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.

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

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

Yeah that was the one I meant I messed up oops.

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.

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

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"?

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.)

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?)

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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