For all you Jamie Oliver lovers...

Posted by: andy

For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 07:46

Looks like someone at Boots doesn't like Mr Oliver...

http://www.boots.com/shop/product_details.jsp?productid=1037997

(look carefully at the image)
Posted by: JBjorgen

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 07:52

*chuckles*
Posted by: robricc

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 07:55

That is pretty funny!

We get this dude in the US on The Food Network.
Posted by: boxer

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 08:18

Have Boots spotted what you spotted and changed it, or are my office and I remarkably unobservant?
Posted by: peter

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 08:21

Have Boots spotted what you spotted and changed it, or are my office and I remarkably unobservant?
LOL, they've changed it; it was reasonably unmissable when it was there...

Peter
Posted by: tonyc

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 08:21

Oh, wow, they actually did change it! That's remarkably quick.

I'm not really sure how to describe it. He had, shall we say, some poorly placed items in front of him that would have made it into Maxim Magazine's "Found Porn" section.
Posted by: msaeger

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 08:25

Are you guys talking about this picture ?

Posted by: andy

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 08:31

No, this one:

Posted by: boxer

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 08:37

Oh, wow, they actually did change it! That's remarkably quick
Maybe, Boots are checking the BBS to see whether they can get the Karma in, ridiculously overpriced, for Christmas?

Just a small conspiracy theory!
Posted by: boxer

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 08:58

We get this dude in the US
But do Americans understand cheeky cockney chappies, or for that matter what has come to be called "Estuary English"

Personally, I think he has the most irritating use of an English accent since Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins and I don't believe it's his given tongue.
Posted by: Anonymous

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 09:01

Damn, that is hilarious. and he's got a green J up his ass.
Posted by: robricc

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 09:09

I generally think he's a dork. His accent doesn't strike me as odd though.
Posted by: wfaulk

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 09:17

But do Americans understand cheeky cockney chappies, or for that matter what has come to be called "Estuary English"
I recognized the accent, even if I didn't have a name for it, but is there something specific about ``cheeky cockney chappies'' that you're referring to, or just a general notion of what they're like?
I think he has the most irritating use of an English accent since Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins and I don't believe it's his given tongue.
How is more irritating than anyone else using it? Is it because you believe it's an affected accent (rather than English not being his native language, which is what I would take your opinion to be from the latter part of that sentence)?
Posted by: boxer

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 09:35

The CCC was a feature of every British war film, and many others, probably from the war years until the end of the 50's.

English is his given tongue, but I don't believe that this particular accent is the tongue that he was given!

For the record, the way that I speak English is described as "received English", much as the way in which the BBC use it, in that it has no regional bias.
Posted by: wfaulk

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 09:44

I'm starting to get the impression that English accents are chosen, not acquired. Is there any element of truth in that?
Posted by: peter

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 09:51

I'm starting to get the impression that English accents are chosen, not acquired. Is there any element of truth in that?
Some people choose to change their accent; if one does, one has to be very careful not to slip out of character or one looks like an idiot (if affecting a more upmarket accent, cf My Fair Lady) or a pretentious twit (if affecting a more downmarket accent, cf Jamie Oliver). In the particular case of upper-class twits affecting Cockney accents in order to appear "more in touch with the people" on television, there's a special word for it: Mockney.

Peter (never had much of a Potteries accent, but regret losing what of it I had)
Posted by: boxer

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 09:59

Very much so, In truth, Scottish, Irish and Welsh ones too, if it serves a purpose.
A Jamie Oliver type accent with the addition of an antipodean tendency to turn every sentence into a question by raising half an octave at the end is an increasingly common and irritating part of English, here.

I'm not the only one, we've just had a programme called " grumpy Old Men" screened here, in which they picked upon just this.

Don't wish to sound a snob, but I speak in precisely the way that I was taught at school, and pre-school from my parents.

P.S. Listen to before and after interviews with Nigel Kennedy, the violinist - it'll give you the idea
Posted by: Anonymous

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 10:12

Why don't you brits just talk normal.

