to newscasts from Atlanta or New Orleans now and they could have anchors who emanated from Duluth or Sheboygan or Albuquerque or Snohomish and we'd not have a clue. We've lost much of the oh so characteristic and charming regional accents of Tennessee and Kentucky and Alabama, and it's a damned shame!

One word that is so commonly mispronounced in the U.S. that it probably should have its spelling altered to support it's pronunciation is 'statistics'. That first t is so frequently eliminated that the word could rent it out and make a little money.

We Americans tend to be enunciatorily lazy. Words that required us to change the position of the lips and tongue more than once are simply asking for trouble. People in England don't have this problem because they don't actually move their lips or tongue when speaking.

C

[Bruin Fisher]

And so, with yet another reply, we still are devoid of a satisfactory explanation of 'stand over man'. Probably no one else, but Bruin and I are curious!

We Americans tend to be enunciatorily lazy. Words that required us to change the position of the lips and tongue more than once are simply asking for trouble. People in England don't have this problem because they don't actually move their lips or tongue when speaking.

C

Maybe 'stand over man' is a state secret - and any Aussie who betrays his identity to a foreigner is guilty of treason?

And about the enunciation problem, yes, we Brits suffer from a congenital defect known as the stiff upper lip - and it forces us to speak funny.

Here the word 'specific' is all too often pronounced 'pacific' - and by professional speakers like newscasters, sometimes, much to the annoyance of pedants like me (pendants??!).

[Cole Parker]

Pendants? You wish!

C

[Cole Parker]

We'd say tongue in cheek over here, but I don't know if that crosses the water well or not.

C

[DesDownunder]

Google to the rescue: From the Urban Dictionary comes the following, Note: definition 2 is the clearest of these:

1. STANDOVER MAN

Thief who specializes in persuading other thieves to surrender their valuable items.

From the website of Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read:

"My apprenticeship in crime began in the 1970s. This had me robbing massage parlours and taking on contracts to maim and kill rivals. Once I had obtained a doctorate as a "standover man", robbing drug dealers and other criminals, who funnily enough couldn't report me to the police, became child's play. I once told a friend "why rob a straight guy of $20 when you can rob a drug dealer of $10,000 and he can't go running to the police?" After all both involved some work on my behalf, but the man in the street was less likely to give up his $20 as he had to work hard for it. For the drug-dealers it came easy, so why would they put up a fight. Although some of my victims chose to chew razor blades (at their own request of course), before they would hand over cash? And I am the psychopath!

2. STANDOVER MAN

Aussie slang for an extortionist who uses physical violence (or threats thereof) to extract payment on behalf of another party.

You might pay a standover man to get some money owed to you instead of going via the police. Perhaps you might order a few broken ribs or a kneecapping as an object lesson to go along with the payment.

3. STANDOVER MAN

a large man, usually gang-related, who threatens people with physical violence in order to have certain wishes carried out.

So common is this term in Australia , that I had no idea it wasn't a universal term for all English speaking countries. I have certainly seen many US and UK films which feature characters who are standover men. I guess I superimposed the term on them.

As for the woman saying "escapay,"

what more can I say than, I hear only "escapeeeeeeeee"

which at least supports my argument that we are all superimposing our local speech recognition on the pronunciation.

I stated twice, clearly, that objectivity is very difficult when it comes to discussing this because our personal "hearing" obfuscates recognition and thus compromises communication. This is a prime example of this effect.

There is no shame in this, it just happens and awareness of it, may be a shock, but I have no intention of calling in the standover troops to enforce y'all to submit to this understanding.

[Cole Parker]

Google to the rescue: From the Urban Dictionary comes the following, Note: definition 2 is the clearest of these:

1. STANDOVER MAN

Thief who specializes in persuading other thieves to surrender their valuable items.

From the website of Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read:

"My apprenticeship in crime began in the 1970s. This had me robbing massage parlours and taking on contracts to maim and kill rivals. Once I had obtained a doctorate as a "standover man", robbing drug dealers and other criminals, who funnily enough couldn't report me to the police, became child's play. I once told a friend "why rob a straight guy of $20 when you can rob a drug dealer of $10,000 and he can't go running to the police?" After all both involved some work on my behalf, but the man in the street was less likely to give up his $20 as he had to work hard for it. For the drug-dealers it came easy, so why would they put up a fight. Although some of my victims chose to chew razor blades (at their own request of course), before they would hand over cash? And I am the psychopath!

2. STANDOVER MAN

Aussie slang for an extortionist who uses physical violence (or threats thereof) to extract payment on behalf of another party.

You might pay a standover man to get some money owed to you instead of going via the police. Perhaps you might order a few broken ribs or a kneecapping as an object lesson to go along with the payment.

3. STANDOVER MAN

a large man, usually gang-related, who threatens people with physical violence in order to have certain wishes carried out.

So common is this term in Australia , that I had no idea it wasn't a universal term for all English speaking countries. I have certainly seen many US and UK films which feature characters who are standover men. I guess I superimposed the term on them.

Ah. I see. We do have a term for it in the U.S. It's 'thug'.

