Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

The words do not have to be perfect.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

I did not have telepathic declassification on my 2022 bingo card.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

This really is a full service blog.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

The revolution will be supervised.

Eh, that’s media spin. biden’s health is fine and he’s doing a good job.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

You are here: Home / Open Threads / President Zelenskyy Speaks to the US Congress on Wednesday at 9 am ET

President Zelenskyy Speaks to the US Congress on Wednesday at 9 am ET

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While we wait, here’s a 10-minute late-night address by President Zelenskyy on March 12.  If you have already watched it, it’s worth watching again.

President Zelenskky speaks to Congress:

Transcript of President Zelenskyy’s speech to the US Congress.

 

Reader Interactions

201Comments

  3. 3.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Baud:

    I said to a friend last night, I really hope Boebert and Taylor Greene and Gosar and Cawthorn and their ilk all decide to “boycott” the speech. The chamber would be better without them.

  4. 4.

    MisterDancer

    Of related interest:

  5. 5.

    WaterGirl

    They don’t have this on the White House LIVE page, so if anyone finds a better video source than this one, please post a link in the comments.

  7. 7.

    Gin & Tonic

    Since he is reading, I wonder if the interpreter was provided a copy? She’s stumbling in parts. And I wonder if Congress got a printed translation?

  14. 14.

    Gin & Tonic

    I wish Americans would learn how to say “Volodymyr”. It’s not hard. It’s not Vladimir.

  22. 22.

    Betty Cracker

    In addition to being remarkably courageous, Zelensky deeply understands the power of media. He has exactly the skillset he needs.

  24. 24.

    BC in Illinois

    President Zelenskyy called on US Representatives to look into which companies in their districts/states are still doing business with and supporting Russia.

    This is something they can do.

    Bring it all to light.

    More than the empty words for Ukraine, which is all I get from my worthless Representative [Ann Wagner – R – Safe Republican Vote].

  25. 25.

    zhena gogolia

    @WaterGirl: It’s roughly just the way it’s spelled!

    I don’t know how to make it any more phonetic than it already is without getting into details about labialization that you don’t really need. Just don’t say Vladimir.

    ETA: I’m corrected about stress — vo-lo-dy-MYR.

    ETA: And I spared you a lecture about polnoglasie!

  28. 28.

    O. Felix Culpa

    @Gin & Tonic: Unfortunately many Americans have a tin ear when it comes to foreign words. As a student and sometime teacher of foreign languages, listening to folks murder a language is nails on a chalkboard, but it seems some many people can’t even come close to correct pronunciation.

    On the topic of Zelensky’s speech to Congress, I hope it leads to concrete supportive action.

  29. 29.

    Betty Cracker

    @WaterGirl: He was looking at a piece of paper — maybe a transcript? It was just kind of funny, Pelosi seeming to admonish him to get up, probably in the same tone she tells her grandchildren how to behave in church. I’m sure he meant no disrespect.

  30. 30.

    zhena gogolia

    @SiubhanDuinne: It’s all hitting me at once now. What a fucking tragedy, outrage, atrocity, abomination.

    There are the people who fly passenger jets into buildings and there are the people who go UP the stairs after the building’s been hit. There is Putin and there is Zelenskyy. How can humanity hold both possibilities?

  31. 31.

    Betty Cracker

    Senator Kelly of AZ was on CNN just now saying that a U.S.-enforced no-fly zone = war with Russia. Mentioned the nukes on both sides.

  33. 33.

    JMG

    US will not institute a no-fly zone. However, it and other Western countries are in the process of sending significant numbers of anti-aircraft systems to Ukraine.

  35. 35.

    O. Felix Culpa

    @Betty Cracker: I thought it was strategically significant that Zelensky followed his request for a no-fly zone (which he knew he wasn’t going to get because nukes) with a request for upping the amount and type of military equipment that the US provides. A smart move that I think will yield results. Hopefully quickly and effectively.

  39. 39.

    Soprano2

    @zhena gogolia: That’s not hard. Phonetic French, OTOH, is a nightmare. My least-favorite language to sing in, closely followed by Hebrew (based on my experiences, I’ve heard some Asian languages are even harder for English speakers). Some of the problem is that other languages have sounds our mouths never learned to make.

  40. 40.

    topclimber

    From a late comment on Adam’s post. Anyone knowledgeable about this?

    Do switchblade drones require human operators? If so, how long to train and therefore how long before Ukrainians can use them?

    Kinda hoping any required training started in secret a few weeks ago.

  41. 41.

    O. Felix Culpa

    @zhena gogolia: No, I suspect she doesn’t hear it. A lot of people who are not attuned to foreign languages don’t seem to hear the differences. If you don’t grow up with it or have a talent for language, it can be hard. I struggled with certain diphthongs and tones in Cantonese, both hearing and reproducing, because they’re so outside what a westerner is accustomed to. Most Americans have virtually no exposure to any kind of foreign language, as I’m sure you know, and either can’t or don’t make the effort to reproduce the sounds as faithfully as possible.

