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I love this kind of humor. Do biritish people really talk that polite IRL all the time? If someone would always talk like that I would seem very fake and off t

I love this kind of humor. Do biritish people really talk that polite IRL all the time? If someone would always talk like that I would seem very fake and off to me and make me very suspicious. The only times I expressed myself like that was in university application letters. I wish someone would do a Scottish or Australian version of PHP complete with swear words. I'd pay good money for that (I have my Alexa set to Aussie, totally worth it).

tmtvl 4y ago
Well, sometimes you get a bit of the classic "you wot mate? Keep your gob shut or we'll have a barney, innit." Depends on circumstances, really.
techterrier 4y ago
no.
dmitriid 4y ago
> Do biritish people really talk that polite IRL all the time? The other side of the same humor is re-writing everything with "oi, c*nt, over here, you c****sucker" Aaaand I think it's the same people :)
twixfel 4y ago
Some examples he used are never said. I would say something like "perchance" very rarely, and "Good morrow" never. "Would you mind", well I suppose we say this all the time.
- _the_inflator 4y ago
  However using "perchance" as "if" replacement is somewhat ingenious. Always be polite in your sourcecode. :D
jrumbut 4y ago
They talk normally but the way they walk is very silly indeed: https://youtu.be/eCLp7zodUiI https://youtu.be/eCLp7zodUiI
abracadabra_ 4y ago
No. We really don't. People who speak Received Pronunciation (RP) may speak more in this way (look up Jacob Rees-Mogg if you really want to see how stupid it sounds) but they are a small minority of the British people.
- canbus 4y ago
  we definitely don't speak politely about Jacob Rees-Mogg
  - Beltalowda 4y ago
    Hm? He's certainly the smartest and most skilled MP by far. A Victorian gentleman who invented a time-machine to travel 150 years in the future? Name one other MP who can match his genius.
- DrBazza 4y ago
  I’m curious why you think RP sounds stupid.
  - abracadabra_ 4y ago
    I was more saying that one particular example (JRM) sounds stupid. I don't think this is a contentious issue. However, RP can sound a bit silly with some pronunciations. The same is true with any accent.
    - abracadabra_ 4y ago
      P.S. I'm from Yorkshire so I'm used to accents being mocked.
    - DrBazza 4y ago
      How JRM speaks doesn’t bother me at all. Must be an age thing. What bothers me is the emergence over the last 10 or 15 years is the new London accent that was previously Thames Estaury in the 90s and before that an actual bona fide London accent that my grandparents had. The new accent is typified by -ah or -ar instead of -er. The police recruitment adverts being the best example. Become a police office-aah instead of police office-er.
foo42 4y ago
Nah, it's a caricature of a particular class of Brit, mostly from a particular period. We do have different turns of phrase, some of which are very local even within Britain, but they're not all posh and polite, if anything the greater differences are in our styles of irreverence
- paganel 4y ago
  > if anything the greater differences are in our styles of irreverence I'd say the self-deprecating humour is also a mainstay of the Brits, encompassing almost all social classes. Granted, I'm not a Brit, but a former boss of mine (I'd also call him a friend) was a Brit and he checked all the stereotypes related to that. Really great guy. They (the Brits) used to also be renowned for their black humour, at least around these parts of the European continent, but I feel that that is beginning to fade out (maybe it has become too culturally sensitive to joke about death? I wouldn't know)
  - sph 4y ago
    Relevant: Stephen Fry explains the difference between British and American humour: https://youtu.be/8k2AbqTBxao https://youtu.be/8k2AbqTBxao
chrisbaker98 4y ago
British people also talk like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5bqYlsXDdg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5bqYlsXDdg
- snodnipper 4y ago
  I would imagine those are a subset, where some would be referred to locally as "chavs" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chav https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chav Folks might note 'In the 2010 book Stab Proof Scarecrows by Lance Manley, it was surmised that "chav" was an abbreviation for "council housed and violent"'.
Gordonjcp 4y ago
> Do biritish people really talk that polite IRL all the time? No, no-one talks like that, and also "British people" don't really talk the same way even from one town to the next. There's not really any such thing as a "British accent". You know how different a New Englander talks from a Texan? That's how different someone from Glasgow sounds compared to someone from Edinburgh, or someone from Manchester compared to someone from Birmingham.
