Linguistics

Yet another anonymous coward slithers out from under something, making a comment on some other forum of the same type that more mainstream media websites have taken to deleting on sight:

Anonymous said...
At least the leader of the NDP has managed to figure out subject-verb agreement. That's more than anyone can say for Y-Vonne "Do dis minister tink" Jones. If the NDP can't do better than the current sorry pack of Liberal re-treads, they never will.

June 8, 2009 11:52 AM

Anonymous coward, no doubt, is of the same ilk who would scream with righteous indignation if anyone from Canada were to, let’s say, point out how the male leader of one of the three main provincial political parties employs a well-known local idiomatic change of vowel quantity, consistently saying “hee’s” instead of “his”.

But no matter where your opinion comes down in the incessant language-and-accent debate, there are some linguistic traits which are utterly lacking from Yvonne Jones’ earnest coastal Labrador lilt.

She doesn’t claim, in respect of a perfectly truthful statement, that “nothing could be further from the truth.”

She doesn’t prefix an unfrank comment with the multisyllabic particle “Igottabefrankwitcha.”

And she doesn’t post-posit the equally multisyllabic “tobehonestwitcha” to a lie.