  44. 44.

    O. Felix Culpa

    @zhena gogolia: You would think so, and you would think she would have had coaching beforehand so as not to embarrass herself, but apparently not. Sigh.

    ETA: Mandarin tones are easy and I’m sure you could get them, but Cantonese is another matter.

  45. 45.

    Baud

    I take it the main takeaway from the speech is Nancy Pelosi’s difficulty with foreign names.

  47. 47.

    Gin & Tonic

    @O. Felix Culpa: I understand your point, but Slava Ukraini has no phonemes which would be challenging to an English-only speaker. Palatilized consonants, like the first one in Lviv can be hard, the double-zh like in Zaporizhzhia can be hard, but some of the other mispronunciations I ascribe to laziness.

  51. 51.

    Bunter

    @zhena gogolia:  No, she probably can’t. My last name has an “a” pronounced “uh” and almost everyone, regardless of how long they’ve known me or how often I correct them, say a long “a” instead.

  52. 52.

    Gin & Tonic

    BTW, the music behind the video was ‘Melody’ by Myroslav Skoryk. In case anyone is interested.

  54. 54.

    O. Felix Culpa

    @Gin & Tonic:

    some of the other mispronunciations I ascribe to laziness typical American ignorance of and disregard for other cultures and languages.

    Fixt. I sympathize, believe me. I was cringing during her well-intentioned but murdered efforts.

    More to the point, I hope that Zelenskyy’s speech leads to a quick and effective response.

    ETA: See JMG at #48. I’m that this was all teed up in advance. I’m impressed with the coordination of messaging and action.

  55. 55.

    Scamp Dog

    @O. Felix Culpa: Mandarin tones are easy? It took me two months living in Taiwan, formally studying the language to get them down. Fortunately I had a year-long scholarship so I got fairly good at the language. :)

  56. 56.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Baud: I have a name that some Americans find difficult to pronounce, most of the time it doesn’t bother me, especially when I detect a sincere attempt at the correct pronunciation. Then I gently correct them. Its no big deal.

    @Baud: I thought it was BaWd.

  57. 57.

    WaterGirl

    Biden will speaking on assistance to Ukraine at 11:45 this morning.  (I have a post set up for that speech.)

    Hard to imagine that Biden would schedule that shortly after President Zelenskyy’s presentation to congress unless he had something more to announce.

    All else aside, the optics of “sorry, we’re doing all that we can do” would be ridiculously bad.  I imagine we will learn something new.

  59. 59.

    zhena gogolia

    @dr. luba: But in the nominative the last syllable is “a,” right? Maybe she got it mixed up with that. The phrase with “slava” puts Ukraina into the dative, right?

  61. 61.

    Betty Cracker

    My husband has a Polish last name that no one but family pronounces correctly. English speakers are flummoxed by the string of consonants without a vowel in sight, and Polish speakers pronounce it the way it’s said in Poland, which is not how the American Klwoijehifdzzwistscs say it. (Not the real name!)

  62. 62.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @zhena gogolia: Back when I was traveling in Mexico on a regular basis, I always said it took me a week to get my Spanish ears back in place, just so I could hear words, as opposed to a jumble of nonsense noises. Whether I knew what the word meant or not was a whole ‘nother matter, but at least I could hear identifiable words.

  63. 63.

    Gin & Tonic

    @WaterGirl: Shorter “o”s. “Polo” is more like “Poe-low.”

    p.s. Do not, under any circumstances, go to the site howtopronounce.com

  64. 64.

    O. Felix Culpa

    Watching a WaPo live interview with former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. Smart lady.

  68. 68.

    japa21

    @Gin & Tonic:  To which I say, “Same to you fella”​

     

    ETA: The things one learns at BJ are amazing.  I did not expect to get a wide and varied look at language pronunciation this morning.

  73. 73.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @O. Felix Culpa: I hope we’re providing tactical intel as well, particularly targeting info on the artillery. That’s been my main thought when I heard about shelling hospitals and evacuation routes.

  75. 75.

    Jay

    @topclimber:

    yes, they require human operators.

    it takes about an hour on a simulator to learn how to launch, control and target one. Several launches probably, dependent on skill and learning curves, to become proficient.

  76. 76.

    Another Scott

    @MisterDancer: That reminds me, …

    PUTIN: Should I pursue this campaign against Ukraine?

    ORACLE OF DELPHI: Should you send an army against the Ukrainians, you will destroy a great empire.

