Friday, September 01, 2006

Dive! Dive! Cow dialect alert

Copyeds, raise the red flag if you see this one on a bgt near you. It is, on the evidence, a clever bit of PR fakery that spread through much of the news world last month:

ANIMAL-ACCENTS -- BIDEFORD, England -- Everyone knows about the Southern drawl. Now, dairy farmers in southwestern England claim their cows are mooing with a regional accent.

With art, we are assured.

Remember, as a rule: If a story with CP-able art of cows demonstrating their intrusive "r" is, well, a crock, the correct response isn't "Yeah, but it's reader-friendly." The correct response is "Wow! Maybe we can fit an Iraq story in after all!"

Y'all come back, hear?
(I think a Sam Bideford was sort of like Wally Pipp to Peter Duck's Gehrig, but I could be wrong.)

*Alarum first raised at TCEs; speedy confirmation from a major Southeastern buro

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

ah. bullcrap is universal.

12:03 AM, September 02, 2006  
Blogger Theophylact said...

Language Log has been all over this story...

11:33 AM, September 05, 2006  
Blogger fev said...

Right. Log has roasted this in classic Log fashion. I thought I'd been clear on that by linking above to one of Mark's fillet jobs, and if I wasn't, sorry.

The note at TCEs was the first hint I'd seen that the phenomenon was crossing the Atlantic, and since the story was on the Cox News bjt that very evening, the officer of the day here thought a real-time warning was appropriate.

Fat lot of good it did, huh?

8:51 PM, September 07, 2006  

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