As for the woman saying "escapay,"

what more can I say than, I hear only "escapeeeeeeeee"

which at least supports my argument that we are all superimposing our local speech recognition on the pronunciation.

I stated twice, clearly, that objectivity is very difficult when it comes to discussing this because our personal "hearing" obfuscates recognition and thus compromises communication. This is a prime example of this effect.

Yeah, you did say it, but I thought you were kidding! You actually didn't hear escapay? Amazing. That's exactly what she said. Everyone else heard it that way too. Wow!

C

[TracyMN]

O-M-G!!

I couldn't figure out from one sentence to the next, who's serious and who's kidding; and the question of who's serious about what and who's kidding about what would be waiting in the wings if I did--alternating between fascination and WTF? I did manage to come away with a representative sample of things--one question, one thing I took exception to, one "i'm in that group", and one reason to be glad I stuck it out: (hint: the question is followed bty a question mark)

I've not noticed that people leave out the "t" in statistics, and should we say specific like "spee" or what? Bruin, i'm of the eck-sit variety I think.

And Bruin, I loved the explanation of escapee /payee and the abandonment of escaper, leading to the hijacking and conversion of escapee. You make smart look easy and Fun!

This kind of thread is like a phenomenon, (which I just looked up and found my first choice "phenomena" is actually the pleural and it would be, according to Onelook, a mistake to have used it here) in every sense of the word.

Too smart for your shirts, I think...but then there's always sexy....

Did someone say hijack?

Tracy

[blue]

"Hi, Jack."

C'mon, somebody had to.... :D

[DesDownunder]

Thanks blue, that brightened my day.

I'll tell Jack you said, "Hi."

[Bruin Fisher]

I'm a Brit, so.....

Hello, John!

[Trab]

I suspect that the ability to speak another language besides English also aids in listening/hearing when words are spoken. There is not as much of a tendency to 'hear' what is expected to be heard, since we have two or more parallel brain sites trying to decipher what is being said.

One of my biggest peeves in recent years is the highjacking of 'fisher'. We used to have fishermen, then feminists insisted that fishermen and fisherwomen were not acceptable, and forced fisherperson on us. This was abhorrent to almost everyone, and hence 'fisher' was taken by them. Sadly, there ARE things, animals, called "fisher", and they are in the marten family.

Absolutely the worse though, is saying "axe" when it should be "ask". How the heck anyone can turn it around and not hear that it is now a radically different work with different meaning is beyond my comprehension. "Then he axed me if I was okay..." loses all logical meaning compared to "Then he asked me if I was okay."

Sadly, many of the people speaking that way don't even know there is a problem.

[Cole Parker]

Replacing ask with axe quite possibly was a case of black argot becoming mainstream. There are many such usages. I don't know whether it's an intentional thing on the part of a portion of the population of black Americans to have their own language, or simply a distortion of traditional language that gets started through mishearing or misspeaking and then adopted by the masses. The fact that recreational reading is at an all time low right now probably lends itself to the problem, if it is a problem. If you never read the words ask and axe, only hear them, it could be easy to mistake one for the other, never having the opportunity to see the difference in print.

There are lots of arguments for and against corrupting the language like this. But axe for ask is certainly a prime example. And it's another example of how our language is a living and breathing entity, and always changing.

C

[Trab]

Interesting though, is that it never goes the other way, as in, "The 6' 2" man was an ask murderer." Maybe it is a subconscious thing, in that the person would rather 'axe' someone for something than 'ask' for it.

[colinian]

Replacing ask with axe quite possibly was a case of black argot becoming mainstream.

In the first chapter of Chris's textbook, How English Works - A Linguistic Introduction by Anne Curzan ad Michael Adams, on page 2 there's a sidebar titled "The Story of Aks" that gives the history of the use of axe and other variants for ask. Turns out that writers in the 14th century, including the poet Chaucer, used ask, aks, ax, and axe interchangeably for the word 'ask' that we use today. In his Dissertations on the English Language (1789) Noah Webster wrote that the use of 'ax' for 'ask' was common in New England. The textbook continues:

By 1953, E. Bagby Atwood noted in A Survey of Verb Forms in the Eastern United States that aks/ax no longer occurred north of the Mason-Dixon line. Once widely spoken in America, aks had become regarded as a Southernism -- even though speakers throughout the United States can be heard using it. As African Americans migrated from the South, they carried aks with them, and today enough African Americans employ it, regardless of where they live, that is also counts as a feature of African American English.... This story may shake up some things that you thought you knew about language, such as that aks is just wrong or bad English.

So 'axe' etc. predates black argot by a few centuries.

Isn't English a wonderful language? And isn't language a wonderful, fascinating subject!

Colin

[Cole Parker]

It's barely possible that guy knows more about it than I do.

C

[DesDownunder]

The lesson here is to never assume that something is wrong just because you think it is obviously so.

We now know that 'ask' murderers who use axe, aks, or ax ,

Do not need to have there ass, axed,

Though some might still think their use of ass

Deserves a jolly good whack on the arse.