Actually, I'm currently trying to make the transition to a Mississippi accent so i can present myself as a higher class citizen.
Posted by: wfaulk

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 10:18

I speak in precisely the way that I was taught at school
By which I assume you mean that schools actively teach non-accented pronunciation. That is a concept so out of the scope of US schools that it's hard to fathom.

I've lived in a city all my life, which means that most of the people I grew up with didn't have a very rural accent. Since working for the state, which, for whatever reason, seems to employ a lot of folks from the sticks, I amazed at the bright people who sound like they've jumped out of the pages of Lil' Abner.

I guess the point is that my reasonable lack of accent is almost solely due to non-school influence -- environment, a lot of TV, etc.
Posted by: tonyc

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 10:27

Actually, I'm currently trying to make the transition to a Mississippi accent so i can present myself as a higher class citizen.
Haha. I find it funny that a Mississippi accent is an upgrade from a Louisiana accent. Is there some kind of "accent roadmap" you can show us to illustrate what your next step will be? Geographically it looks like you'd move on to an Alabama accent, but I actually consider Alabama more redneckish than Mississippi or Louisiana. Then again, I've never lived in either, and am just judging based on people I've met from those places (including relatives who were married into the family.)
Posted by: peter

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 10:33

Haha. I find it funny that a Mississippi accent is an upgrade from a Louisiana accent.
I don't really know what a rural Louisiana accent sounds like, but surely a N'awlins accent is one of the US's very few distinctive local accents, and is something to cherish? Where in Louisiana do you come from, Yz33d?

Peter
Posted by: g_attrill

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 10:34

I speak in precisely the way that I was taught at school

By which I assume you mean that schools actively teach non-accented pronunciation. That is a concept so out of the scope of US schools that it's hard to fathom.


It has been a while since pronunciation was taught at British schools, and only the top schools really do this sort of thing, and even then it is probably not taught as much as learnt by those who don't already speak that way.

My oldest aunt and uncle went to a private school and ended up speaking RP (and pronouncing off like "owf") and mum and youngest uncle went to a state school and ended up talking "normally"!

They realley shood teech proper speeling at british skools these days...

Gareth
Posted by: peter

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 10:41

For the record, the way that I speak English is described as "received English", much as the way in which the BBC use it, in that it has no regional bias.

[...]

Don't wish to sound a snob, but I speak in precisely the way that I was taught at school, and pre-school from my parents.
In Yorkshire? Or did you live in the Home Counties at that time? Was it a state school?

Peter (and his mixed-race parentage: dad comes from Yorkshire, mum comes from Surrey)
Posted by: tonyc

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 10:45

US's very few distinctive local accents
You're joking, yes? Maybe you've spent too much time on our West Coast, where nobody has a distinctive accent because they're all transplants. But in the Eastern and Central time zones, you'll find a plethora of distinctive accents (though one might argue some aren't worth preserving, like the Boston accent, which should be constitutionally outlawed.)

Come to think of it, the Boston accent is probably the Cockney accent of the United States.
Posted by: DWallach

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 11:39

Come to think of it, the Boston accent is probably the Cockney accent of the United States.

I'd have to say the Brooklyn accent ("you godda problem wit dat?") is far more spiritually in tune with an English cockey accent then the standard Boston middle-class "pahk the cah in Hahvahd yahd" accent. (My father is from Brooklyn and my mother is from Boston. I grew up hearing both accents regularly.) There's a completely separate upscale Boston accent, famously spoken by JFK and there's also the "southie" Boston accent as heard from Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in "Good Will Hunting". Southies are in another world.

