Do You Speak Narration

Last night I watched Do You Speak American? Overall, it was a quality, old school expository public tv documentary series. Its narration was written for educated, curious people who still need a helpful stentorian Canadian to explain what Detroit rappers mean by "sick" and "ill." To me, they did a couple of things that didn't seem to fit the style.

1. The narration didn't bother to draw the links between contemporary hip hop slang, contemporary Surfer Dude/Stake/Snowboard slang, and what one researcher pointed out as a new Chicano dialect in LA. And it was especially weird in the scene where the 2 LA kids demonstrated this new Chicano dialect while they were hanging out with a black/Latino combination group of kids.

2. They introduced the California section with a clip of Nicole Kidman announcing the winner at an Hollywood award ceremony. WTF, mate? Was it a nod to Anglo-Saxon capitalism and media globalization? Were they fishing for funds to make a sequel called Do You Speak Australian?

I hope it's obvious that humans move around, mix and mingle, etc. Americans are born in Canada, Australians are born in America, Mexican-American kids could be very tan and have 'fros. I guess I'm being so picky because the producers set up the expectation that everything was going to be explained. Plus I was sore that they didn't stop in my native dialect region. That was not ohkee-dohk.

I do give them points for the sequence of southern accents in post-JFK era Presidential inaugurations. They also tried to leave in most of the dirty words. My station bleeped some, but not others, the jaggoffs.