british dialect notes part 2, and

[fox]

1. Other words I understand perfectly but can't quite get myself to say include loo, lav, and even toilet, which is of course not at all out of place in British English; fortunately I can ask for the ladies' and raise no eyebrows. Have excised restroom from my vocabulary entirely, and had a brief fling with washroom before abandoning it as well. Wish my fellow Americans would stop saying bathroom. Seems to be a big giant label.

Had a discussion the other night about the British expression pulling (and related to pull and to be on the pull), particularly with relation to the (archaic, i.e. 90's-era) US expression macking. Apparently on the pull and on the mack (note to non-US English speakers: not to be confused with on the make!) are approximately equivalent, and therefore also if a person goes out macking he or she can be accurately described as having gone out pulling. The transitive verbs are very different, however; macking on someone is hitting on him/her, or more likely chatting him/her up. Pulling someone, see, I always understood that to be roughly synonymous with score or pick up; if you pulled the girl, you went home together, and barring some serious performance-related catastrophe, you had sex. Apparently not! I am reliably informed by cannons_at_dawn that pull just means get off (which solves nothing for me, as I'd assumed that to be a sexual achievement as well), or, after more elucidation, hook up in the high school sense of going off to a corner and making out. (In many US circles, "hook up" also means get laid.) So the standard for success with respect to "pull" is different than I thought it was; you can strike out and still count as having pulled.

Go figure.

Same conversation went on to discuss dekko, shufti, and other leftover colonial slang mysteriously turning up in the speech of people whose parents were born after the British left India.

Later, mentioned to servalan that it's interesting (to me, anyway) that you can't count quid, while you can count bucks. Both are words I understand fluently, but I don't think I use either; certainly not quid, because I'd feel like an idiot, and I don't think I use buck either, although I suppose I do for approximate amounts less than two dollars ("a buck and a half") and, as servalan said about herself, "large round-number purchases" ("that'll set you back about a hundred bucks"). Quid is still obviously in routine use in Britain, but not bob, which I suppose went out with the shilling. Any other currency slang? It was also interesting to us that you can count G's but not K, in the world of enumerating thousands.

2. post-mortem, so to speak, on the requiem: it went really well! people came and heard us and said it sounded good; apparently the orchestra was the weak link, which is refreshing. :-) the soloists were excellent, from a chamber choir i'm dying to join; they're the ones i e-mailed to pester for an audition next term. the bass was very good. the soprano had a very sweet voice, which was a nice change from a lot of soprano soloists who feel that higher must equal louder and with a wider vibrato. sadly, above about F# i felt like she went a teensy bit sharp -- strange, eh? not enough to actually sound bad; just enough that i could hear it a leetle bit and wonder if i was going nuts. see previous entry re: spoiled by perfect-pitch-having conductor. the alto was note-perfect, but not really an alto. apparently this is more common than i realize; director at sebastienne's college chapel choir says Real Altos are very rare. this one was a mezzo-soprano -- she had the range for the parts she was singing, but it's all about the vocal quality. the tenor had a lovely voice and only one leg.

Comments

[thalia]

Our choir has a whopping two true altos: one sings tenor, the other bass. Don't get me started. The entire alto section are mezzo-sopranos in disguise--actually, one of our altos is a real soprano and can hit a high C easily, but since we currently have 15 sopranos and nine altos (on those rare occasions when everyone is there), we're quite happy to have her on our side.

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

your Real Soprano was me in my college choir -- you know how the G above the staff isn't high? the B-flat is high, but not difficult. heh. but! i can read music.

of course, in the chapel choir i mentioned above, i'm a first soprano who on a couple of occasions dropped down to sing first tenor. since the only real tenor in that choir is a second, and the guy who occasionally helps out and sings first tenor but is really an alto (no, it's true) wasn't there at the time.

i've never sung baritone or bass, but from tenor on up, apparently, i'm your girl. :-)

[thalia]

Yeah, the reading music thing is big. Half our sopranos go into a panic any time they don't have the melody.

You must have a pretty wide range, if you can sing tenor. I love singing tenor--there's something fun about going an octave below middle C. I can only sing bass when I have a cold. [g]

Counter-tenors are fabulous. Unfortunately, we don't have any--in fact, we don't have any high tenors. It's too bad.

But I'd be happy if we could just convince the two women with alto voices to sing alto. They'd both sound fabulous.

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

i can get down to about the E-flat below middle C, sometimes a shade lower -- but not with any volume below about G or F#. but that's okay, because the boys can reach those notes; they needed me for volume on the stuff above middle C, since the things we were singing went up to the G in the treble clef (or would have, but this was a score with both men's parts together, you know, so it was three ledger lines above the bass clef), which is right in my belting-voice.