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Sayers - sense of humor?
Aug. 9th, 2015 11:27 pmAs I mentioned last night, I’ve been reading Five Red Herrings, a Lord Peter Wimsey novel set in the border area of Scotland, which I hadn’t read before. By the way, Kirkcudbright is pronounced, “Kir-COO-bree” – I’m glad I learned that relatively early in the book.
If one has patience for hearing an awful lot about train and bus schedules, it’s an okay book, but you have to put up with a whole lot of Scots dialect transcription. Or maybe Scots is recognized as a separate language, but I don’t know if it’s written in the rather phonetic way that Sayers used, and I don’t know if she was actually using it or just a Scottish version of English.
However, then I came across two pages of statements by a witness with a lisp. I had to set the book aside for a while to work up the energy to tackle it, but Sayers was obviously having fun with it, and although it’s also a bit offensive, I guess it’s amusing enough, in its way:
“…thay if they thaw a bithyclitht lath Tuethday week.”
“Thpectacleth vould be a good dithguithe for him. Thith one it might be altho, but he hath a mouthtathe…”
And the classic, “I do not like puth-thyclithtth.” (A push-cycle being a bicycle, ergo “push-cyclists.”)
But then it occurred to me – the speaker was a Scotsman. What a mercy that she didn’t inflict the lisp on us in combination with the dialect!
If one has patience for hearing an awful lot about train and bus schedules, it’s an okay book, but you have to put up with a whole lot of Scots dialect transcription. Or maybe Scots is recognized as a separate language, but I don’t know if it’s written in the rather phonetic way that Sayers used, and I don’t know if she was actually using it or just a Scottish version of English.
However, then I came across two pages of statements by a witness with a lisp. I had to set the book aside for a while to work up the energy to tackle it, but Sayers was obviously having fun with it, and although it’s also a bit offensive, I guess it’s amusing enough, in its way:
“…thay if they thaw a bithyclitht lath Tuethday week.”
“Thpectacleth vould be a good dithguithe for him. Thith one it might be altho, but he hath a mouthtathe…”
And the classic, “I do not like puth-thyclithtth.” (A push-cycle being a bicycle, ergo “push-cyclists.”)
But then it occurred to me – the speaker was a Scotsman. What a mercy that she didn’t inflict the lisp on us in combination with the dialect!