Diary: Singers, swimmers and sweeps

01.07.10
Chim chim cher-ee
A professor of sociolinguistics at Lancaster University has predicted that the cockney accent will be gone from London’s streets in 30 years, pushed out of the city as a new multicultural English takes over. Diary hopes that future generations seeking evidence of what cockney sounded like will make the effort to look beyond the attempts of American actors to reproduce it in Hollywood movies – Dick Van Dyke as the chimmerney sweep in Mary Poppins and Don Cheadle’s rhyming slang in Ocean’s Eleven are just two of the most painful examples. Why does it never occur to casting directors that if you want someone to play an English character, a good place to look might be England?

04.07.10
Happy Fourth of July
According to a Marist poll released for the Fourth of July, 26% of Americans were unable to say which country the US won its independence from. Some of those didn’t even know there had been a war of independence. Diary would like to remind our US readers how important it is to remember that all the flag-waving and fireworks is a commemoration of that thing that happened that time with those people.

05.07.10
The internet has spoken
When drafting an online poll, one should pause to imagine what would happen if a huge team of people were to come up with the cruellest joke
they could think of as an answer. Because that’s what will happen. Baby-faced pop star Justin Bieber, beloved of young girls and their mums, is the latest celebrity to learn this. When he let fans vote on his website to decide which country he should tour next, the answer came back loud and clear: North Korea. Now 16-year-old Bieber either has to add the secretive communist state to his tour schedule or renege on his promise. As the BBC helpfully informed us in its report of the story, “it is not known if Kim Jong-il is a fan of Justin Bieber’s music”.

19.07.10
Auto-ethnography
A sociologist from Warwick University is planning to swim the English Channel as part of her research into what motivates people to take part in extreme sports. Karen Throsby says she wants to understand what people get out of physical activity apart from “the current obsession with seeing it simply as a way of reducing bodyweight”. Lesser mortals might have just done some interviews and read some books, but Throsby wants first-hand experience, and the only way to get that is to smear yourself in goose fat and swim the twenty-mile stretch - a feat performed by fewer people than have climbed Everest. Social researchers, consider the bar raised.

“You can while away hours typing unfinished questions and seeing how Google completes them”

23.07.10
Complete the following sentence
While messing about on the internet this month, Diary hit upon a new way to gauge what’s on the public’s minds. When you type something into Google these days, it predicts what you’re writing and comes up with a list of options before you finish. You can while away hours entering unfinished questions and seeing how Google completes them based on what others have been asking. Type “is jeremy clarkson”, for example, and it gives you the options “a tory”, “dead” and “jewish”. Type “is lady gaga” and you get “a man”, “a hermaphrodite” and, once again, “jewish” (the internet, as it turns out, is almost as preoccupied with Jewishness as it is with kittens). Diary’s favourite so far is simply “why is”, which produces the options “the sky blue”, “a raven like a writing desk” and of course “my poop green”.