My Fair Lady "Why Can't the English Learn to Speak"
Why Hacker News recommends it
Cited as the classic illustration of accent, class and prejudice in how people speak.
What it is
A scene from My Fair Lady in which Professor Higgins meets Colonel Pickering and Doolittle, singing about how the English fail to speak their own language properly. It has English subtitles.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2013 to 2016.
What Hacker News said
Cites gojomo · 2013-09 · on “English has been my pain for 15 years”
I suspect any investor or investor group with enough data points to offer such a judgement would have said something similar 30 years ago (1983), or 50 years ago (1963), or 100 years ago (1913). Long-distance communication and migration is becoming more common: native English speakers (especially in North America) are getting more chances to hear and become familiar with the speech of people who do not have English as their first language. (Without familiarity, it's easy to assume that flawed grammar and pronunciation means either flawed thinking or risky cultural differences.) So I'd surmise that the heavily-accented currently have their best opportunities ever to thrive in North American c
Cites Animats · 2016-04 · on “Classism in America”
From the article: "Most people are very ignorant of the norms and values of the social classes more than one degree above or below their own." Somewhere, there must be a "how to" guide for social class. There's a questionnaire, but other than some meaningless content on Quora, not much guidance.[1] Where there is guidance, it's about language usage.[2] The classic on this being, of course, "My Fair Lady"[1]. This is less of an issue since TV and movies imposed a standard linguistic dialect. The author likes Paul Fussell's "Class", which is an excellent read. It's quite funny. Social class is less social than it used to be, and more marketed. As a horse owner, I've seen this change since the