Probably my favorite of regional American accents has to be the Minnesota "ya sure, you betcha" Scandinavian-derived accent as heard in "Fargo". That's just absolutely addictive to speak, although I have to admire the Cajun dialect as well. I say "dialect" because they toss in French words more often than Jews from New York mix Yiddish into their regular speech. There's a Cajun DJ who plays Zydeco here early on Saturday mornings, and I can barely understand a word he says.
Posted by: genixia

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 11:48

though one might argue some aren't worth preserving, like the Boston accent, which should be constitutionally outlawed
Amen to that. I'm tempted to move in the next few years just so that my sone doesn't end up with it.
Posted by: Anonymous

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 11:49

I live in Lafayette, which is about 2 hours west of New Orleans.

Believe it or not, I can sometimes hear a Baton Rouge accent and even a Broussard (small town by lafayette) accent. The differences between these are much more subtle than a N'awlins, NYC, or Boston accent, but they are still unique in their own way.

I think people just tend to talk like the people they have always been around, and in places where the same families have lived for generations it develops it's own characteristics and becomes known as an accent. In California, where everyone is a clone of a celebrity, everybody speaks plainly because it's a mixture of many different cultures - it seems like most people move to California, instead of having been born and raised in California along with their ancestors. Now that I think of it, I believe the definition of a cracker is someone who has no accent at all.
Posted by: boxer

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 11:57

By which I assume you mean that schools actively teach non-accented pronunciation
From 4 to 11, when I went to boarding school until I was 18, how you pronounced English was, as important to the curriculum as how you wrote it.
If you arrived at boarding school with a trace of a regional accent, your parents were advised to send you for elocution lessons - I felt really sorry for all those guys from Kenya and Rhodesia etc. who had to go to classes when they could usefully be smoking in a hedgrow!
Mrs.Boxer and the Boxette still go into apoplexies when I say: "Have you got a tahl, I want to take a shah"
Yes, I am a man of Kent, Peter, who has lived in Yorkshire since '72, regrettably, you are as likely to hear estuary English in Leeds or Harrogate, as in the SE, these days.
Posted by: boxer

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 12:05

Have I been putting back too much pop, or has the picture on the Boots site returned to the original "porn" one?
Posted by: wfaulk

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 12:08

I say "dialect" because they toss in French words more often than Jews from New York mix Yiddish into their regular speech.
Technically, that would be a creole.

Peter's right, though, that most US accents are simple accents with simple vowel changes and minor consonant clippings. Very few places have accents as outstanding as those found across Britain because only a few places in the US are not a melting pot of other people from the US. New Orleans is a good one because it's easy to pinpoint to New Orleans. The ones in Boston and New York are hard to nail down because there are so many different ones all competing and they get jumbled up as the people in those cities get jumbled up.

But there are other outstanding ones. The outer banks of North Carolina and Virginia have a few folks who might as well be speaking another language. It's much closer to Elizabethan English than, well, anything. It's bizarre. You've got the ``eh''-people of southeastern Canada. You've got the northern New England accent, which is close to some of the Boston ones, but different. You've got the upper-crust Georgia accent (think white-suited planation owners and Foghorn Leghorn). You've got Smoky Mountain dwellers -- old mountain folk. But I'd say there few distinctive accents west of the Mississippi (with the notable exception of the already-mentioned Minnesota accent), except for fairly new things, like the second- and third-generation Latinos who have a thick Latino accent but speak no Spanish.

I guess there are more than I thought. But I guess foreigners aren't really exposed to those. Little reason for a tourist trip to the Deep South.
Posted by: wfaulk

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 12:13

I can sometimes hear a Baton Rouge accent and even a Broussard (small town by lafayette) accent.
Absolutely. Well, I have no idea about Louisiana, but I can certainly tell apart a number of different central NC accents. Of course, it helps that I'm in a city in the middle of often very rural areas and each direction seems to have a different sound. It's amazing that I can drive twenty miles and feel like the accent is totally different. Of course, with my current job, they come to me, so that's even weirder.
Posted by: peter

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 12:27

But there are other outstanding ones.
Fair enough -- I guess I've just never met, nor seen on TV, enough people from these rural accent pockets to have noticed them. Perhaps I'll amend my opinion to say that N'awlins is one of the US's very few distinctive urban accents.

