TV IS THE PERP
Mark Lawson, The Guardian
"The linguist Professor Katie Wales of Leeds University suggests that regional variations (in British speech) have been safeguarded by serial drama.
"The theory goes that thrice-weekly doses of dialogue in broad Lancastrian (Coronation Street), Yorkshire (Emmerdale), Cockney (EastEnders) and Scouse (Brookside) encourage locals to remain true to their roots. This effect is supposedly achieved partly because the programmes offer an easy primer in the ancestral vocabulary and accent but also because the speaking of the dialect by famous characters confers glamour on styles of speech that might have been thought backward........(Mark Lawson disagrees, and suggests a new phenomenon called TV-speak) "....One widely-publicised example of this phenomenon is the tendency since the late 80s for young people in Britain to end their sentences on a rising intonation as if every phrase were a question, even when they're statements? This is an Antipodean tic which is generally believed to have been imported to Britain through the Australian soap operas Neighbours and Home And Away, in which every line of dialect has an implied question mark.".....Lawson continues...Since the late 1980's there has been an unexpected encroachment of Cockney into the middle and upper classes. In particular, the expressions "sorted" (resolved), "dodgy" (suspicious), and "out of order" (in the wrong), are now spoken by those of all backgrounds, the first of them having almost obliterated the more respectable usage "sorted out"
...and on American influence...."In large swathes of the middle classes, the traditional English expressions of incomprehension - first "pardon?" and then "sorry?" - have almost given way to the American "excuse me?" popularized through American movies and TV shows.
"Revealingly, Chris Evans and Zoe Ball - the current star performers in the only branch of the media consisting solely of speech - both essentially speak American vocabulary with a sub-Cockney English delivery.
A classic Ball sentence runs:And I was, like, "Hello?" (The use of the word "like" to introduce reported speech is another Americanism eagerly copied here.)
"A source in the police force reports that British coppers (or "cops" as they increasingly prefer) now widely use the word "perp" (an abbreviation of the word "perpetrator") for criminal, having picked up this noun from the numerous American police series on British TV."There is also evidence of hospitals in this country starting to use the word "gurney" for trolley, a translation which can clearly be blamed on the success of ER.
"The truth is that, in the real Salford, Liverpool and London, you are increasingly likely to find locals speaking the mid-Atlantic, cross-Tasman, box-Cockney, telly-Scouse combination which makes up the cathode-ray patois that is becoming the true national tongue."
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