Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Those were different times ..., in reply to Simon Grigg,
Immediately after Chch in February, one report we were watching talked of the urgent need to ensure fast access to milk and bread. I probably wouldn’t have blinked if I was in-country but it sounded mighty odd from this angle.
East Asia in effect. Most of my Chinese friends struggle with the reek of dairy.
Still, Fonterra’s out there changing minds and raising cholesterol levels ;-)
Meanwhile, just think of it as a noodle crisis.
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Hard News: Those were different times ..., in reply to Sacha,
And he’s interacting with them verbally as well, eh, as gamers sometime do?
These days, yes. He’s been doing voice chat with his buddies for a couple of years now, in-game text talking for a long time.
It’s a pretty safe environment, really. There’s sometimes a bit of talk about bong hits and such, but we’ve discussed that, and we agree that if there’s any time that he might do that, it’s some way in the future yet.
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Hard News: Those were different times ..., in reply to Sacha,
Peers now include online ones.
Overwhelmingly, in Leo's case.
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Hard News: Those were different times ..., in reply to David Herkt,
There is also the incredible influence of American television programming – listening to NZ adolescents now, it is definitely more American Standard accent.
You should hear our younger boy. Jen has told me that children still largely pick up their accents from family and peers, but -- this is just my theory -- Leo, as an Aspie, is not well equipped to learn this way, and has instead been strongly influenced by the media he consumes and, to some extent, his online gaming friends, who are mostly American teens and twentysomethings.
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Hard News: Those were different times ..., in reply to BenWilson,
My mum and uncle both had elocution training. It’s actually served Mum well as a teacher. Her accent has naturally rolled with the yuf, but she has fantastic voice projection and clarity. It didn’t sound like an unusual experience in her circle.
My mum had elocution and, thus, so did I -- although only for the two or three years we lived in Greymouth, oddly enough. That was enough to participate at least once in "competitions". My magnum opus was a talk about tuna fishing -- I had lures to illustrate it.
It has been undeniably useful to me.
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Hard News: Those were different times ..., in reply to 3410,
Not buying this theory at all. My grandparents (all Edwardian vintage) etc. spoke with the old Kiwi accent, camera or no.
I mean the special "broadcasting" voice as opposed to the way people generally spoke, and the two aren't necessarily the same. I hear a underlying accent accent in pre-70s recordings of NZers that seems quite distinct to me. I quite like it.
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Hard News: Those were different times ..., in reply to Robyn Gallagher,
Could it be that our memory of how people talked back then is influenced by what we see in old film and TV? That is, people who have been trained to speak in a posh telly voice.
Yes, and so ordinary people thought they ought to too when they had a camera pointed at them. Well, that's my strong impression.
I was quite struck that some of the people in the Eyewitness track had accents I'd associate with previous decades.
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Hard News: Those were different times ..., in reply to Kumara Republic,
I suspect that Britain’s joining of the EEC was a contributing factor – the cargo cult of Mother England had suddenly turned out to be a mirage, and coincidentally Yankee & Aussie culture was on the ascendancy. It also happened to be the era of Fred Dagg, Pukemanu and later on, Close To Home. Wasn’t the 1970s also the era of the O.E. too?
Yes, maybe we did let ourselves start sound less like Mother England.
I also wonder if white kids sound browner now. There was very, very little Maori and Pacific influence in the cultures we consumed. Even Billy T James would have to wait a few more years to be unleashed on the mainstream,
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Hard News: Those were different times ..., in reply to st ephen,
At our school everyone agreed that disco was dead; the debate/shitfest was over whether it had been killed by punk or reggae.
I can honestly say that I was (or tried to be) a punk rocker butI still loved Donna Summer's 70s dance records.
As Simon will be able to testify, the love affair continues ...
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Hard News: Those were different times ..., in reply to Alastair Jamieson,
One of the incongruities with “Underbelly Land Of The Long Green Cloud” is the characters all speak with modern Kiwi accents, not what I remember accents sounding like in the 1970’s at all.
Yes! So what influences changed the accent?