And yeah, I think it's true the world over that people can distinguish much finer gradations of accent in their immediate locality than in other parts of the world. I knew southerners at university who claimed not to be able to tell the difference between Liverpool accents (think Yellow Submarine) and Manchester accents (think chief baddie in Gone In 60 Seconds), although to me they're as different as French and Australian accents.

Peter
Posted by: Anonymous

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 12:49

Well, all I know is the accents on all those hot european babes in the new Joe Millionaire turn me the fuck on!
Posted by: msaeger

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 12:52

Yeah that was the one I meant I messed up oops.
Posted by: Mach

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 13:37

Technically, that would be a creole.
Please explain. I've got a Creole friend who would most definately disagree. I thought cajuns were from the french acadians? Cajun dialect is unlike anything that I've ever heard. I worked in Iberia and St. Mary's Parish for awhile and it hurts your head trying to keep up with what they are saying.

New Orleans has several different accents that I remember. The most notable was folks from Chalmette, who have almost a Boston accent. Add Uptown with the Leghorn speak and Metarie with the mix of a little of everthing.

Pittsburgh has a distictive nasal quality to the accent (and the word yunz for you guys).

West of the Missippi, you've got several different "drawls" in Texas each marked by a different cadence. Southern Illinois has one that is somewhere between Texas and a country drawl.

I'd have to say that Western North Carolina has the most bizarre (next to cajun) that I've ever heard. A fast nasal whine that's almost impossible to understand.
Posted by: g_attrill

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 13:49

Have I been putting back too much pop, or has the picture on the Boots site returned to the original "porn" one?

Nope, still the modified one here.

It has clearly been cropped of at the bottom and stretched to fit the old size. I suspect it was an ex-employee on their last day and some other poor soul was yelled to replace crop it ASAP.

Gareth
Posted by: JeffS

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 13:51

Since we're on the topic of accents, I was born in Boston (actually near Boston to be exact) and started out there for a few years. However, I mostly grew up in Houston, TX, and so my early formative accent eventually got weeded out. I still remember getting made fun of because I couldn't say "cool" correctly! Anyway, now I don't think of myself as having a Texas accent. This notion was destroyed when I went to Hawaii on my honeymoon and people would ask, "So, where in Texas are you from?" before I even mentioned where I lived. When I hear myself speak on tapes and whatnot I still don't think I have an accent; perhaps it's just my use of the word "ya'll"?
Posted by: wfaulk

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 14:27

I've got a Creole friend who would most definately disagree.
There's a difference between a Creole and a creole:

Your Creole friend is probably a ``a person of mixed French or Spanish and black descent speaking a dialect of French or Spanish'' or possibly a ``white person descended from early French or Spanish settlers of the U.S. Gulf states and preserving their speech and culture''. The creole I'm talking about is a ``language that has evolved from a pidgin but serves as the native language of a speech community'' (where a pidgin is ``simplified speech used for communication between people with different languages'', usually referring to a melange of the languages involved).

The generic language term derived from the specific language, which derived from the name of the people, but it's a valid term nonetheless.

(Definitions from Merriam Webster Online.)
Posted by: wfaulk

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 14:30

It's probably just a much slighter one than the thick drawls you're surrounded by, so it sounds nonexistant to you. On the other hand, there's the old story that all non-Southerners think all Southerners sound like they're from Texas. Or maybe that's all of the South they know. Be scared if someone can recognize your Boston accent underneath it all. (Ever see the episode of NewsRadio about Lisa's Boston accent?)
Posted by: Mach

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 15:24

Hmm, so under that definition would Quebec-Francais be considered a pidgin language? Or I guess a better way to ask it would be, at what point does a dialect so depart from it's origins that it becomes pidgin?
Posted by: wfaulk

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 15:43

A pidgin is a combined language. I don't think that the random importation of some words really qualifies; that's just evolution. Only circumstances where both languages get more-or-less equal time count. Yiddish is another good one (German+Hebrew) that became a creole.
Posted by: pca

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 17:11

The Quebequi variant of french is not really recognised by a genuine Frenchman as french, at least according to the ones I know who have been to Canada. Mind you, at least one of them was a Parisian, who spoke something that even his fellow countrymen would claim bore little resembalance to french

Even to a non-french-speaking barbarian such as myself, the difference between french as she is spoke in Quebec and that from France is so distinct as to be immediately obvious. I've been told on good authority it's not so much a pidgin dialect, but more as if someone had started with a three-hundred year old protofrench and taken it in a different direction than the people in Europe did, which when you think about it is more or less what happened.

