Speedy's Cafe - General Chat about anything you like!

[Pseudonym]

Another accent post, but if you cover up the subs can you understand what the Scottish guy is saying?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-45905348/kiwi-mp-struggles-with-scottish-colleague-s-accent

[Arcadia]

About half of it on the first try, about 90% by the end.  

[Pseudonym]

Ha!  Better than the MP then!

[Artemis]

When I was in Scotland, it was hit or miss whether I could understand someone.  Some people spoke very clearly, others were met with a vacant stare as I tried to decipher what sounded like another language.

Regarding the privacy issues, I feel the same way.  I’m an intensely private person, and I don’t like the direction things are going.  I usually just get odd and baffled looks about it though, like I’m such a weirdo for wanting privacy or expressing any discomfort over the invasion of my privacy.

 

[besleybean]

Oi, nowt wrong wi the way we speak here!

Ha.

Obviously I'm English, just happen to live in Scotland.

Like most places, it hostly depends who you are speaking to...

But certainly some accents are harder to unerstand than others.

I live on the East Coast amd find West Coast accents a bit more difficult, sometimes.

[Pseudonym]

When I worked on a phone line I had the most issues with Glasgow, Aberdeen and Belfast. I could usually understand once I 'tuned in' but it took a second. 

I love Scottish and Irish accents (and Welsh). Well sexy.  Though, as you say, there's still a lot of variation. 

[besleybean]

I could give you hilarious examples from each...particularly Belfast...but it only really works audibly!

[Pseudonym]

Welsh sounds like Indian sometimes and we'd occasionally get people who were expecting an Indian call centre arguing with us whether we were Indian or not. 😂

[besleybean]

In Orkney, they all sound like Welshmen!

[J.P.]

Sometimes I'm close to change back to my old Nokia 1100. On the daily basis the only advantage of a smartphone is that you can write messages more easily.

[besleybean]

Indeed.

[SherlockedCAMPer]

I understood about 90% the first time the Scotsman spoke and all of the rest after that. I’ve had a harder Scottish brogue when I worked in a call center. I found other foreigners easier than I did the call center guy so this wasn’t too bad. I probably would have had the person repeat had I been there in person because of other noise.

[besleybean]

Yes, sometimes soft accents are a problem, too.

[Van Buren Supernova]

18 hours ago, Pseudonym said:

The one on my laptop has a sticker over it, but I use the cameras on my phone so I can't be covering them. I think you can get ones like shutters you can slide open and closed, maybe I'll look into getting one of those for the forward facing camera.

I use duct tape or masking tape that could easily taken off if needed too, but I almost never use front camera, so if you use it often, I imagine that could be annoying. 

I also consciously tried to look around when typing PIN while doing online banking even when no one is around, and clear my history and cache often. I try not to save my payment detail when I do online shopping, however some sites take the liberty to automatically save them. While I think, I'm still able to reasonably keep myself safe (although I think I'll be losing the fight or have to opt out one day) it's quite annoying that my cautious way is sometimes viewed as paranoid, and it's annoying too to see how nonchalant some other people could be, like my brother who loads sensitive information to devices he gave my mom, out of goodwill to make her life easier, includes setting her up to websites, but she doesn't really need all that and those transactions still can be done independently with a bit of hassle of feeding information just when you need it instead of saving and making them default. So yah, she is a bit confused that we both give opposite advices. Hey, only paranoids survive! (but I'm not really one  )

 

18 hours ago, Pseudonym said:

Oh, and one other thing, I find it bizarre that people are so chilled about having things like Amazon's Alexa in their house that, by it's very nature, is always listening. 

Yes, me too. I think we are not at that time yet and they are not that useful yet. Not only listening, did you read about the time when Alexa actually send the recording (that it recorded without being asked) to the contacts of the owner. That is super creepy.

 

J.P wrote:

Quote

Sometimes I'm close to change back to my old Nokia 1100. On the daily basis the only advantage of a smartphone is that you can write messages more easily.

Noooooo... you are kidding right?? How did Sherlock suppose to check weather in Cardiff??

[Van Buren Supernova]

      

 

 

 

 

Well, I understand the suffering that this shop had gone through. I remember when I was a kid and went to wet market with my mom and saw several women fishing money, crumpled and damp, from their bras.

[Carol the Dabbler]

I may regret asking, but what is a wet market?

[Van Buren Supernova]

Eh? You mean it's not a common term?

Fear not, it has no weird meaning .

Wet market is the term we use for traditional market that sells meats, fish, vegetable. It's normally big open space, naturally ventilated with stalls and various vendors where you could sometimes haggle the price or buy in smaller quantity because they weight the items based on what you pick (as in if you want couple of stalk of vegetables, you choose how much you want to buy) instead of those prepacked in supermarket. They also cater customized requests like gutting the fish for you etc etc. It's basically market , somehow we call it wet market to differentiate with more commercial supermarket.

[Pseudonym]

3 hours ago, Van Buren Supernova said:

Yes, me too. I think we are not at that time yet and they are not that useful yet. Not only listening, did you read about the time when Alexa actually send the recording (that it recorded without being asked) to the contacts of the owner. That is super creepy.

Yes! Horrifying!

I'd never heard of a wet market either!

[Arcadia]

Around here, we mostly call those farmer's markets, even though only about 1/4 the products are from farms. And our local ones don't sell raw meat, although there's a somewhat famous one up in Baltimore that does. And that marketplace in T6T … I imagine that's something similar. What are those called?

[Pseudonym]

... A market. 

[Arcadia]

Works for me.

[Van Buren Supernova]

1 hour ago, Pseudonym said:

... A market. 

Back in the day, a response like that would earn me a chase around the room with an ax aimed at my head.

It's either that she is playing favorite or feel bad about unleashing three banana men at you, but I doubt it's the latter.

[SherlockedCAMPer]

I was in a wet market once in Malaysia. I couldn’t survive it without losing it because of the seafood. It was an interesting experience otherwise.

[Carol the Dabbler]

10 hours ago, Van Buren Supernova said:

Wet market is the term we use for traditional market that sells meats, fish, vegetable. It's normally big open space, naturally ventilated with stalls and various vendors....

That's what I would probably call a city market (because over here the building is generally owned by the city).  And I think that's the term that Arcadia was groping for.

As she said, there are also farmer's markets in the summer, generally held one morning per week in a parking lot, where local farmers or gardeners can rent space to sell their fruit, veggies, nuts, etc., during the growing season.  I've never seen meat sold in those, though there might be a few animal products such as cheese or honey.

 

[Hikari]

On 10/18/2018 at 9:24 AM, Pseudonym said:

Another accent post, but if you cover up the subs can you understand what the Scottish guy is saying?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-45905348/kiwi-mp-struggles-with-scottish-colleague-s-accent

Here's a Scot accent I can sit through all day . . all night . . all millennium.

Here's Gerard Butler, aka one of God's glorious gifts to womankind, explicating some Scots slang for us non-Scots.

(contains Language.  duh.)