Category: language

It appears that several companies are opening call centers in India, where the labor is cheap, but them tutoring them for an American accent to complete the illusion:

“Hi, this is Betty Coulter and I am calling because I have a great deal for you today. I am going to offer you a credit card at a low 2.9 percent with a whole bunch of free gifts.”

Yeah, yeah, you’ve heard it all before. You try to get off the phone, but Betty just drones on and, amazingly, never takes a breath. You try to place the accent. Iowa maybe? No, the “a” sound is too flat. California? Maybe it’s a crowded call center in some business park in Kansas City.

But Betty is actually calling from Bangalore, and her real name is Savita Balasubramanyam. And she is indeed in a crowded office, but it's not dinner time, it’s the middle of the night. And her perfect American accent is the result of rigorous training and an employer-encouraged addiction to Ally McBeal. […]

From Logophilia, today’s coined-word of the day (or, coined phrase, in this case) is “irrational depression”:

Investors have coined a new phrase for the relentless declines: “irrational depression,” a play on the famous phrase “irrational exuberance” uttered by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan to describe the stock-market surge of the late 1990s.

“Whereas two years ago, it was get me in at any price, now it's get me out at any price,” said Alfred Goldman, chief market strategist at A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc. in St. Louis. “Unfortunately, investors are thinking with their emotions and not their minds.”
— Amen Sachdev, “Dow slides below 8,000 to ’98 level,” Chicago Tribune, July 23, 2002

Hmm, yeah, I can relate to that one :-/.

Named after Edward George Bulwer-Lytton who originally wrote “It was a dark and stormy night...”, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction contest is “a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.” And, the 2002 Winners have been announced — here’s one of my favorites:

The blood dripped from his nose like hot grease from a roasting bratwurst pierced with a fork except that grease isn't red and the blood wasn’t that hot and it wasn’t a fork that poked him in the nose but there was a faint aroma of nutmeg in the air and it is of noses we speak not to mention that if you looked at it in the right profile, his nose did sort of look like a sausage.

Jim Sheppeck
Farmington, NM

(Link from this thread on MetaFilter)