It's all in the stress
BBC America keeps advertising this program: Footballers' Wives Over Time - which I keep thinking must be one of those documentaries where they keep going back and filming the same people every year.
But then I look at the screen and it's really Footballers' Wives: Overtime.
Who is this announcer (he sounds American) who hasn't mastered the regressive shift in stess that happens in compounds? overtime, not over time. You know, like the White House, not some white house. Over isn't a nice little unstressed preposition here.
Overtime, fella. Overtime.
Labels: language
1 Comments:
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At 12:54 PM, March 17, 2007
Barry Leiba had this to say...
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<-- Older Post ^ Home Newer Post -->1. The monorail at SFO has a recorded announcement that comes on every time the doors are about to close and the train is about to move. The recording used to say, among other things, "Please set baggage-cart brake TWO, ON." (Stress on the two capitalized words.) Hm, I used to think, it seems odd that the carts would have two brakes, and that you'd specifically have to use brake two in this situation.
They've fixed the announcement. The last time I went through SFO it said, "Please set baggage-cart brake to 'ON'." Ah! Now I get it.
2. When I moved up to the NY/CT area, I had to get used to the idiomatic way they pronounce the names of three towns and a city in south-central Connecticut:
NORTH Haven
EAST Haven
WEST Haven
New HAVEN
The last seems almost a shibboleth: anyone who says "NEW Haven" is known to be an outsider. (And there's no South Haven; that'd be in the middle of Long Island Sound.)
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