    PUTIN: haha nice

    — Djinn & Tonic ?? (@HegelwCrmCheese) February 27, 2022

    Thanks.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  78. 78.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Baud: Used to be an advertisement in the NYC subways a long time ago, something like “if u cn rd ths u cn gt a gd jb.” A school for court stenographers or something. Where’s NotMax when you really need him?

  79. 79.

    O. Felix Culpa

    @dr. luba: Yes, I remember listening to that live and just howling. Those guys were hilarious and an essential part of my Saturday mornings.

  81. 81.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @Gin & Tonic: While I can more or less read the Russian alphabet phonetically, it has always puzzled me that there are three letters with the “i” sound: ы, и and й. And yes, I’m sure that they are different sounds, but the difference is too subtle for my ears.

    This struck me again this week because I just got my “Russian warship, go F yourself” T-shirt from saintjavelin.com!

  82. 82.

    MagdaInBlack

    @zhena gogolia: My given name is Marya. My mother found it in the credits for an artist for a Polish cookbook.  As  you can imagine, that “y” instead of “i” has been a lifelong struggle of mispronunciation, most often Myra.

  83. 83.

    Calouste

    @Another Scott:

    ORACLE OF DELPHI: Should you send an army against the Ukrainians, you will destroy a great empire second rate power ruled by Nazis.

    Seems a phrasing that would more likely convince Putin.

  85. 85.

    Alison Rose ???

    While I understand the need for an interpreter to speak the speech aloud, this lady is um…not good to listen to. I almost wish instead there were just subtitles.

    But also fuck, I’m crying and my admiration for this man grows every day.

  86. 86.

    Jeffro

    Bill Grueskin (?) tweet, noting the standing and applauding U.S. lawmakers:

    “The senators who voted to acquit trumpov in his first impeachment trial are also standing, for some reason.”

    Dems should be throwing serious hands, today and every day, about that.  They won’t, but they sure should.

  88. 88.

    Betty Cracker

    @O. Felix Culpa: Agreed. Maybe Biden will provide some details on that in his speech later today.

    Was just catching up on Adam’s update post from last night and thought this comment from Carlo Graziani was interesting:

    I have a somewhat different take from Adam’s on the implication of Ukraine winning the war without a NATO intervention.

    I believe that it is absolutely vital that they do so, or that they be seen to do so. It is absolutely necessary for the political consequences that Ukraine own the war, and the victory. A victory over Putinist Russsia would be useless, were it credited to NATO.

    We need to look over the horizon, at the world that we are hoping will emerge from this war. That world NEEDS A NEW RUSSIA. We cannot allow irredentist narratives to fester, waiting for another opportunity to burst out of the same goddamn suppurating boil. The fucking STORY of how the war ends MATTERS.

    Would you like to help the Navalnys — he’s not the only one — to power? Help them discredit the Putins. Don’t feed the Putinist narrative. Give the Ukrainians all the tools they need to finish the job themselves. That will finish the Putinists.

    I’ve been in the “supply Ukraine but don’t directly fight the Russians” camp because of the “never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake” principle. This invasion has been a catastrophe for Putin, whereas a NATO attack might be a lifeline. But I like CG’s framing above. History tells us that how wars end matters very much.

  89. 89.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @O. Felix Culpa: I’m sure they are in general, but as I say I’ve been particularly thinking about the artillery.

    A lot of what we can and should be doing, we may very well be doing already but would be highly classified, and we’re currently (thank God) in an administration that respects US secrecy law.

    But there is a war of public perception as well, and I guess I’m wishing that there was a lot more VISIBLE that we could be doing that would stop short of an act of war.

  90. 90.

    dr. luba

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym: Vowels in slavic languages generally have one sound, unlike English.

    As for the Russian letters you mention:

    ы short i sound, like in “kill”
    и  long e sound, like in “heat”
    й  a consonant, not vowel,  y like in “yellow”or “young”

    In Ukrainian, which is actually quite different, we have

    и short i sound, like in “kill”
    і  long e sound, like in “heat”
    й  a consonant, not vowel,  y like in “yellow” or “young”

  91. 91.

    JCJ

    @Gin & Tonic:

    I remember Stephen Colbert describing a sign in Welsh as looking like someone had “thrown a bucket of consonants against a wall”.  When driving once in Prague I found the names of streets to look like a bunch of consonants got together to have a party – no vowels allowed!

  92. 92.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Betty Cracker: I wish Navalny hadn’t been used as an example. Yes, he is Russia’s current anti-Putin, but scratch him and you’ll find the same “Greater Russia” nationalism.

  94. 94.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    @topclimber:

    Simple solution – hire a pack of 12 year olds and load them up on Capri Sun and Lunchables. It’ll be running well in 45 minutes.

  96. 96.

    lashonharangue

    As others have mentioned,  the problem is deeper than Putin.  I think to have any long term chance to change how Russia sees the world, two things must happen.  First, Ukraine has to be seen as having won, not NATO.  Second,  a strong, democratic, non-NATO Ukraine (like Sweden) needs to be an integrated and prosperous part of the EU. In 20 years maybe Russia will get a clue.

