The list of vaguely risible fanboy habits I share with heterosexualist males may hereby begin with the following: I adore Lynne Russell and everything she does!

The überglam karateka/newsreadtrix/vixentrix fatale was last seen in the mid-’90s modelling that week’s hair tint as she statuesquely delivered updates on CNN Headline News. After leaving the business, Russell moved to Canada with her husband. But now she’s back doing fill-in on CBC Newsworld and oh, mother of God am I excited! I tape her shows! I dissect her accent!

Canada’s mosaic approach to multiculturalism works better than the American melting-pot approach and there is one manifestation of the mosaic that may surprise you: We put people on TV who speak in accents. Yes, of course everybody has an accent, but I mean detectable accents. An interpreter often heard during news conferences and the like speaks British English. A hostess of a science show, who resembles a transvestite even more strongly than Russell does, is British. We had an Australian business newscastrix for a while, and a Newsworld weathercastrix is from New Zealand.

On-air diversity, while requiring improvement, can be seen and heard. American networks hire Canadians, whose accents seem pleasingly neutral (hence officially do not exist), but you scarcely ever find a detectable accent on American television. The Australians, despite their decades of institutional racism, are more in the Canadian model, as Norman Hermant, late of CBC, is now a reporter there. I have heard a vast range of newsreader and announcer accents in England.

But Russell’s accent surely is not undetectable. It fairly screams, and I don’t think it is my linguistics degree and my mild otaku for this shit that causes me to notice. She really sounds like an American, a fact I note but do not object to. Let’s transcribe a few examples, using, of course, International Phonetic Alphabet. Good luck getting your browser to display them.

• Most disturbing is Russell’s mispronunciation of the title of an elected head of a province (and some territories), premier. It’s pronounced exactly one way, “preemyer,” a lesson only some recent U.S. ambassadors to Canada have bothered to learn. It is not pronounced in the various hodgepodges Americans use for that word and the related premiere (“premeer,” “premyare”). Russell pronounces it “primyeer” [ˌprɪmˈjiːr] or “premeer”
• Back vowels (chiefly [aː] → [ɑː]), sort of like a Buffalonian: not, conflict (n.), economic, Ontario, jobs (also Jobs), Lebanon, dollar, technologies, solid, consolidate, Squamish (lots of stress on first syllable)
• Ottawa [ˈɑːɾɘˌwɘ]
• Saskatchewan (tricky to transcribe; much stress on final vowel) [sæsˌkæʧˈwɑːn]
• No Canadian raising audible whatsoever (as in subtitles [ˌsʌbˈta͡ɪɾl̩z] – yes, she conveniently uttered that word)

Russell is also required to utter Canadianisms like “hydro” for electricity and “Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry.” Then there was this humdinger, heard as I was writing this (2006.09.07 16:10): “How’s it gonna play with the American – ‘with the American.’ How’s it gonna play with the Canadian public?” Delightfully, that’s how!

No, you probably wouldn’t want to swim on a day like this. Parasail, sure.

(Q.v.; q.q.v.)

Another in a series of postings on CBC captioning (also see the separate page on the topic)

In a delicious irony, a single caption on a CBC program has succeeded in epitomizing CBC captioners themselves:

I present to you some excerpts from The Planman, a British telefilm (starring – inevitably – Robbie Coltrane) that reran on Friday night. Now, you’re thinking: If it’s a British production, the captioners can use British orthography, right? Well, in principle, yes, if a fully-considered and -researched system is in place. (Ditto U.S. spelling on American shows.) But don’t go looking for anything so recherché on the sixth floor of the CBC.

I surmise that what actually happens is this: Ferrets safely tucked away in their cages at home, CBC captioners trudge off to Fort Dork every day (ten in a row, then four days off). Their mission: To write down what people say on Canadian TV shows. Tedious in the extreme, obviously it’s a job that nobody in their right mind would ever opt into. To jazz things up a little, they pretend it was Brits who were doing the talking all along.

If The Planman uses British orthography, it’s by accident or by fiat (“British spelling is classy!”), not by choice.

But tell me: Isn’t a C student from the word go merely thus, and not a ‘C’ student from the word “go”?

More? Of course there is! [continue with: A ‘C’ student from the word “go” →]

Derek Birdsall, quoted in Communicate: Independent British Graphic Design Since the Sixties:

You have said that the best layouts appear to have designed themselves.

How could they be different? Of course, you could do it in a million ways, but it should have a look of conviction. The conviction in my case comes about from knowing how right it is, because I have been through the mill. I have been through it all. There is a reason for everything.

There is not a right and wrong way, but there are better ways and worse ways, and they are almost always findable in the text. There is often a recurring word in the text that might give you an idea for the right typeface. Let us suppose there was a book about Herman Melville. His name will appear quite often in the book. Sometimes even there there is a clue to a nice typeface that has a lovely M. One of the reasons I like justified setting is because I use Poliphilus a lot, which has the most deliciously surreptitious angled hyphen. It is worth breaking words for.

The suitability of the type to the subject of the book is less important than to the nature of its text. Not the politics of the text – which, of course, is something that obsesses kids today because they think they can get an idea out of it – but the actual words. Even things like ampersands and brackets – if you have stuff with a lot of brackets, Bell has the most delicious square brackets. It is a good enough reason to use that typeface.

All these years later, I retain Sciroccist tendencies.

If you have to ask, you can’t be my friend.