09:35 – Barbara and I have started watching Heartland on Netflix streaming. Netflix streaming has only the first two seasons, totaling 31 episodes, but seasons three and four are available on DVD, with season five currently running. I’m not sure if Netflix has those DVDs, but once we near the end of the available episodes I’ll probably add DVDs to our Netflix account. There are several other DVD-only series with new seasons available, so we’ll get DVDs for a few months until we’re caught up with those and then change back to streaming only.
I’m not sure what it is about Canada, but it certainly produces more than its share of really fine young actresses. There is Emily VanCamp, of course, whom I adore, and now Amber Marshall, the lead character in Heartland.
When we started watching Heartland, we knew nothing about it other than the Netflix description. We watch a lot of Canadian series, and this is the first one we’ve watched that didn’t scream “Canadian”. I’m not sure what it is, but I can usually identify a series as Canadian within the first minute or two. It’s not the accent. Maybe something to do with production values. For the first few minutes of the first episode of Heartland, I didn’t really think about it, but if I had I would have just assumed it was a US series. Yes, most of the characters pronounced “ou” as the Canadian “oo” rather than the US “ow”, but that pronunciation is not unique to Canada. Many US residents in the upper plains states sound more Canadian than American in that respect. When one of the characters said something about over the border “in Montana”, that narrowed things down a bit. We knew the series was set in North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, or Idaho. Or perhaps Saskatchewan, Alberta, or British Columbia. Alberta, as it turns out.
Bob wrote: “I’m not sure what it is about Canada, but it certainly produces more than its share of really fine young actresses. ”
It’s the socialized health care! 😀
Maybe it’s the beer. Er, no, wait. We already had that discussion.
Don’t worry, most of us are approaching the age where we’ll have that discussion again.
And again.
And again…
Our Canadian and Australian are kind enough to not export the films with the ugly actresses.
Amber Marshall is an attractive young woman, but I don’t think anyone would be likely to call her drop-dead gorgeous. She is, however, adorable, in the same way that Emily VanCamp and Taylor Momsen are.
Like Emily VanCamp, Amber seems to be well-grounded and not at all full of herself. When Emily got her first big role, in Everwood, she celebrated by going out and buying a nice SLR to pursue her photography hobby. Before Amber was the lead actress in Heartland, she was a vet tech. When Amber finished shooting the first season of Heartland, she spent the break before shooting the second season began by returning home and working at her old vet tech job. I suspect both of these young women have their heads screwed on tightly.
The Canadian accent grates on me after a while, a little goes a long way. It’s the way they utter declaratory sentences with a higher-pitched question note at the end, even more irritating than the “eh?” Our daughter has been living, working and studying at McGill in Montreal for about eight months now, and I am going to tell her next week when I see her again to just speak only French around me from now on. She started doing that accent thing and it is *every* sentence now. At least I can finally learn French. And once she learns German, which will take about a week or so with her, we can switch to that. (I heard the German language was better done than any of the others.)
RBT wrote:
“When one of the characters said something about over the border “in Montana”, that narrowed things down a bit.”
I’ve always said mon-tan-ar where the ‘a’ in tan is short but when I’ve heard North Americans pronounce it it seems closer to mon-taa-nar. So is the the first ‘a’ supposed to be short or long?
I like German and its quirks. Of course, English was first a Germanic language, so we should be more allied than separate. Modifiers generally come before a noun in both languages, unlike Spanish, French, and Italian. The seriously insane part of German is holding onto gender for all objects — and in German, gender is used to preserve case, and not to point to any biological reality. And more than any other language that respects gender, German largely ignores biology in assigning sex.
The other part of German that is odd, is word order. But the fact that the verb in all subordinate clauses comes at the end of the clause, makes for some fun times with the language. You can drive Germans batty by just withholding that last word in the clause or sentence for a long time, and they will start using their hands with gestures to get you give them that last word, on which the whole meaning of the sentence often …
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relies.
Miles_Teg says:
I’ve always said mon-tan-ar where the ‘a’ in tan is short but when I’ve heard North Americans pronounce it it seems closer to mon-taa-nar.
That’s OFD and his Bostonian cousins.
So is the the first ‘a’ supposed to be short or long?
That short American “a” as in “man”, “tan”, “ban”, “can”, “ran”. Last “a” is “uh”. Mon is like the Carribean, “Hey, man [mahn]”. Mahn-TAN-uh.
I can tolerate a very wide variety of accents. But what really bugs me, is the infiltration of the North with that southern twang. There was a place I had to call regularly in Pennsylvania a decade or so back, and the woman who answered the phone was clearly not a Keystone native. The Midwest from Iowa through to eastern PA is supposed to be the home of unaccented American English. But while I was away for 30 years, it was infiltrated with that lazy southern pronunciation and its associated lazy grammar. What is with “have ran”, and using “was” for the subjunctive “were”?
And starting the answer to questions with “So….”?
Git outta here with y’alls shabby English.
Chuck wrote:
“The seriously insane part of German is holding onto gender for all objects — and in German, gender is used to preserve case, and not to point to any biological reality. And more than any other language that respects gender, German largely ignores biology in assigning sex.”
The thing that amuses me about German is the gigantic nouns, like the one that translates into English as “widow of a captain of the Danube Steamship Company.”
