Posts Tagged ‘ TLABD ’

Bad Press, Bad Science (?), Bab

If I was the sort to decide on New Year’s resolutions, then one would have been making a concious effort not to get upset about this sort of thing: Why it may be better not to speak up if you’re a Brummie – BBC NEWS “The study, which matched accents with perceived intelligence, found speaking in a Birmingham accent gives a worse impression than saying nothing at all.” Lazy headlines, lazy articles, easy shots – at least for once it doesn’t seem that it’s just a press release form an insurance company (or similar) – Let’s look at the evidence, or lack thereof: 48 people were involved in the study, do you think 48 is a particularly large number, the sort that might extrapolate well to making generalisations on the population of Britain (60M?) as a whole? No-where that I can find are the methods or the details of the study available – I’ve emailed Dr Lance Workman so I’ll see what happens. I don’t think I’m alone in just being fed up to the back teeth of this coming up every six months or so, in different forms. People do it because the media fall for it every...

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Balderdash and Blartin’

After a hectic week rushing round promoting TLAB Day (I’ve just this minute got back from doing Radio Five on a show with Danny Kelly*) can we relax here? Course not. One of the legacies of TLABD, we hope will be an online Brummie dictionary – there were hundreds of phrases added to the TLABD site and it would be such a shame to lose all that work. So we’ve set up a wikipedia-style ‘Brummie dictionary’ for all of the good people of the interweb to contribute to. It’s empty at the moment, although we’ll start to shift the submitted stuff across asap, so if you want to get in first and make sure it’s your definition of ‘crash’ (as in the rocks) that makes it – get over there. In true wiki stylee if you search for something and it isn’t there, you’ll be given the chance to add it yourself. There’s a link to the proper wiktionary help pages on the site should you get stuck. *Fascinating (and possibly untrue) fact from that link, Danny was once briefly married to Hazel O’Connor.

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It’s Talk Like A Brummie Day – Today

Most visitors to B:iNS would probably be speaking like a brummie anyways, but the idea for today is to get all those other people to have a go themselves. If you’re having fun talking like a brummie add a comment to this tread on www.talklikeabrummieday.co.uk. BREAKING NEWS: Due to extreme weather – the event planned for Chamberlain Square in by the Big Screen this afternoon is off, it wouldn’t have been much fun for anyone to be drenched. The organisers tell me that it may happen later in the summer, but nothing is confirmed as yet. It won’t be TLABD then, but it’ll still be good.

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Pledge to Talk Like A Brummie and win

Pledge to Talk Like A Brummie and win

This Friday people around the country with be spending the day talking like a Brummie, calling each other “bab” and advising people to go “careful past your granny’s”. The campaign has built up with hundreds of pledges on myspace and facebook and there are people planning to spend the day talking like a Brummie from as far away as Australia, Canada and even Liverpool. One special event that is being held is a celebration of the Brummie accent in Chamberlain Square, from 12pm to 6pm on Friday people will be able to hear a panel of local experts, record their own favourite Brummie phrases and sayings for the BBC Big Screen and will have the chance to win special Birmingham prizes – get down if you can even if it’s “looking a bit dark over Bill’s mother’s”. The lovely lads at Bostin.org.uk – home of the T-Shirts that Adrian Chiles loves – have agreed to send a T-Shirt to one lucky TLABDay-er. All you have to do is sign up and pledge to Talk Like A Brummie on Friday on the site. You can even sign up for their newsletter for the chance to win even more Bostin stuff.

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BiNS is mostly by Jon Bounds a Birmingham based social web consultant, producer and writer., You can hire him to work on your social web campaigns or anything really—he's not fussy. Follow him on twitter or drop him an email.

There's also the odd bit of stuff from Danny Smith.

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