- happymellon 4y ago
  I would say the difference between West Country, Home Counties, North East and Glasgow is significantly higher than the difference between most US States. Although that's presumably because we have had thousands of years to develop dialects and the US didn't have very long until TV, radio, telephone started mashing dialects from regions together. I can tell the difference between New England and Florida but it isn't quite in the same league.
  - Lio 4y ago
    Accents in the UK aren't even consistent in the same place. My wife and I have different accents and grew up in the same medium large sized town.
    - chrisbaker98 4y ago
      Accents in the UK also have a strong class dimension. Middle class people often speak in a very different way to working class people from the same area.
  - chrisbaker98 4y ago
    The general pattern observed in linguistics is that accents/dialects/languages and language families have the greatest level of diversity in the area where they originated. E.g. Austronesian is a huge language family that covers an enormous geographic area including Hawaii, the Philippines, Indonesia and even as far as Madagascar, and it contains over 1,000 distinct languages divided into 9 subfamilies - and yet all but one of those subfamilies are found exclusively in Taiwan, where proto-Austronesian first emerged roughly 5000 years ago.
marginalia_nu 4y ago
Dunno if there is such a thing as "how British people talk". Something that's struck me about the country is how much the way you talk reflects where you are from and your station in life. Like not just which region, there's frequently dialects/sociolects for different parts of a city.
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  The smallest dialect areas I know of are next-town/next-city. I'd be interested if you could give an example (email me if you like, see my profile)?
  - chrisbaker98 4y ago
    There are said to be multiple variations of the Liverpool ("Scouse") accent: https://wikiless.org/wiki/Scouse?lang=en https://wikiless.org/wiki/Scouse?lang=en
mrtksn 4y ago
Brits will say that they don't but if you are coming form a more direct culture you definitely notice the added layer of politeness to everything. There are a lot of other native speakers in the UK, for example from Australia or the USA, and you can instantly tell if this person is from the UK or Australia and it's not only the accent that gives away. Maybe you've heard that the western attitude of smiling for no good reason is strange for Eastern Europeans but this is not like that and you can actually quickly internalise the general politeness of daily interactions. I like it a lot but sometimes can come up as unauthentic, you feel the authenticity when they start using sarcasm.
- toyg 4y ago
  f you are coming form a more direct culture you definitely notice the added layer of politeness to everything Brits will kill me for this, but it's more of an European thing - the Brits just preserved it a bit more aggressively than others, because they never actually abolished the aristocratic system that generated it.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    >it's more of an European thing Not true. Go to Eastern Europe and see. You'll get much less unintentional smiles or politeness than in the UK.
    - toyg 4y ago
      > Not true. Go to Eastern Europe and see. Oh oh, "yes true", and your note confirms it... What did Eastern Europe aggressively do, in the last century? Destroy aristocracy. So they are at the opposite end of that particular scale.
      - oblio 4y ago
        > What did Eastern Europe aggressively do, in the last century? Destroy aristocracy. Well, I wasn't a big fan of it, but the reality of the matter is... for most of us, someone else destroyed our aristocracy (and all of our intelligentsia with it) for us.
DaveChild 4y ago
No, it's a joke. Source: I wrote it :)
mcv 4y ago
> Do british people really talk that polite IRL all the time? It's that or cockney. Those are literally your only options if you want anyone from the UK to understand you.
te_chris 4y ago
Nope. The telegraph (right wing paper for posh people) was losing its mind about London street slang a few months back (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/06/13/wagwan-street-slang-britains-main-dialect/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/06/13/wagwan-street-sl...)
_joel 4y ago
Do we heck. There are many different dialect and accents in the UK, but nobody talks like that (Apart from the 18th Century cosplayer, Jacob Rees Mogg, but thankfully we hear less from him nowadays)
KineticLensman 4y ago
Britain is a patchwork of different dialects and speech patterns with numerous class-based and regional variations. We don't all speak the same any more than Americans do.
sph 4y ago
"G'day Alexa." And I imagine she calls you a cunt once in a while, for good measure.