  97. 97.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @dr. luba: The combination ий at the end of words like русский has always particularly puzzled me. I think it’s generally transcribed as “ii” as if it is a long “i” sound, but I think you’re telling me it should end with some kind of consonant sound.

    I assume in Ukrainian, President Zelenskyy’s name ends with a similar combination which is why it is transliterated that way.

  98. 98.

    Sloane Ranger

    Just a question about US/NATO armaments being sent to Ukraine. Are they being given free, or are they on a use now, pay later basis?

    Because if it’s the second, it took us in the UK, 60 years (nearly 10 of those in austerity) to repay what we owed the US for fighting Fascism until Pearl Harbour. I wouldn’t want to see Ukraine win the war only to be saddled with a massive debt like we were.

  99. 99.

    Soprano2

    @Betty Cracker: My husband’s Polish last name (mine too) has an “a” that’s pronounced like “o”. It’s rare that anyone gets it right the first 10 times – I sure didn’t! And ours isn’t a long or odd name, either. I’m related to everyone in this city who has it, though. When we went to London in 2006, the woman at the desk was Polish, and she used the Polish pronunciation of what the name was before it was Anglicized. My husband was impressed by that.

  100. 100.

    brendancalling

    I’m in a class with high school kids, so I can’t watch.
    May I assume Mr. Zelenskyy shamed the US and the rest of the world?

  101. 101.

    Calouste

    @JCJ: Welsh gets a bit more pronounceable once you know that a “w” is in most cases the same as the sound “oo” in English.

  104. 104.

    O. Felix Culpa

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym:

    I guess I’m wishing that there was a lot more VISIBLE that we could be doing that would stop short of an act of war.

    Would $1 billion more in US aid to Ukraine help? I’ve worked in marketing (so yes, I’m evil, but for good causes) and get the importance of messaging and managing public opinion. That said, I’m ok with not knowing everything about what we’re doing. I’m a civilian and a mere internet opinion-haver. There are times when I need to trust the experts to do expert things. Thankfully we have an administration that values expertise and will do its best to do the right thing under difficult circumstances.

  105. 105.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @Sloane Ranger: I’ve heard the term “Lend-Lease” being used, which I believe was the name for the WW2 program.

    Googling for “Lend Lease Ukraine” finds me one bill in Congress, S. 3522, introduced in January in the Senate. No evidence of any further action on it.

    Other than that, no idea. If it involves money, I think Congress has to act. I don’t know who has the authority to just give materiel for free.

  106. 106.

    O. Felix Culpa

    @Gin & Tonic:

    I wish Navalny hadn’t been used as an example.

    Agreed. The enemy of a dictator isn’t necessarily going to end up being an advocate for democracy and self-determination.

    ETA: I agree with the rest of Carlo Graziani’s analysis that BC cited. Just not comfortable with the Navalny bit.

  107. 107.

    Betty Cracker

    @brendancalling: I wouldn’t characterize it that way. He expressed gratitude and friendship and asked for more help. He illustrated the horrors Ukrainians are enduring in an indelible way. He’s pushing for things he knows he probably won’t get to maximize the amount of assistance, which is the rational thing to do, IMO.

  109. 109.

    O. Felix Culpa

    @brendancalling: Shame is not an effective motivator, and Zelenskyy is smarter than that. He did provide a compelling case for more aid, though, and he will get more, according to announcements from the WH.

  114. 114.

    Torrey

    @Betty Cracker: The use of video was inspired. And the silent concluding message onscreen, as well as the shift to English afterwards. He knows how to reach Americans.
    (I notice that the addresses to the EU and to the UK Parliament didn’t include video.)​
    ​
    ​

  116. 116.

    Oklahomo

    @Gin & Tonic: Our branch of the family didn’t Anglicize the last name, so no one ever gets it right the first, second, third time.  We have some old Czech missal in the family keepsakes and the sentences are surreal.

  117. 117.

    Geminid

    @Sheila in nc: The American version of English has a lot of variation when it comes to pronunciation. People in the Midwest call a cow a “cow,” whereas around my part of Virginia they’re called “keows.” And in Richmond, some older people still call a house a “hoose.”

  118. 118.

    Leto

    @JCJ: Welsh was fun. I’m sure G&T would call us idiots for not being able to pronounce it.

    “You can’t say the town of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch? I really wish Americans, who can barely speak their own language, would get it correct.”

  119. 119.

    Betty Cracker

    Is anyone else surprised at how focused Americans are on Russia’s war against Ukraine? Our collective attention span is usually in the fruit fly range, so I am surprised and encouraged.

  121. 121.

