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My muse went crazy and decided that I could write a story that takes place in London England. A challenge I've been avoiding due to the differences in the King's English and what we speak on this side of the pond. But I guess like cross-dress, suppressing your muse's desire to write, makes it grow stronger. So I've given in to the pressure. Not only have I completed one, but I have another in the pipe line and one that I've only sketched the premise in a few paragraphs for.
This one is about a man whose wife's roommate at UCLA was the daughter of the British Consulate. He has an opportunity to go to London on business for a week and the company will allow him to take his wife. She reconnects with her college roommate and they stay for a week longer on their own dime and say with the now married roommate.
While there, they get invited to a fancy dress party. I dare you to guess the theme.
What I'm in need of is someone who speaks the King's English as native language to go over the story to make sure that my British characters don't end up speaking American or worse yet pigeon UK English.
I've done my research and I'm fairly confident that the places I've mentioned in the story do exist and that the are correctly referenced, however, I'm willing to have that corrected by first hand knowledge.
I'd like to send, by email preferably, it to some kind Brit so they can do that.
Any volunteers?
Comments
I could do it
After all, its 'pidgin', not 'pigeon'. Two languages separated by an ocean, what? I believe pidgin comes from locals in the Far East (of the world - not New England) trying to say the English word 'business'. Go figure!
mailto: [email protected]
Penny
Thanks Penny
It's on its way. The file name is UK Consolate. Subject line is "American to English translation" from [email protected]
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Second look
Patrica, once Penny has seen it I’d be happy to give it a look over as well.
I’ll pm you my email
Sammi (London born n bread(pun intended))
You do understand
That the locals don't speak "The King's English". That is an affectation, taught at the better schools. It's sometimes referred to as "Oxford English", much beloved of BBC announcers. Take a stroll through Central London and you will hear an amazing variety of languages and accents. What you are very unlikely to hear is "The King's English". (Except maybe at Speaker's Corner.)
"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin
King's English
Two of the characters in question would come from families that would have had a very good university educations and would quite possibly speak closer to king's English than the average man on the street. The third one is a question mark. At any rate, I don't think they would be using very much slang, however I don't have any first or even second hand knowledge that supports the idea that a University graduate wouldn't use slang.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
In London... anything goes
but many locals speak a thing called 'Estuary English'. Watch an episode of 'The only way is Essex' and you will see what I mean.
Anything goes because on any day, you will hear at least a dozen languages as you travel around the capital.
The biggest issue will be the spelling. Colour and all that jazz.
Set your language for the document to be English(UK) and you will see the differences.
Samantha
Daughter of the... what?
The British Consulate would be a building. The person (the diplomat living overseas and looking after British subjects and interests) is the Consul.
Sugar and Spiiice – TG Fiction by Bryony Marsh
Buildings can have children too!
Just for instance, you might say that the White House is the pretty daughter of Leinster house in Dublin. It would be hard, I'll grant you, to slip crossdressing into the plot. Maybe . . . ah . . . the EEOB is the son of a Baroque Trading House, crossdressing as a Second Empire Parisian whore? Just spitballing here . . . .
The dialogue would be a challenge.
Emma
Shows my ignorance
That's what I love about this community... what ever you need to know someone here more than likely has the knowledge and is willing to share. Thanks. I'm not in love with the title anyway and would be open to a better one.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Um, no
Actually, this is about Americans in London. The building is the American Embassy and the US representative to His Majesty would be the American Ambassador.
Consulates do exist, for many nations. They tend to be in smaller nations or as outstations of an Embassy, usually in cities and towns that have a large ex-pat population from that country.
Penny
If they were room-mates at
If they were room-mates at UCLA, I imagine that dad was the British Consul in San Fransisco, or one of the others in the US: https://www.british-consulate.org/british-consulates-in-amer... while daughter was in college.
My misreading
We are both right, but that does not excuse me misreading the precis. They were room-mates at UCLA but the story mostly takes place in London. It does not involve any diplomatic officials in London.
Penny
See Guest Readers comment
The consul is indeed stationed in an undisclosed American city... San Francisco would be a good assumption but more likely, Los Angeles. That's what I had in mind when I wrote the story. However, it's exact location is immaterial.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Any language
Any language without curses and with minimum of abbreviations shows the class. The much harder task is to immerse into social/geographic specific slang (e.g. cockney).