tmtvl 4y ago

Well, sometimes you get a bit of the classic "you wot mate? Keep your gob shut or we'll have a barney, innit." Depends on circumstances, really.

techterrier 4y ago

no.

dmitriid 4y ago

> Do biritish people really talk that polite IRL all the time? The other side of the same humor is re-writing everything with "oi, c*nt, over here, you c****sucker" Aaaand I think it's the same people :)

twixfel 4y ago

Some examples he used are never said. I would say something like "perchance" very rarely, and "Good morrow" never. "Would you mind", well I suppose we say this all the time.

_the_inflator 4y ago
However using "perchance" as "if" replacement is somewhat ingenious. Always be polite in your sourcecode. :D

jrumbut 4y ago

They talk normally but the way they walk is very silly indeed: https://youtu.be/eCLp7zodUiI https://youtu.be/eCLp7zodUiI

abracadabra_ 4y ago

No. We really don't. People who speak Received Pronunciation (RP) may speak more in this way (look up Jacob Rees-Mogg if you really want to see how stupid it sounds) but they are a small minority of the British people.

canbus 4y ago
we definitely don't speak politely about Jacob Rees-Mogg
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  Hm? He's certainly the smartest and most skilled MP by far. A Victorian gentleman who invented a time-machine to travel 150 years in the future? Name one other MP who can match his genius.
DrBazza 4y ago
I’m curious why you think RP sounds stupid.
- abracadabra_ 4y ago
  I was more saying that one particular example (JRM) sounds stupid. I don't think this is a contentious issue. However, RP can sound a bit silly with some pronunciations. The same is true with any accent.
  - abracadabra_ 4y ago
    P.S. I'm from Yorkshire so I'm used to accents being mocked.
  - DrBazza 4y ago
    How JRM speaks doesn’t bother me at all. Must be an age thing. What bothers me is the emergence over the last 10 or 15 years is the new London accent that was previously Thames Estaury in the 90s and before that an actual bona fide London accent that my grandparents had. The new accent is typified by -ah or -ar instead of -er. The police recruitment adverts being the best example. Become a police office-aah instead of police office-er.

foo42 4y ago

Nah, it's a caricature of a particular class of Brit, mostly from a particular period. We do have different turns of phrase, some of which are very local even within Britain, but they're not all posh and polite, if anything the greater differences are in our styles of irreverence

paganel 4y ago
> if anything the greater differences are in our styles of irreverence I'd say the self-deprecating humour is also a mainstay of the Brits, encompassing almost all social classes. Granted, I'm not a Brit, but a former boss of mine (I'd also call him a friend) was a Brit and he checked all the stereotypes related to that. Really great guy. They (the Brits) used to also be renowned for their black humour, at least around these parts of the European continent, but I feel that that is beginning to fade out (maybe it has become too culturally sensitive to joke about death? I wouldn't know)
- sph 4y ago
  Relevant: Stephen Fry explains the difference between British and American humour: https://youtu.be/8k2AbqTBxao https://youtu.be/8k2AbqTBxao

chrisbaker98 4y ago

British people also talk like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5bqYlsXDdg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5bqYlsXDdg

snodnipper 4y ago
I would imagine those are a subset, where some would be referred to locally as "chavs" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chav https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chav Folks might note 'In the 2010 book Stab Proof Scarecrows by Lance Manley, it was surmised that "chav" was an abbreviation for "council housed and violent"'.

