Interestingly enough my father-in-law, with his heavy English accent would refer to some building lumber as
"two bee" (limey accent).
I do not usually hear this phrase in my neck of the woods, near the CanUSA border.
Is this common in the US or where you are?
Timber, surely?!
Which one? ;-)
I've heard it on US telly programmes before now. Well, maybe not "two- bee", more like "two-bah" I suppose it depends on the speaker's particular accent and how certain words are pronounced - "bee"/"bah" would just be local ways of pronouncing 'By' (somewhat obviously).
Mo' like tooba around here--as in "Hand me one-a them-there tooba-fors"
In E-TN was more like "Run 'n fetch (or tote if an older gent) me one-a them-there tooba-fo-ahs" :)
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I heard it more in musical terms: "Git me 'nuther one o' dem tuba force."
Don't think I ever heard "four" pronounced w/ only a single sillyuble either there or in VA Piedmont...is hard to get the E TN twang in print, though. The VA drawl is a little easier altho the olde Scotch/Irish/English "hoose" and "aboot" sorta' throw a spanner into it... :)
When kids were young and still in VA, folks came to visit while elder daughter was learning numbers and counting..."wun, two, thu-ree, fo-ah..." At that point Grandma (the KS-bred/raised Ed major) was simply aghast...
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----------------------------------- It's an expression that is as old as the hills and was resurrected by Al Roker, a network news personality on morning TV (Today Show) about
5 years ago.Since then it has spread like wild fire across the TV announcer world with every Tom, Dick and Harry trying to use it in their news broadcast.
Lew
Only in a play, follwed by or not two bee.
More commonly heard as 2 by. ;~)
But you might find twobafour and threebetwo.
Don't ask me why but I know I say the above (In the English Midlands).
However, just to confuse this issue, I am more likely to say fourbetwo than twobafour!
I would suspect that since he was in construction that twoby refereed to the dimension of the would he was using. In the US (Canada?) there several common wood sizes. These are some common nominal sizes in inches that you could find in a lumber yard.
2X = Twoby.2 X 2 Bracing and other light uses
2 X 4 Studs in the walls of a house. This is the most common size in building a house. 2 X 6 rafters for the roof. 2 X 8 floor and ceiling joists.These size go up to 2 x 14 with the larger sizes becoming rarer as the size increase.
I have heard twoby to refer to several sizes of these structural piece of wood. i.e I need 10 twoby, (usually 2X4) 6 sheet of plywood, etc.
Depending on the building this size could be increase depending on the load on the piece of wood.
An Englishman with an English accent? What is the world coming to?
Yeah...and damn proud of it too. He shouldn't have been here as the people couldn't understand a word he was saying when he felt his usual caustic personality was due, even though attempting to live in Canuckistan for 30 years. He lives alone as a hermit now, as far as we know....LOL
Define an English accent :-)
I live in the Midlands, just south of Coventry, go across to the other side of Birmingham, around Dudley and Stourbridge and with the combination of accent, dielect and voice intonation you'd hardly think we spoke the same language - as for the North East, they're from another planet!
Stuart wrote the following:
It's the same here in the US. Some parts of the country do not use the whole alphabet, and others do not pronounce vowels the same as others. I spent 11 weeks with people from all over the US. The worst problem was from some guy from Odessa, Texas. It took me two weeks before I could understand what he was saying. It turned out to be one of my best friends at that place.
Yeah the different dialects are a riot, really. It's a study in itself and very entertaining.
I find other dialects pronounce words more correctly, by logical analysis using English grammatical rules, and then there are words they completely screw up, too. Very interesting stuff.
English accent is one from Jolly ole' England. For years my wife thought I was picking on her when laughing about some of the Brit accents. Now she laughs too. Well, I still get it once a year, whether I deserve it or not.
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Define an English accent :-)
I live in the Midlands, just south of Coventry, go across to the other side of Birmingham, around Dudley and Stourbridge and with the combination of accent, dielect and voice intonation you'd hardly think we spoke the same language - as for the North East, they're from another planet!
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