With my education and...
... couple of poems I created in my life (hopefully totally eradicated from existence) - I still can not decipher basic Cockney Slang.
And I still have trouble understanding "drunken English" after 30+ years of being able to communicate with British people in their native language.
Cor blimey, guvnor!
I’d suggest you avoid cockney-type lingo entirely, in case it ends up seeming really forced (think Dick Van Dyke in ‘Mary Poppins’...) or because it will make the story harder to read (like Mark Twain’s heavily accented Jim in Huckleberry Finn).
Also, it would date the piece. Cockneys and indeed working class whites as a whole are a small and shrinking minority in modern London. I’d just try to use standard English English... which means you can’t say “I could care less”, “different than”, “mom”... and would want to be cautious about “bum” (which does not mean vagrant), “fanny” (which does not mean bum) ... okay, it’s going to be a little bit of a minefield.
Have fun.
Sugar and Spiiice – TG Fiction by Bryony Marsh
If you need another set of
If you need another set of eyes on it, I would take a look. I grew up in a town in the South of England, just over an hour from London by train. Lots of Londoners relocated to it, so it has a strong London influence.
London speak
has infected much of the south of England like a disease, lots of the locals here in Dorset talk like Londoners, probably because they are spreading all over the country buying up second homes and denying that opportunity to young locals. Londoners earn so much more money than the rest of the country, but Westminster will never act against them.
Angharad
Actually Londoners are not to blame!
50-60 years ago some people were able to locate your London address with the precision of 20-30 yards just by your accent.
Same for Berlin, Bonn, Moscow, New York and so on.
But we have radio for 100+ years and TV! It muddles up accents and local variations.
Standard German that is spoken by like 99% of German people - standard because there was a powerful radio transmitter somewhere on the edge of the Bavaria!
Actually no
I was born and grew up on the south coast in a military town, back in the days when we still (just) had an Empire.
My school was full of the children of service folk, such that they kept coming and going according to where their parents were posted. These children came from all over the country and on arrival would spout a variety of regional accents, which became even wilder when they came back from postings abroad. I had a friend who arrived with a mild Scots accent, which then changed successively to Aussie, Canadian and Singapore!
Though there was a local accent used by folk who had lived there for generations, because we had such a mix in our school we all ended up having a mild 'general' southern English accent - which to northerners sounds very much like that of London.
When I eventually moved to work in London for a time I discovered that what to me sounded like a London accent was not, by then things had moved on there. London is now big enough that different parts have differing accents and I sampled most of them during daily commutes into the centre.
Then I moved with work to the West Midlands... and everyone said I had a London accent. Um, no. My accent is much more refined than that!
- At school we always used to say that civilisation ended north of Guildford. Watford? Bah, savages!
Penny
London speak.
I worked in Thetford, Norfolk a few years ago and the receptionist was Norfolk born and bred as were her parents yet she spoke with a N London accent because Thetford was a London overspill town and all her former school-mates had come from there. Similarly, I also worked in Welwyn Garden City in Hertfordshire and to hear a real Hertfordshire accent you needed to go out into the country areas. That was back in the 1950s - I guess it's worse now.
Fortunately up here in the N Midlands we still retain our local accents much to the confusion of our foreign friends who learned Southern English :)
aye, 'appen
Where i grew up was a strange backwater, either the far west of East Anglia (most peeps watched the channels based in Norwich), just too far away to be London commuter belt, but strangely referred to as the 'south east midlands'. What accent i had when i left school was pretty much inpossible to pinpoint other than vaguely south of the Humber and east of the Pennines.
40 years living in Sheffield and whilst i don't consider i have much of an accent, its strong enough that the heathens down here in the south west seem to struggle with it, a simple request for a bus ticket is often repeated several times before they get it. I go back to GOC and there's no issue.
It works the other way too i guess although i can generally understand even the thickest yokel accents in these parts.
I think attendance at universities has flattened many peoples accents, no one wants to stand out too much from their peers so they all end up with Uni English usage and certainly no standout accent. My grandson has more of an accent after one year at school than his born & bred Yorkshire mother!
FWIW, its not the act of swearing that will identify class rather the words used, some of the 'landed' classes swear just as much as the lower rungs of society, they just use different terms and they are used more casually.
Madeline Anafrid Bell