Re: Usage of "effing"?

Sabremeister Brian [bpwakeling@xxxxxxxxxxx] said:
In a speech called cwlNO-1A4131.14582413092007@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx,
Green-Eyed Chris (cwlNO@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) spake thusly:

In article <5ksntjF5bhg4U1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Sabremeister Brian" <bpwakeling@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In a speech called
cwlNO-7AE338.11233713092007@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx,
Green-Eyed Chris (cwlNO@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) spake thusly:

I would like to know just how common the word "effing" is on the
streets of the UK and the USA.

It really didn't catch my eye when Vernon first used it in OotP,
but
I
did notice it being used three times in DH. The question for me is
what age group uses it and whether, due to JKR's popularity, kids
might even find it more acceptable than the ~real~ word,
especially
if they heard more adults using it.

It's a bowdlerisation of "fucking", and is only really used by
people
in their mid-20s+ when they think that using the real word might
offend or unnecessarily shock someone (eg a parent, someone senior
to
them at work, someone known to have Views on strong language,
someone
who's a regular church-goer, etc).

Teenagers tend to stick with using "fucking"/"fuck", although there
is a noticeable group across all age ranges who will use the word
"fecking"/"feck" instead. Made acceptable as a substitute by the
sitcom Father Ted in the mid/late 90s, it is fairly homonymic to
the
word it was designed to replace, especially if spoken in a
stereotypical Irish accent, and heard by an RP accent.

RP? Certainly you do not refer to the dialect spoken in the state of
Rhineland-Palatinate to the south of my North Rhine-Westphalia
(NRW).


Received Pronunciation - aka Queen's English, the ideal form of spoken
English that TV and & producers, newspaper & book editors, assume
everyone else to base their listening experience/internal narrator on
and to have perfect understanding of, even if it does make actual
practitioners sound rather posh in 99% of the country. It is assumed
that, unless noted or demonstrated otherwise, everyone speaks RP -
hence Harry, Hermione, the Malfoys, Dumbledore and virtually all
Ministry staff speak in RP, whereas the Weasleys may speak in a mild
West Country, Snape may be North Welsh-Cheshire-Mancunian,
MacGonnagall is almost certainly Lowland Scots, and so on. The
newsreader Trevor MacDonald has an almost perfect RP accent.

Are you British? As that is a rather old-fashioned point of view if I
maybe so bold.

The characters you name simply speak in the accent related to their
point of origin, and as Harry et all hail from the Home Counties they
therefore, quite reasonably, speak with the local accent. And that
accent ain't what the queen speaks - have a listen next Christmas Day.
:-)
.

Loading