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[Adventurer]

Last Updated: Wednesday, 21 March 2007, 15:20 GMT

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Best of British

Many Brits make it in the US - not all keep their accents


By Megan Lane
BBC News Magazine


A cut glass English accent can fool unsuspecting Americans into detecting a "brilliance that isn't there", says Stephen Fry. So is a British accent - of any variety - the route to success in the United States?
"Gee, I just love your accent."

Any Brit crossing the Atlantic will have heard that line many times. Like the rest of us, Americans are rarely immune to the charms of an accent different from their own.


Go on, say "shagadelic"...
There's the amusement value of listening to someone who sounds like they might just punctuate their sentences with "oh, behave". And a British accent can conjure up a stereotype of a polite, droll, self-effacing race.

But very few Brits are like Hugh Grant (Grant himself has kicked over the traces of his Four Weddings and a Funeral persona), and Stephen Fry speculates that Americans may be dazzled by the British accent.

"I shouldn't be saying this, high treason really, but I sometimes wonder if Americans aren't fooled by our accent into detecting a brilliance that may not really be there."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/6470095.stm

[mindmetoo]

I think Koreans should get their kids British accents, even if they think their sprog is Harvard bound.

[Ya-ta Boy]

I admit to once being impressed by British accents. I was hanging out in Greece with some cool Scousers and met other Brits through them. For a time it did seem like I'd landed in a crowd of highly educated folks. Once my ear adjusted and I could actually follow a complete sentence, it didn't take long to figure out that a different vocabulary just masked the usual range of shallow-to-interesting people, like any other group of people.