Thursday, May 5, 2011

Gerund U

Distracting U, Perplexing U, Irradiating U, Detaining U....  The Ukraine tourist board is running ads on the BBC for Ukraine, where they have native Ukrainians standing in front of various lovely sites, or icons, or doing their service jobs, saying "(gerund) U".  Eg: "Amazing U", "Delighting U", "Entertaining U".  And that's all nice and well and good I guess, but some of the citizens they show look like throw backs from old, low quality, slightly in-bred, very pale, Russian pornography I saw back in the 90s that made me wince.  Then, there's pronunciation of "U".  The BBC adverts are in English (of course) so one would hope that the English pronunciations would be accurate..  About 30% of the time they are.  The rest, is umlauted, or 'criss-ka'ed' or otherwise distorted... like a Quebecois trying to speak Cajun, or an unpracticed  red neck trying to speak in a Cockney accent... it doesn't work.

I tried to find a link to the BBC video to share here, but after 10 minutes of trying, all I could find were these CNN spots, where a smooth, well practiced narrating voice over does all the "gerund U"s.

Ukraine is aggressively trying to market itself of course on the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, which just happens to coincide with the Fukishima partial melt down.  Maybe Brits are more intrigued by accents that mangle English and Americans (like myself) find it very very distracting, and hence the CNN targeted narration?

1 comment:

  1. There are no ads on the BBC inside the UK. I haven't noticed these ads on other channels, but then, if I watch anything, it's almost always DVRed and I skip the ads anyway. But now I'm curious!

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