    O. Felix Culpa

    @Omnes Omnibus: Hey Omnes, I’ve been wanting to ask you what kind of weapons would be helpful to, transferrable, and quickly operational for Ukraine against the shelling of their cities? Sorry if you’ve answered this elsewhere, but it’s evident that a NATO no-fly zone is a no-go for the foreseeable future. What else would work?

  122. 122.

    O. Felix Culpa

    @Geminid: Indeed. My Ohioan SO persists in calling milk “melk,” which she knows is WRONG because I’ve told her so more than once. And yet we’re still married. :)

  124. 124.

    trollhattan

    @JCJ: @Calouste:

    “Hinterland” a Welsh police procedural served as my immersion course in–definitely not learning but listening to Welsh and also discerning the Welsh English accent from among the seemingly two-hundred possible UK accents. It’s set in Aberystwyth, the spelling of which I’ll assert is an elaborate joke for pranking visitors. I also learned it’s nearly never not raining in Wales.

  125. 125.

    topclimber

    @O. Felix Culpa: Navalny is best known as a crusader against corruption. When this war finally unravels, those corrupt fat cats that turned their military into a Potemkin village will provide a great, unifying scapegoat for Russians. EVERYBODY in Russia knows corruption is a problem. It’s  a reality even 20 years of Putin propaganda can’t gaslight.

  126. 126.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @O. Felix Culpa: Aside from more artillery?*  The new drones that are heading there seem like a good step.

    *The problem with counter battery artillery isn’t necessarily not having the right weapons, but not having fast enough targeting ability.

  127. 127.

    debbie

    @O. Felix Culpa:

    There’s also linguistic differences. Lots of languages slide from one syllable to the next, while American English pretty much pronounces each syllable. I also think British English adds syllables just because they can.

    I’ve heard Kyiv pronounced three different ways. I know the old way is wrong, but I’ve heard both a single syllable and a slight second syllable.* I don’t know which is the correct pronunciation.

    (By Masha Gesson, in an interview on NPR).

  128. 128.

    The Moar You Know

    Because if it’s the second, it took us in the UK, 60 years (nearly 10 of those in austerity) to repay what we owed the US for fighting Fascism until Pearl Harbour. I wouldn’t want to see Ukraine win the war only to be saddled with a massive debt like we were.

    @Sloane Ranger:  I remember sometimes in the late 00s when I read a news story about the UK finally paying that off.  I was outraged.  I understand the political reasons why in the 1930s arming Britain was sold to the American public as a loan, but damn, we held you guys to that for every last red cent and it’s just inexcusable that we did.  So, on behalf of this American, my sincere apologies.

  129. 129.

    O. Felix Culpa

    @Omnes Omnibus: Thanks. All I know about weaponry and military strategy I’ve learned in the last couple of weeks from people like you and Adam. I appreciate the info.

  130. 130.

    dr. luba

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym: Both и and й are transliterated to y, so it get complicated…..

    So the sound is i (short) + y (consonant)

    It’s a very common ending to names in western Ukraine.  It is sometimes transliterated to “yi” as well (short i + long e sounds smushed together).

  132. 132.

    trollhattan

    @Betty Cracker:

    My shallow person’s observation: if ever modern combat were made for media consumption this is the war that presents itself on a platter. Compared to, say, Eritria, which has been grinding along for years, or Yemen, the mass and social media infrastructure and high proportion of English speaking communications emerging have crossed the barrier we throw up via short our attention spans and SQUIRREL!

  135. 135.

    dr. luba

    @debbie: Kyiv is two syllables, but don’t linger on them too long.  KIH-yeev. And I’m a native Ukrainian speaker, while Masha is a Russian speaker.

  137. 137.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    OK, finally had a chance to listen to the video so I can react  specifically rather than just talking out of my ass. Zelenskyy is absolutely right. It is not just Ukraine that is under attack, but democracy. The strategic issues are much larger than one country and one despot.

    I am so amazed and impressed that he is taking the opportunity to go beyond the war and terror he and his people are personally experiencing, but to talk about new forms of international cooperation in times of peace, such as better infrastructure for global vaccine distribution. Can you imagine talking about vaccines while bombs are literally falling on your head?

    He is also absolutely right that shutting down Russian airspace is an absolute humanitarian necessity. I trust our leadership to find a way under European leadership. We’ve already seen that Biden knows how to work those levers.

    Oh, and about the translator: I don’t imagine he had a large pool of linguists to draw on in wherever he is bunkered. Give them some slack.

  140. 140.

    O. Felix Culpa

    @Omnes Omnibus: Knowing even half the truth is infinity percent more than I knew before. As an internet opinion-haver, it doesn’t really matter which half, does it? //

  141. 141.

