I choose to believe that they were planning on publishing "Why are white slave-owners always gotta be the bad guys?!" in the issue with the "Why we gotta criminalize businesses, guys?!" cover.
One can only wonder what on earth that guy was thinking.
Either of them, really, come to think.
"I'm tired of white men always being portrayed as villains. Probably most of those men thought they were leading good, honest lives and doing right by their families, just like I try to do."
[Gazes ashamedly at the Economist subscriber in the mirror.]
Does anyone know who the reviewer actually was of that Economist review? Economist authors are usually an open secret, but I haven't seen a reveal.
I mean the author of the Economist review, of course.
The Economist is such a "how to be an asshole while feigning knowledge" manual. We do judge you, Flip. Why did someone think you needed that?
Economist authors are usually an open secret
This is true of their regular columnists, but this could well have been a one-off. It was so clearly written in about five minutes according to the brief summary-compliments-disagreement formula that it's just barely, barely possible that the guy didn't mean a word of it and doesn't deserve to be outed. I mean, I don't really believe that, but maybe they won't out him.
Gawker has a much better description of the Economist.
The Economist is an intentionally fusty British news-aggregation magazine for people who pretend their Economy Plus airline seat is a wing chair by the roaring fire in a manor house.
I actually like "the how to be an asshole while feigning knowledge manual" better as a one line description of the Economist. There, I said it. You are better than Gawker, Ogged. Breathe it in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KJSnd8VzQw
12: And that's why, in general, I like the economist. Not enough to pay for it, though.
I sympathize more with the teddy bear dude as I'm much more likely to take criticism too personally and with no sense of proportion than decide to defend slave owners as unfairly vilified.
I still get it because it's different, at least, than my usual sources. I started reading it when I took a once-an-hour bus to work in the suburbs, and when I missed the bus, it was the only thing at the newsstand that had a chance of keeping me busy until the next bus came.
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The British accent widely used for High Heroic Fantasy in the movies (Thor, etc); is that a particular accent? A regional one? Learned in first year drama school? Echo of the Christmas panto?
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Although I am familiar with the dialects of the common people I seldom frequent the talkies, so I can't be of assistance here.
20: It's mostly a stage accent approximating RP, isn't it? (Except dwarves are Scottish. Dwarves are always Scottish.) This doesn't hold for Game of Thrones which tries, badly and inconsistently, to have different regions of Westeros represented by different regional British accents.
When I read that Economist review I confess I found myself idly wondering if McMegan had written it.
I think of it as the Shakespeare accent. Not 100% sure if that's accurate.
The actual Shakespeare accent would have been Midlands. Which isn't remotely the RP-type accent people use in movies.
Oh, you mean the "hither, varlet, and present your scabby buttocks for my attention" voice?
I tell my critical thinking students that The Economist is a great source for tidy, easy to diagram arguments. In general, it is the place to go if you want to see a widely-read publication where everyone writes in the style your college professors want you to write in.
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Everybody wake up and amuse me. My 2yo has decided to get his revenge by (1) taking off his diaper all by himself after lights-out (2) pissing the bed (3) giving me the jimmy leg all night in our dry bed and (4) sitting up at 6am and declaiming on his plans for the day, while his breast-feeding mother grumbled into her pillow. Kill me now.
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28: Sounds very miserable indeed. Have you read the comments in the second linked article? Highly entertaining if completely insane. I admit it irks me that the viral nature of his insanity might drive up sales of his book... but at least people will know what they're getting.
28: It's nap time for 2-year-olds, or at least that's what I just told Selah. She's also had a nap and a walk and watched Pee-Wee's Playhouse AND an episode of Batman, because we're pro-rotting brains when moms want to rest.
30: We're having an unprecedented pre-breakfast Winnie-the-Pooh DVD session, to be sure. The terrorists win.
From what I can tell from my Crystal, actual Early Modern English is pretty weird to the modern ear, not corresponding to much today at all - Irish English might be the closest.
Also, it would be only at most some Midlands it bears a resemblance to, no? I just browsed a few videos of people demonstrating their Midlands accent (two East, one West) and they were all non-rhotic.
I've got no idea what regional accent it maps to, but this is supposed to be Shakespeare in the original pronunciation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s
The link in 33 is pretty great.
For example, you learn that "hour" and "whore" rhymed in Shakespeare's English, and both sounded like a pirate's "Arrrr."
In fact, one takeaway from that video was that "talk like a pirate" is mysteriously the closest thing we have to the actual early modern accent.
I dunno if it's that mysterious. The "pirate" accent is a third hand imitation of an actor imitating an English West Country accent, right?
OT: Speaking of reviews, there is a new James Ellroy novel, which the NYTBR assigned to Dennis Lehane, who indulged, in the sole novel of his that I sampled, in so many goddamned clichés in the first forty pages that I resorted to the SkyMall catalogue. Nice work, legacy media.
25: Shakespeare himself would have had a Warwickshire accent, but presumably he'd have been aware that Henry VIII didn't speak the same way? The actors would for the most part have been Londoners.
The earlier you go, the more distinct regional accents should have been, yes?
Taking 36 as a model (Corrnish wrrrekers frrrom Yrrreka, arrrr), High Fantasy Accent is maybe descended from the first actors to convince Hollywood that they were high-falutin'. Pickfair? Traveling repertory? Professional elocutionists?
Speaking of British accents, DeLong posted this a while back.
I thought it was well done and was impressed that, as an non-brit, I could recognize all of the distinct accents that she was talking about (though chris y was less complementary in the comments -- it's possible that what worked for me would feel much to broad and like a oversimplification to somebody who was already familiar with the accents in question).
I remember Crystal suggesting at some point (in either the video or the book) that there was enough intermixing in London for a lot of accents to be current, and encouraged actors he was dialect-training to put something of their own region in their delivery.
I remember from college that Canterbury Tales was much easier to understand if you imagined all the characters speaking in a pirate accent.
Thar once were a povra wid'wa, yarrgh.