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July 18, 2009
Eeyore number
Next time one of those idiotstick ING commercials comes on with the guy carrying a big red 3-D rendering of the magic number of dollars he'll supposedly need to retire decades from now, listen carefully to the woman's voice-over right at the beginning: she says "Ee-yore" — not "your" — number.
Which American accent does she have?
Last I looked "your" was a one-syllable word.
I guess it's fallen into the same time-dilating black hole of speech that's also captured "med-a-ley" (used to be a two-syllable word, "medley" did) and "ath-a-lete" (that was how the late, great Don Drysdale used to pronounce "athlete").
July 18, 2009 at 02:01 PM | Permalink
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Comments
Around here people say melk instead of milk.
Posted by: Nick | Jul 19, 2009 12:19:33 PM
I didn't look at the accent thing, just out of rebelliousness or something.
Who says "aig"? For "egg", I mean -- my father was born in St. Louis and raised in Kansas and he and every damn member of his family of origin said "aig" and "laig" and "plaisure" (pleasure) and "maisure" (measure) and so on. I don't naturally say "aig" but long ago I adopted that pronunciation as a little comedic filigree and it never fails to get noticed and laughed at. (Accent on the laughed AT.) And what the hell? -- born in Japan but mostly raised southern gothic and I say stuff like "body" and "about" like I'm Donald Sutherland or something! Uh-boat?!? Like I say -- what the hell? (Hey, you know who else says "aig"? Sally Field! And she's a California girl, isn't she? What's a left coaster doing saying "aig", anyway?)
The "ee-yore" for "your", or in these parts, "yer", reminds me of Jackie Gleason on the old Honeymooners show. When Alice would get up in Ralph's face and give him hell about something, he would listen with eyes out on stalks and then blast out something like "And ee-YOU are goin' ta be takin' a trip to da MOON, Alice!!" Or if Ed Norton didn't understand something that Ralph thought HE did, he'd say, "Norton, that's because ee-YOU are a moron!!" Okay, enough ancient TV history... I guess it's for possible (comedic?) emphasis? Maybe it's a form of pseudo-sarcasm, which is a real confusing concept, I must admit, but maybe there's some kind of ironic crypto-hipster thing going on... I don't know.
Posted by: Flautist | Jul 18, 2009 8:27:27 PM