    Barbara

    @The Moar You Know: This subject was covered in the biography of Churchill that was published last year, written by Geoffrey Wheatcroft.  This biography was considered by the author to be something of a “corrective” to the kinds of myths and mythologizing that was seeded by Churchill, and perpetuated after his death.  One of the items that Wheatcroft goes after relentlessly is the idea of a “special relationship” between the US and the UK.  Making the UK pay us back was one of the ways in which, according to Wheatcroft, it should have been eminently clear that the relationship was mostly one way if not actually just a British fantasy.  Making them pay us back was also a manifestation of US (especially Roosevelt’s) disdain for the British Empire — which Churchill only gave up on after a lot of kicking and screaming.

  142. 142.

    opiejeanne

    @Oklahomo: You forgot “warsh”, the way my Missouri family used to say it. Our mom never pronounced it that way, but my sister does now. I think she picked it up from our favorite aunt.

  145. 145.

    opiejeanne

    @O. Felix Culpa: My husband says “pellow” for that thing you put your head down on at night. His mom was raised in Indiana so maybe that’s the source? I’ve never heard anyone else say it that way.

  149. 149.

    opiejeanne

    @trollhattan: There was a character in Torchwood, Gwen Cooper, and I hear her accent in British shows sometimes and think, “She/he sounds like Gwennie, must be a Welsh actor”.

  150. 150.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @Leto: Everybody was talking about the Delco accent in “Mare of Easttown” and saying how well it was done. I live in Delco (Delaware County, PA) and I know there is a distinctive local accent which I can immediately recognize and can’t imitate. I didn’t think “Mare” captured it but I’m not a native.

    For me what I mostly notice is some very strange diphthongs on certain sounds, like the O in “I don’t KNOW” and the A in “Have a nice DAY”.​ Don’t ask me to try to transcribe it.

    My birth accent is from Syracuse, NY (that would be SARA-cuse for natives). Non-natives get very nasal when imitating how we say words like ONONDAGA (our county and lake).

    My wife (Long Island, NY) is very amused that for me Mary, merry and marry are the same word.

  152. 152.

    O. Felix Culpa

    @opiejeanne: Interesting. I’ll have to listen carefully the next time my midwestern spouse says the word for “soft thing that you put your head on at night.” I haven’t noticed the same flattening from short i to short e in that word, just in “milk,” which is a linguistic atrocity IMO. But I like our marriage, so bite my tongue most of the time.

  155. 155.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @opiejeanne:

    TOKYO — A powerful earthquake hit off the coast of Japan late on Wednesday night, leaving residents in the Fukushima region that was battered by a devastating quake and tsunami just over 11 years ago awaiting another possible tsunami in the early hours of Thursday morning.
    The magnitude 7.3 earthquake hit at 11:34 p.m. and the shaking lasted more than two minutes. It was felt as far as Tokyo. The Japan Meteorological Agency issued tsunami advisories for Fukushima and Miyagi prefectures and residents were warned that waves of up to 1 meter could hit the coasts.

  156. 156.

    bjacques

    @Oklahomo: none of these is correct. It “warsh”.

    And as a Leek Belt Master of Llap Goch, I fear no man!

     

    EDIT: opiejeanne beat me to it!

  160. 160.

    Geminid

    @Barbara: Roosevelt definitely had some animus towards Britain and especially their empire. He waited until Britain had drained their financial reserves down almost to zero before pushing Lend Lease through Congress.

    I watched an episode once of Victory at Sea, the 1950’s documentary series about the naval side of the Second World War. It described the enactment of Lend Lease and the program’s wide reach. I think the writers were sucking up to the Republicans, because when they described how Congress passed Lend Lease, they never even mentioned Roosevelt.

  162. 162.

    opiejeanne

    @O. Felix Culpa: I agree, and I’m a monster for trying to get him to pronounce “pillow” correctly so I’ve stopped.  I’ll have to listen when he says “milk” next time, if he does.

    The past couple of years he’s taken to saying things like “He was drug out of the house.” I have no idea where that came from, but he has stopped using “dragged” almost completely. It makes me nuts, just like me saying “dragged” after he says “drug” must annoy him, but he just laughs and says, “That too”.

    He’s 75 and there is less conversation between us though, but not out of animosity.  I think he’s just growing silent, as some older people seem to do. Maybe he feels he’s already said everything he needed to in the past 52 years of marriage, but I’d like to hear more from him.

  163. 163.

    Kropacetic

    @lowtechcyclist: Mr. MacGregor, I know it takes a lot of work; but if you get your Cosmopolitans to take root, you will have a lovely bushel of cocktails in no time.

  166. 166.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @opiejeanne: Has he started saying things like “The car needs washed” or That needs fixed?”  The whole time I lived in OH, kept wanting to shout “TO BE” at people.  The Upper Midwest has its own verbal tics, but not that one, thank dog.

  167. 167.

