What really constitutes Standard British English?

Damian in Edinburgh   Wed Jun 11, 2008 7:01 pm GMT
***Where do you Europeeons get such funny ideas?***

From Fox news. ;-)
Dans   Thu Jun 12, 2008 8:06 am GMT
In my books there is no "Standard" in English.

I think you are referring to the "Ideal" form of British English? RP is the "ideal" form during the old days, fine examples which comes up to mind was the BBC having it's news readers adopt RP accents up to the 1970's.

These days - there is no perferred accent of English as long as you are understandable. You even get a corkney speaker on BBC once in a while.
Jake   Thu Jun 12, 2008 7:02 pm GMT
***Where do you Europeeons get such funny ideas?***

From Fox news. ;-)

It's unlikely that Fox News has ever come out to its European viewers and said "This is a redneck" so the European concept of what a redneck is probably differs greatly from the actual American stereotype. In the US Rednecks are usually not perceived as being religious at all but rather quite the opposite. In the 80s when I was growing up in Southern Missouri I can distinctly remember the "rednecks" in my school as being mostly a bunch of whiskey-drinking tobacco-chewing tattoo-sporting aggressive bullies. They were anything but "religious".

A you tube video that portrays stereotypical rednecks:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBocef6iQps


From Wikipedia:

Modern Usage:
Redneck has two general uses: first, as a pejorative used by outsiders, and, second, as a term used by members within that group. To outsiders, it is generally a term for those of Southern or Appalachian rural poor backgrounds — or more loosely, rural poor to working-class people of rural extraction. (Appalachia also includes large parts of Pennsylvania, New York and other states.) Within that group, however, it is used to describe the more downscale members. Rednecks span from the poor to the working class.

Generally, there is a continuum from the stereotypical redneck (a derisive term) to the country person; yet there are differences. In contrast to country people, stereotypical rednecks tend not to attend church, or do so infrequently. They also tend to use alcohol and gamble more than their church-going neighbors. Further, "politically apathetic" may describe some members of this group. Until the late 1970s they tended toward populism and were solidly behind the Democratic party, but have supported Republicans since the Carter presidency. They are less homogeneous than the country people and other Southern whites. Many Southern celebrities like Jeff Foxworthy and Roy D. Mercer embrace the redneck label. It is used both as a term of pride and as a derogatory epithet, sometimes to paint country people and/or their lifestyle as being lower class.

Although the stereotype of poor white Southerners and Appalachians in the early twentieth century, as portrayed in popular media, was exaggerated and even grotesque, the problem of poverty was very real. The national mobilization of troops in World War I (1917-18) invited comparisons between the South and Appalachia and the rest of the country. Southern and Appalachian whites had less money, less education, and poorer health than white Americans in general. Only Southern blacks had more handicaps. In the 1920s and 1930s matters became worse when the boll weevil and the dust bowl devastated the South's agricultural base and its economy. The Great Depression was a difficult era for the already disadvantaged in the South and Appalachia. In an echo of the Whiskey Rebellion, rednecks escalated their production and bootlegging of moonshine whiskey. To deliver it and avoid law-enforcement and tax agents, cars were "souped-up" to create a more maneuverable and faster vehicle. Many of the original drivers of stock car racing were former bootleggers and "ridge-runners."

Federal programs such as the New Deal era Tennessee Valley Authority and the later Appalachian Regional Commission encouraged development and created jobs for disenfranchised rural southerners and appalachians. World War II (1941-45) began the great economic revival for the South and for Appalachia. In and out of the armed forces, unskilled Southern and Appalachian whites, and many African Americans as well, were trained for industrial and commercial work they had never dreamed of attempting, much less mastering. Military camps grew like mushrooms, especially in Georgia and Texas, and big industrial plants began to appear across the once rural landscape. Soon, blue-collar families from every nook and cranny of the South and Appalachia found their way to white-collar life in metropolitan areas like Atlanta. By the 1960s blacks had begun to share in this progress, but not all rural Southerners and Appalachians were beneficiaries of this recovery.

Writer Edward Abbey, as well as the original Earth First! under Dave Foreman, proudly adopted the term redneck to describe themselves. This reflected the word's possible historical origin among striking coal miners to describe white rural working-class radicalism. "In Defense of the Redneck" was a popular essay by Ed Abbey. One popular early Earth First! bumper sticker was "Rednecks for Wilderness." Murray Bookchin, an urban leftist and social ecologist, objected strongly to Earth First!'s use of the term as "at the very least, insensitive."

Author Jim Goad's 1997 book The Redneck Manifesto explores the socioeconomic history of low-income Americans. According to Goad, rednecks are traditionally pro-labor and anti-establishment and have an anti-hierarchical religious orientation. Goad argues that elites manipulate low-income people (blacks and whites especially) through classism and racism to keep them in conflict with each other and distracted from their exploitation by elites.

U.S. Representative Charles B. Rangel caused controversy on February 13, 2005, by referring to Bill Clinton as a redneck in response to Hillary Clinton's refusal to support his views on the Amadou Diallo case.