Comments on: David Tennant is made of awesome

By: links for 2008-07-04 « Unisyc.

links for 2008-07-04 « Unisyc. — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 00:35:41 +0000

[...] David Tennant is made of awesome | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine (tags: doctorwho scifi bbc tv media awesome) [...]

By: Mike Torr

Mike Torr — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 07:20:39 +0000

Bill Bryson is one of the all-time greatest writers on the planet. His books have me laughing hysterically every time.

By: Joe Meils

Joe Meils — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:28:09 +0000

Does anyone know if this, and the “Blink” recording, and any other stuff like this, is being included on the DVD sets?

By: Nigel Depledge

Nigel Depledge — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 11:51:38 +0000

Will M. said:

And to the Brit who doesn’t like our pronouncing of English: when you folks try to understand U.S. regional dialects, perhaps we’ll attempt to glean the meaning of your truly mumbled and mangled offshoots of the Queen’s English.

OK, you’ve set me off now.

The US has no regional “dialects”*. It does have several pale shadows of regional accents, but, as has been pointed out by Bill Bryson (I believe it was either Notes From a Small Island or Notes From a Big Country), the variation in accents around the USA is far smaller than the variation in accents in Britain. If you compare speakers from London, Cornwall, Aberystwyth, Liverpool, Lancaster, Leeds, Newcastle, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Inverness, you will find that each of these places has its own distinct accent, and many of them also have a dialect.

Also, there is no such thing as the “Queen’s English”. The term “the King’s English” is derived from the King James Bible. “The King’s English” always and only refers to King James the First and Sixth (first of England, sixth of Scotland).

* Deliberately not counting separate languages like Pennsylvania Dutch/Deutsch.

By: Nigel Depledge

Nigel Depledge — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 11:38:55 +0000

Nick, you beat me to the nitpick. Curse you!

By: Nick

Nick — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 08:41:30 +0000

> “Tom Baker, John Pertwee… wherefore art thou?”

Because they were born?

“Wherefore” means “why”, not “where”. If you’re going to paraphrase Shakespeare, make sure you do it right.

By: defectiverobot

defectiverobot — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 04:20:03 +0000

Anybody notice, by the way, that one of the missing planets was Calufrax? It’s the planet that was consumed in the Tom Baker episode “The Pirate Planet” and ended up being the second segment to the key to time.