    Leto

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym: same! Notice some weird diphthongs on certain words. I’m originally from Charleston, which has it’s own weird rhythms (I’m looking at you, dad!). We’re over in Berks now, but haven’t noticed anything too obvious. That was one of the fun things with the military, getting to hear all the different accents from all over. Sometimes on some of the silliest words.

  168. 168.

    trollhattan

    @SectionH:

    7.3 is a bigass quake, but luckily a wisp of a thing compared to the Great Japan Quake that destroyed Fukushima, an unimaginable 9.0-9.1.

    It’s more akin to Loma Prieta, the World Series quake, which unlike this one was not offshore.

  172. 172.

    opiejeanne

    @Omnes Omnibus: No, but there are some other tics that I can’t remember right now.  Again, maybe his mom from Indiana. He and his father were born and raised in California but he spent a lot of time with his paternal grandparents, who were from Missouri and Illinois and I sometimes hear echoes of them in his speech.

    He said that when I was in Missouri for my grandmother’s funeral and he called my aunt’s house, he could hardly understand me or my mom or my aunt.  Whatever “sympathetic accent” I had picked up was gone by the time I got back to California.

  174. 174.

    O. Felix Culpa

    @opiejeanne: My SO is on the far end of the introvert scale, so we have a lot of companionable silence. We also enjoy some good conversations, but as a verbal processor, I’ve had to make some adjustments. It’s worth it to me, and it sounds like it is for you too. :)

  176. 176.

    opiejeanne

    @O. Felix Culpa: I have found myself to be the driving force for the past 15 years or so, as in “Would you like to visit X?” or “Do you want to go out and do X?”

    Funny, as soon as he retired I told him we were going to Ireland. He was startled and said he didn’t know anything about Ireland (we both have Irish ancestry), and I told him we’d find out. We bought a bunch of tour books and a fairly decent map, and after he’d read for a while I asked him what he wanted to see. We went and had a ball

    I tend to plan everything  except where we’ll eat. I don’t trust being able to find a place to stay overnight without a reservation any more.

  179. 179.

    O. Felix Culpa

    @opiejeanne: When I think of the challenges (and joys) of managing one marital relationship, I’m grateful that I do not have responsibility for multi-party international relations, especially in time of war. I’m also thankful for people like Biden who are willing to take on that responsibility with as much integrity and intelligence as possible.

  180. 180.

    JoyceH

    @Calouste: I saw something similar on Twitter where the Macbeth crazy witches tell Putin that if he enters Ukraine “the bear will triumph”, so he goes ahead, thinking they mean the Russian bear, not — Paddington.

  181. 181.

    Central Planning

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym:

    I’m a native Long Islander, and Mary/merry/marry are almost all the same for me.

    I somehow got the “or” of orange and forest imprinted on me as “ahr” so ahrange and fahrest. My wife and kids give me shit about that every time we get into a discussion on pronunciation.

    My oldest also pointed out there’s a different cadence for the way we talk. I’ve never noticed it and now I can’t stop trying to identify it, which is near impossible because it changes when you’re aware of it.

  183. 183.

    Another Scott

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym: Accents are fun.  My father pronounced “water” like “worder”.  Supposedly rural Virginia accents are close to the way people talked in colonial times and can sound strange to these ears.

    Cheers,

    Scott.

  184. 184.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Gin & Tonic: Yeah, “stick your finger through your throat,” how ’bout…:^D

    Americans have a number of problems with European languages alone, and some are not at all obvious. Yeah, there’s the use of r/l/m as vowels, the dark Slavic “l”, the “ř” of Czech, “rz” and “ł” of Polish, nasalized vowels in Polish and French, the glottal “r” of French, hard and soft “ch” in German, etc….

    One thing I noticed from brief exposure to Russian is how vowel sounds change depending on whether or not they’re stressed. The “a” or “o” in unstressed syllables seem to slide toward the schwa (“uh”) sound. It seems to me ​that stressed vowels tend to be sounded toward the front of the mouth, and when unstressed the sound moves to the rear. The front/rear distinction is explicit in languages that originated in central Asia (Hungarian, Turkish), and I wonder if the long Russian sojourn under the yoke of the Golden Horde affected their language that way.

    The other non-obvious difficulty I have observed is that (with rare exceptions) there are no pure vowels in American English. Every vowel starts off as one sound and segues into another – i.e., a diphthong. Whereas in every European language I have even a nodding familiarity with, all vowel sounds are pure unless specifically indicated (e.g., “ou” in Czech). And this difference – much more than the inability to pronounce certain unfamiliar sounds – will out a Yank immediately.***

    (Now I will sit back and wait for the dissembled multitude to lace up their golf spikes and come stomp on me for being, not just wrong, but wrong in a personally offensive way.)

