I watch a lot of old movies from the Golden Age of Hollywood, and I’ve seen my fair share of 1930s gangster flicks (George Raft is my favorite!). Films like The Public Enemy, Scarface, and Little Caesar are filled with slang that is now either obsolete or considered old-fashioned, but I was pretty surprised to …
Category: Language
A Matter of Speaking
No other two languages are as unalike as the English spoken by Americans and Britons, and countless sociological tomes and travel guides of the Edwardian period devoted a considerable number of pages detailing the differences. Not only did vocabulary vary, but the spelling, and most acutely, pronunciation of words immediately marked one as quintessentially English …