Witness Claremont McKenna Professor John J. Pitney's allusion to I Love Lucy in a statement about President Bush's final State of the Union speech in The Columbus Dispatch.
"This speech will have all the suspense of the 500th rerun of I Love Lucy."Compare with today's USA Today's bit on Britney Spears new British accent. See Carmen Fought, a linguistics professor at Pitzer, rather random mention of Love Actually.
Seems about right. (I don't really get why women dig British accents, but it seems to have helped a few of my uglier, British friends, so good for them.)Carmen Fought, a linguistics professor at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif., says Americans' bias for Brit-speak is illustrated in the hilarious/pathetic scene in the British film Love Actually, in which a working-class English schlump in a Milwaukee bar attracts a gaggle of American sexpots.
"He's got a lower socio-economic accent, the equivalent of our 'redneck' accent, but these women drape themselves all over him because of the way he talks — they think he's sexy," she hoots. (Or, as the character, Colin, boasts, "Over there, I'm Prince William — without the weird family.")
I'm not sure what those two quotations really mean about our professors. I'm less inclined to generalize about people's scholarship based upon one quotation, but it is interesting to see what kinds of comments are getting play in the main stream media. In any event, it frightens me to see that our professors actually know popular culture.
