Categories: uncategorized
Tags: foundspeech, words
Date: 03 October 2007 19:19:55
A minor triumph in my ongoing quest to collect samples of the way we speak now!
Genuinely overheard on a bus in London. The speakers were young women, I assume late teens or very early twenties, talking about their college courses and what they intended to do next. One of them seemed to be at SOAS, the other was at an American university but doing a short course abroad here in London. But they seemd to know each other, and both had what sounded like English public-school accents to me.
[...]
"Where are you staying?"
"I've got a flat at Waterloo"
"Like, Awesome!"
"I'm supposed to be like staying at the course accommodation but its like SO small! It's like TINY"
[...]
"Then there is a course called 'Issues in contemporary British politics'. It's about, like, Britishness"
[...]
"There's quite a lot of writing but its not, you know, like what I'm used to"
[...]
"He's asking me. like complex numbers, and I can't do them in my head"
[...]
"I was like going to go to some like third-world country but it was too much like these Christian missionaries who were killed so my parents were like: 'You're not going to go!' I can never remember the name of the place."
You were going to go there and you can't remember where it was?"
"It was like begining with 'C'"
"Cambodia?"
"That's the place. I keep on getting it mixed up with California".
I swear that's true. That's what they said.
Maybe they were having a laugh. Maybe they are budding radio comedy writers improvising their new show. The world might be a better place if more radio comedy writers were rather cute young Asian women. Not that I know that both these women were actually Asian. They were sitting behind me on the bus, though I had seen one of them get on. Maybe they noticed that I was listening to what they were saying and were deliberatly playing up. Like.