Carefree, wherever I may be

[wwidsith]

Work needed someone to cover the Champions League final in Munich, and so naturally, as a non-German-speaker who hates football, I was chosen for the job. It was a long, grinding day yesterday - up at half-five for a flight and working till about three o'clock this morning.

I have never been to Bavaria before, and my impression of it from driving

Comments

[herself_nyc]

Flemish Masters: WANT!!!!! Please write this up.

As for the rest of the post ( in which I at least, would say you'd buried the lead) - um, wow. None of that is new to me - I've read all about football supporters, I've even darted out of their way in the Tube a time or two - but it still stuns me every time I encounter it. SO GLAD nothing like that goes on here in New York. Though I can't think why not, really.

[wwidsith]

It was a brilliant gallery -- the highlight for me was seeing this sucker in all its full-size glory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_of_Alexander_at_Issus

[herself_nyc]

It must've been -- that's an unreproducible painting, really.

[ruakh]

> A drunk 40-year-old skinhead in a grey suit, with a gash across his extensive forehad, loomed out of the crowd, grabbed my camera and said something like "What the fuck's all this then, eh? The noos? The fuckin noos?"

Yeah, I don't hear a difference between "news" and "noos".

In Jude the Obscure, one of the characters calls out to Sue Bridehead:

> "Soo!" he said (this being the way in which he pronounced her name).

and I don't hear a difference there, either. So, I take it you're of Thomas Hardy's party?

[wwidsith]

Like most Brits, I say /njuz/ rather than /nuz/, although no one at all says /sju/ for Sue anymore. There are quite a few words which have lost their /j/ very recently though-- people like Brian Sewell, or my mother, still say syuitable, which sounds sooooo old-fashioned to me. It is also considered a bit posh to say tiss-ue instead of tish-ue.

Excuse laziness in IPA - iPad.

[ruakh]

Weird. I find initial /nj/ and /sj/ rather hard to say - even though initial /mj/ and /fj/ and /kj/ and /hj/ and /pj/ and so on are all very common. And while in the States I've occasionally heard /ɪs.ju/ or /ɪ.sju/ for "issue", I must say that "posh" is among the very last words I'd use to describe that.

So was this guy saying "noos" because he was drunk, or because he came from some red-blooded part of Britain that pronounces "news" as Americans do, or what?

(By the way, does it make me a bad person if I have some schadenfreude over this entry? Americans abroad being embarrassed by other Americans' behavior is old news; I'm pleased to learn we're not the only ones it happens to.)

[wwidsith]

The "noos" thing is less about regionality than class -- it just sounds kind of uneducated to me when I hear it in a London accent like that. But I think /sj/ is on its way out here too.

[weofodthignen]

Killing myself laughing despite the tragedy of that result.

M