German isn’t the only language that does strange things with the gender of nouns. The French word for bra is la soutien-gorge, which is masculine.
Would be nice if there was an edit function. What I meant was:
French word for bra is le soutien-gorge, which is masculine.
RBT wrote:
“Amber Marshall is an attractive young woman, but I don’t think anyone would be likely to call her drop-dead gorgeous. She is, however, adorable, in the same way that Emily VanCamp and Taylor Momsen are.”
Okay, we used only to need to know the words “beautiful”, “pretty”, “attractive”. Now we need to know what “drop-dead gorgeous” and “adorable” means. A few weeks ago you discussed what the first three words meant, and said that a woman can be zero, one, two or all three. Would you care to name a few woman in each of those categories?
Taylor Momsen is cute (there’s another word) despite, or perhaps because of the raccoon eyes.
All hail Mittens: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-04-11/santorum-ends-us-presidential-campaign/3942428
“I’ve always said mon-tan-ar where the ‘a’ in tan is short but when I’ve heard North Americans pronounce it it seems closer to mon-taa-nar. So is the the first ‘a’ supposed to be short or long?”
I’ve never heard it pronounced other than mawn-tan’-uh, with the first syllable rhyming with lawn and the second with ran.
Upstate New York: “mahn-tan’-uh” with the first syllable rhyming with “on”.
As for the US Presidential
racedrunken stagger, I think that despite Obamao’s ceaseless attempts to prevent his winning a second term, the Establishment Republicans are working even more tirelessly to make sure Obamarx gets a second term. Add in MSM bias (admittedly much less effective than it was in decades past) and the twin observations that if an election is close enough to steal it will be stolen and that election fraud always favors the Establishment Democrat. I’m pretty sure we’re looking at another four years of the fool.“Adorable” has little, if anything, to do with physical appearance, although cuteness may be a factor. I think Wiktionary has a pretty good working definition, “1. Befitting of being adored, cute and/or loveable”. (Albeit, ironically, with a misspelled word…) Adorable is more a personality characteristic than a physical one.
As to drop-dead gorgeous, that’s best measured by externalities. In the presence of a drop-dead gorgeous woman, heterosexual men forget about everything else and just look at her. Without realizing what they’re doing, they run into doors, walk into swimming pools, and wander into traffic.
Hey, I don’t know if the women in the following story was drop dead gorgeous, but I think she was at least quite attractive, with a good figure. A work colleague once told me about a woman in a short miniskirt who dropped something in central Canberra and had to bend over to pick it up. Apparently old guys were having heart attacks and young guys were walking into rubbish bins and light poles due to this. I would have loved to seen this incident.
Yup, as OFD predicted a couple of years ago, Bishop Mittens is, in fact, The Annointed One, a bag job all along, and the other clowns from that tiny circus car were just sideshows. But so long as the Prophet’s administration continues to churn phony job and economy numbers and manages to stay out of any more Sandbox wars, he will be in like Flynn, as they used to say. This is also assuming the media continues to kneel and genuflect at his altar.
Whichever one, Ave, Caesar Imperatore!
Robert Bruce Thompson says:
I’ve never heard it pronounced other than mawn-tan’-uh, with the first syllable rhyming with lawn and the second with ran.
The New England pronunciation. Same as with the guy’s name Don, which people out East pronounce the same as the girl’s name “Dawn”. Us Midwesterners say D-ah-n. And M-ah-n-TAN-uh, not Lawn-TAN-uh.
OFD wants to know how it is that we went from making fun of the Canadian accent to making fun of MINE.
All you really have to remember is that we remove the letter “r” from lots of words and then re-insert it in other words.
Barn is bahn.
But idea is i-deer.
See. Easy.
“Same as with the guy’s name Don, which people out East pronounce the same as the girl’s name “Dawn”.”
Actually, what you’re referring to is the Short British O, with which the man’s name Don and dawn are homophones. That’s not East Coast, but limited to an area of about 60 miles surrounding Pittsburgh, PA. I was born and grew up about 50 miles north of Pittsburgh, and I still pronounce those two words with the same vowel sound. Elsewhere on the East Coast, the two are readily distinguishable.
Ah, but have you managed to add “to be” to your vocabulary?
The incorrect, Pittsburgh-area linguistic atrocity: The table needs washed.
The correct phrasing, used by people whose family trees don’t loop back in on themselves (nothing personal, of course): The table needs to be washed.
I’m multi-lingual, so I understand all three forms: “This table needs to be washed” is grammatically correct, but verbose. “This table needs washed” is grammatically correct and elegant (in the original sense of the word). “This table needs washing” is grammatically correct, but ugly.
I also understand (and can speak if forced to do so) the substitution of “J” for “Did you” and “Y”, as in “Jeet jet?” for “Did you eat yet?”
Hmmm. I’ve just been looking at the Pittsburghese entry on Wikipedia, which has a number of errors, particularly in terms of geographic distribution. New Castle, where I grew up, is about 50 miles north of Pittsburgh, in northwestern PA. Yet many of the usages the Wikipedia article lists as limited to southwest PA are (or were) common when I was growing up.
Many of them are correct, however. For example, the article lists “gum band” (rubber band) as southwestern PA, which is correct. I grew up calling it a rubber band, although I understood what someone meant on the rare occasions when I heard “gum band”.