    ** My French I teachers first lessons were devoted to vowel sound drills: a – e – i – o – u, over & over – emphasizing the pureness of the sounds. (And one day after school he spent a half hour teaching me the glottal “r”. Two years later my French accent was good enough to unintentionally convince a Francophone Québécois that I was an exchange student from L’hexagone. Those were the days, my friend…)

    *** Listen, e.g., to the speech Mitt Romney gave in French to the IOC in support of Salt Lake City’s Winter Olympics bid. Perfectly pronounced except for the sliding vowels, and perfect obviously American.

  185. 185.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Uncle Cosmo: If you want a reverse of that, look at the number of non-native English speakers who have difficulty with the “th” sound.

  186. 186.

    SectionH

    @opiejeanne:  Sorry for late reply, No warning for Hawai’i either, per NWS_PTWC (Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. The west coast mainland is NTWC, NationalTWC.)
    There was an advisory for parts of eastern coastal Japan. Not sure if a low-level advisory is still place.

  190. 190.

    Martin

    @O. Felix Culpa: Mandarin tones *can* be easy for some people. I’ve worked with a *lot* of foreign born students when I administered our communications program and learned that some students are very well attuned to those nuances and as a result can more readily adapt to speaking English sounding more like a native speaker than others. I remember working with a Vietnamese student on a commencement speech and no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t enunciate certain English words in a manner that would be understood over a PA system. So we looked for synonyms and wordsmith things a bit to focus on words that he could enunciate well. English was his 4th language. French was his 2nd and his French was just as difficult to understand.

    Now, this young man went on to earn a PhD in almost record time for us. He was an outstanding speaker and writer. Really, a brilliant and thoughtful guy, but he couldn’t adapt his speech even through mimicry exercises, singing – we tried all kinds of stuff. And understand, he was a super-good sport through this. A lot of this was his idea, and he worked incredibly hard at it. His brain just didn’t work that way, which was fine. I’ll add, in his 3rd year he founded a student chapter of Toastmasters. I mean, the guy was committed.

    By comparison, I had another student who came to us from Taiwan – spoke the absolute minimum amount of English to get admitted and I hired him as a student worker but needed a mandarin speaking co-worker to get through a few conversations at first, but by the end of his first year was absolutely fluent, and by his 4th year could pass as a native speaker. It was remarkable. He went on to write for a number of magazines, and I actually hired him to teach communication some years later. His brain did work that way, which was also fine.

  191. 191.

    Another Scott

    @bluegirlfromwyo: I was mixing some things there – I don’t know where his “worder” came from.  He was born in El Paso and lived all over the place – Colorado, Kansas, Michigan, Long Island, Chicago, Georgia, etc.

    The rural VA accent comment was from us living in NoVA for decades now.

    Cheers,

    Scott.

  192. 192.

    StringOnAStick

    My husband wants to learn Spanish, but he can’t roll an R.  He tries, I show him how it looks inside my mouth when I do it; maybe a good language teacher could get through to him.  He can speak German convincingly enough to have fooled an international flight attendant but that was with jet noise in the background though.

  193. 193.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym: My wife pronounces “crown” and “crayon” identically. (Because of her life history, her accent is an unusual hybrid of San Francisco Bay Area with New Hampshire borrowings. I suspect this came from the former.)

    She also has the “pin”/”pen” merger, but this is usually described as a Southern US thing so I can’t fully explain it.

  194. 194.

    Origuy

    I tried to learn Arabic, but it has a lot of consonants and I could not distinguish between them. I decided to learn Russian and got pretty good; I was able to manage in Moscow by myself and hold conversations with my hostess. Now I’m working on Italian in preparation for my summer trip. Years of Spanish are helping a lot and there aren’t any new sounds.

    Welsh w and y are easy; it’s double L that is weird. I put that aside after I learned enough to pronounce place names.

  195. 195.

    StringOnAStick

    @Another Scott: Some people easily pick up whatever the local accent is where they are.  I had friend who moved to Australia with her husband; he picked by Aussie immediately, to the point where she thought it was embarrassing, like he was trying too hard to fit in.  He was a college professor though so speaking like a local was more useful for him and he got lots of daily interaction.

  196. 196.

    Origuy

    @StringOnAStick: It took me years to learn how to trill my R’s. Tell him to try to start by making the sound with the back of his tongue and work forwards to the tip.

  197. 197.

    StringOnAStick

    @Origuy:  My two years of high school Spanish and lots of Latin medical memorization plus a strong reading vocabulary let me get along in Italian really well, plus it is such a fun language to speak!

  198. 198.

    Matt McIrvin

    @StringOnAStick: My mother, a born and raised Iowan, worked as a school psychologist in Prince William County, VA, spent a lot of time talking to parents and school staff on the phone and I used to notice that she’d often acquire a distinct Southern or Appalachian accent when she was on the phone with some people, like an accent Zelig. She didn’t know she was doing it.

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