3 posts tagged “slang”

There is a commercial for either the Yellow Pages or a company called Southern Plumbing here in Wellington. Now, it doesn’t give a phone number (kind of ironic if it is for the Yellow Pages) otherwise I’d have called them the minute I heard this on the radio.
   The ad begins with a southern American woman talking about how she had coons, and she threw the Yellow Pages at them. It goes on with her complaining about coons and how she has to get rid of them, and the last sound in the scene is her priming her shotgun.
   I can’t see the connection to plumbing because for most of the broadcast I am in total shock.
   Yes, she uses the word coon.
   I know you can be ignorant and assume that coon is short for raccoon, which is bound to be what they will say, but why then did the woman need to have a southern US accent? Maybe the Americans reading this can inform me if there more raccoons in the south.
   I just thought of the Ku Klux Klan.
   The Yellow Pages company in New Zealand was recently bought by an American corporation so I don’t buy the argument that with the new management no one knew about the racial connotations.
   It paints the whole image of the Klan, lynchings and murders of black Americans.
   If the Southern Plumbing I linked is the firm that has put this ad out in conjunction with the Yellow Pages, then I would be seriously worried.
   I have written to the firm. I would like to think this ad was done out of sheer ignorance but there are way too many coincidences here. If they realize they have few African-ethnicity clients on their database it sure won’t be down to the small number of people of African descent in New Zealand.

PS.: The term is used in Australia, too, referring to Aboriginals:

http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,22931249-5001021,00.html

which makes me wonder just how many New Zealanders made the same connection.—JY

The Murdoch Press—The Times, anyway—is putting forth a contrary viewpoint to all the hype around Ashes to Ashes, by journalist Caitlan Moran.
   And I think she has a point.
   In summary, Moran feels that Ashes to Ashes has reached some level of self-parody. The star is now undeniably Gene Hunt, which, as I put forth in the comments, must be akin to the Fonz getting top billing in Happy Days after Richie left.
   Richie is Sam Tyler in this context.
   Moran, who has seen the première, or pilot, writes:

It’s not Phil Glenister’s fault – he continues to play Hunt with malicious, controlled glee. The problem is with the show itself. It has lost its innocence. It’s gone from being a little bit in love with Hunt – as any rational programme would be – to borderline stalking him. Every Hunt entrance is a “Hero Shot” – slow pans, moody lighting, orchestral upswell. Every scene is waiting for Hunt to enter, or animate, or conclude it. The show will give him anything he wants – machineguns, a speedboat, a ludicrous plot resolution.

   My remaining concern is whether we are as fond of the 1970s as we are of the 1980s. The cop show—what Americans call police procedurals now, in an effort to differentiate from English English*—probably reached a zenith in the 1970s in the UK, with shows such as The Sweeney (the sort-of inspiration for Life on Mars) and The Professionals (which was designed to compete with The Sweeney). In this context, The Sweeney is the Gospel of Matthew, and the last season of Special Branch with George Sewell was the Book of Malachi.
   But I am not sure if we are as fond of the next decade because we missed these dark, gritty shows. Dempsey and Makepeace and Cat’s Eyes are loved only by fans of the genre. Putting Gene Hunt into this world means the show must centre around him and the evolution of his character in a new decade, full of bright colours and later, pastel shades. Ashes to Ashes cannot be a homage to anything actually from the 1980s even if Moonlighting had been cited in an early press release—to all intents and purposes it can only be a homage to Life on Mars.
   Nevertheless, I am looking forward to the new show, because it presents an opportunity for fans to ask a new set of questions. Or at least I hope we can.
   As Life on Mars neared the end of its run in 2007, there were numerous speculations on what actually happened to Sam Tyler. Some argued that 1973 was Purgatory. Another theory was that Sam Tyler leapt into the body of a 1973 cop called Sam Williams while in a coma. He would wake up, someone else said, and find that Annie Cartwright was actually his nurse and they would fall in love and get married. And a lot more pointed out the Wizard of Oz references. 
   Scriptwriter Matthew Graham put that all to rest when he said, yes, Sam’s in a coma and he killed himself to get to his idea of Heaven, which features Gene Hunt, Ray and Chris, and, most importantly, Annie Cartwright. No other explanation is canon.
   Are we to accept that it’s so elegantly simple?
   Maybe yes, since this is just a TV show, but Graham and co-creator Ashley Pharoah say they want to explore the ‘mythology’ of Gene Hunt.
   The press kits are essentially saying that DI Alex Drake has imagined 1981 and the gang because she read Sam Tyler’s case file and developed an obsession over it.
   It just seems too simple, if it is written as cleverly as the original. I can’t imagine watching Ashes to Ashes and not having the same questions about: what is this time period? Who is Gene Hunt? And I would hope that Graham, Pharoah, Chris Chibnall and whomever else is writing would explore the “why” element of all of this than leave us without pondering what has happened to Alex Drake.
   If this is all—if Hunt is a psychological manifestation of a tumour or the bullet in Alex’s head—then we approach Ashes to Ashes backwards. Last time, seven million of us watched the finalé because we wanted answers. This time we approach the show knowing the answer first. And there goes one major element of why we watched the original.

* The Brits I hung out with for drinkies last night had never heard of the term police procedural.

In 2039, they’ll be laughing at us, but for now, let’s laugh at the 1975 J. C. Penney catalogue. It’s a stone soul gas—I can dig it. And the bongs that Penneys sold: groovy. Mellow out, man.

http://badbanana.typepad.com/weblog/2007/09/catalog-shoppin.html