Gordonjcp 4y ago

> Do biritish people really talk that polite IRL all the time? No, no-one talks like that, and also "British people" don't really talk the same way even from one town to the next. There's not really any such thing as a "British accent". You know how different a New Englander talks from a Texan? That's how different someone from Glasgow sounds compared to someone from Edinburgh, or someone from Manchester compared to someone from Birmingham.

happymellon 4y ago
I would say the difference between West Country, Home Counties, North East and Glasgow is significantly higher than the difference between most US States. Although that's presumably because we have had thousands of years to develop dialects and the US didn't have very long until TV, radio, telephone started mashing dialects from regions together. I can tell the difference between New England and Florida but it isn't quite in the same league.
- Lio 4y ago
  Accents in the UK aren't even consistent in the same place. My wife and I have different accents and grew up in the same medium large sized town.
  - chrisbaker98 4y ago
    Accents in the UK also have a strong class dimension. Middle class people often speak in a very different way to working class people from the same area.
- chrisbaker98 4y ago
  The general pattern observed in linguistics is that accents/dialects/languages and language families have the greatest level of diversity in the area where they originated. E.g. Austronesian is a huge language family that covers an enormous geographic area including Hawaii, the Philippines, Indonesia and even as far as Madagascar, and it contains over 1,000 distinct languages divided into 9 subfamilies - and yet all but one of those subfamilies are found exclusively in Taiwan, where proto-Austronesian first emerged roughly 5000 years ago.

marginalia_nu 4y ago

Dunno if there is such a thing as "how British people talk". Something that's struck me about the country is how much the way you talk reflects where you are from and your station in life. Like not just which region, there's frequently dialects/sociolects for different parts of a city.

pbhjpbhj 4y ago
The smallest dialect areas I know of are next-town/next-city. I'd be interested if you could give an example (email me if you like, see my profile)?
- chrisbaker98 4y ago
  There are said to be multiple variations of the Liverpool ("Scouse") accent: https://wikiless.org/wiki/Scouse?lang=en https://wikiless.org/wiki/Scouse?lang=en

mrtksn 4y ago

Brits will say that they don't but if you are coming form a more direct culture you definitely notice the added layer of politeness to everything. There are a lot of other native speakers in the UK, for example from Australia or the USA, and you can instantly tell if this person is from the UK or Australia and it's not only the accent that gives away. Maybe you've heard that the western attitude of smiling for no good reason is strange for Eastern Europeans but this is not like that and you can actually quickly internalise the general politeness of daily interactions. I like it a lot but sometimes can come up as unauthentic, you feel the authenticity when they start using sarcasm.

toyg 4y ago
f you are coming form a more direct culture you definitely notice the added layer of politeness to everything Brits will kill me for this, but it's more of an European thing - the Brits just preserved it a bit more aggressively than others, because they never actually abolished the aristocratic system that generated it.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >it's more of an European thing Not true. Go to Eastern Europe and see. You'll get much less unintentional smiles or politeness than in the UK.
  - toyg 4y ago
    > Not true. Go to Eastern Europe and see. Oh oh, "yes true", and your note confirms it... What did Eastern Europe aggressively do, in the last century? Destroy aristocracy. So they are at the opposite end of that particular scale.
    - oblio 4y ago
      > What did Eastern Europe aggressively do, in the last century? Destroy aristocracy. Well, I wasn't a big fan of it, but the reality of the matter is... for most of us, someone else destroyed our aristocracy (and all of our intelligentsia with it) for us.

DaveChild 4y ago

No, it's a joke. Source: I wrote it :)

mcv 4y ago

> Do british people really talk that polite IRL all the time? It's that or cockney. Those are literally your only options if you want anyone from the UK to understand you.

te_chris 4y ago

Nope. The telegraph (right wing paper for posh people) was losing its mind about London street slang a few months back (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/06/13/wagwan-street-slang-britains-main-dialect/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/06/13/wagwan-street-sl...)

_joel 4y ago

Do we heck. There are many different dialect and accents in the UK, but nobody talks like that (Apart from the 18th Century cosplayer, Jacob Rees Mogg, but thankfully we hear less from him nowadays)

KineticLensman 4y ago

Britain is a patchwork of different dialects and speech patterns with numerous class-based and regional variations. We don't all speak the same any more than Americans do.

sph 4y ago

"G'day Alexa." And I imagine she calls you a cunt once in a while, for good measure.