My favorite sentence

I'm sure you can't sleep for wondering what my favorite sentence is. Let me put you out of your misery. It's from Mr Phillips, by John Lanchester. And here it is. Our narrator - Mr Phillips, as you might expect - is talking about his secretary, Karen:

"And there is something about the limitless reserves of indifference she can express, the thrilling estuarine boredness of her 'Yeah'"

Oh, and I can't resit an update on La Hutton. On the welcoming video, the one with the animatronic dinosaurs, she at one point uses the word 'advantage'. But what made me sit bolt upright in my chair was the way she said it. Not with the 'ah' sound you'd expect from a glossy sydney demi-celebrity. She used the short flat 'a' (as in 'cat') that you'd expect from someone brought up in middle-class Melbourne (as opposed to what passes for upper-class melbourne, or even catholic melbourne for that matter).

Many years ago, in the midtown Manhattan branch of the New York Public Library, I stumbled across a book about regional variants in Australian spoken english. It was a short book, as you'd expect, the authors rapidly reaching the conclusion that most australian accents fall either side or the class divide or the urban/rural divide, but they did some work on the 'a' vs 'ah'. There was a map, shaded by relative densities of the two variants. Sydney was more 'ah', Melbourne more 'a', as you'd expect. Adelaide was off the scale 'ah' - no surprise there, they also say 'anythink' there a lot. I can't remember the Queensland data, they probably all spoke too slowly to be of any statistical significance.

I wonder sometimes whether the committee who chose the national anthem ('Advahnce Australia Fair' most of the time at public events) did this deliberately.

Must sleep.