The Quebec natives, of course, consider themselves to be speaking perfect French, and tend to get insulted if you claim otherwise.

pca
Posted by: DWallach

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/10/2003 22:39

I don't know much about Quebequoi vs. "proper" French, but I really enjoy their dirty words. In "proper" French, all the dirty words are just like in English -- references to scatalogical or sexual items. In Quebequoi however, they're all references to aspects of the Catholic Church. "Host!" seems to have roughly the same common usage as "shit!". That, alone, made Montreal a fun place to visit.
Posted by: julf

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 30/10/2003 08:04

A pidgin is a combined language. I don't think that the random importation of some words really qualifies; that's just evolution
Precisely. A language that borows from another language is either a dialect or a development. A pidgin is really a "least common denominator" minimalistic language formed by people who come together without a common language.

Most pidgin languages have a number of common features and structures, leading linguists to stipulate some sort of common genetic proto-language templates.
Posted by: boxer

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 24/11/2003 06:37

Looks like someone at Boots doesn't like Mr Oliver...

Forgive me for returning to this subject, but I've only just noticed that the Jamie Oliver picture, in the obscene version, is in Boots printed Christmas catalogue, as well as on the net version, there must be millions of copies at stores nationwide, as well as mailings.
Posted by: andy

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 24/11/2003 06:50

Apparently the "obscene" version isn't doctored at all. That is just the way it looks when shrunk down to a thumbnail.
Posted by: boxer

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 28/11/2003 15:53

It's just been on "Have I Got News For You" looked pretty obscene to me!
Posted by: CrackersMcCheese

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 29/11/2003 06:35

Like Andy says this is the correct image, but the angle and rendering made it look far worse!

Posted by: boxer

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 01/12/2003 10:00

Boots' spokesperson is claiming: "It's a loaf of bread that has been altered due to the compression of the image", according to my advertising industry magazine. But closer examination would show that its the paperbag from which he has taken the fruit that he is peeling, to the extent that should you look very closely, you can see a printed image on the side of the bag.
Funny that Boots didn't know that and went to all the trouble of cropping the image, or in other words, accepting guilt where no guilt was extant!
The question that strikes me is, did this whole set of circumstances, ending with it being in the trade press and on national TV, start with Andy's observation on this site?
Posted by: frog51

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 01/12/2003 10:24

Mmmmm - cause and effect. Well, you know what they say about butterflies...Andy's bigger than a butterfly so who knows the devastation he could cause by flapping his wings. Oooh, no wings huh? Erm...okay
Posted by: andy

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 01/12/2003 11:21

I can't claim responsibility I'm afraid, my brother alerted me to the image. I don't know who told him.
Posted by: g_attrill

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 01/12/2003 13:29

I'm surprised they didn't explain what it was on HIGNFY - it was actually the first time I've seen it (ahem) enlarged and even on TV it looked pretty sus. In the full res version it's obvious it's a paper bag but I reckon even seeing it on the shelf from a distance you would do a double take!

I'll have to search it out next time I'm in town and have a chortle.

edit - some interesting linkage:

http://www.manchesteronline.co.uk/news/stories/Detail_LinkStory=73550.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,630-909726,00.html

Gareth
Posted by: boxer

Re: For all you Jamie Oliver lovers... - 02/12/2003 04:26

Amazing how the constabulary have the resources to turn out and look at Jamie Oliver calendars, but not when your house gets broken into!