As a film student, I feel it is my duty to inform my readers about the fantastic film Ollie and I experienced last night. Its description on American Netflix (I have access to many versions of Netflix due to an add on called Hola) left out a ton of details and I'm glad it did. A user on r/NetflixBestOf on reddit recommended the film The One I Love (2014) with Mark Duplass and Elizabeth Moss. It's only an hour and 30 minutes, a refreshingly brief film. The advice on the reddit thread was to go into the film knowing nothing about it, and just trusting the recommender on watching the film. The film was brilliant. I really don't want to spoil anyone on the film, but I cannot reccommend the film enough. Readers, if you go on to watch this film please contact me on how you felt about it! There are several ways to contact me-Twitter, email, Facebook, Instagram. You name it. I just get really excited about films that have some form of cerebral stimulation.
Despicable Me is on TV right now and I've never seen it before. I knew the minions came from this film, and that Steve Carrell voices Gru, but that's it. I just saw candy in the film and it made me hungry. I haven't eaten much today because of the heartburn I woke up with. I went to the fridge, saw a mini custard egg tart, wanted to eat it, but then thought about how horrible I felt this morning and went for strawberry yogurt instead.
I want to discuss the phrase "take the mick," or "take the mickey." This is a British English phrase that I have recently been exposed to. For whatever reason it took 5 months of me living here to come across people using this weird phrase. But before I try and explain what taking the mickey is, I must explain the phrase "taking the piss." You see, in the UK to "take the piss" means to be unreasonable. So, in conversation, let's say, Ollie comes home from a lecture and says that his professor assigned the class a 5,000 word essay due tomorrow, giving him less than 24 hours to complete it. He would say that his professor (actually Britons don't call them professors, but still) was taking the piss, or being unreasonable. Then we come to "take the mick." It's just another way of saying take the piss. However, taking the mick has a crazy backstory that we will explore. However before we do I need to explain another phenomenon in this country, Cockney rhyming slang. I'm going to enlist Wikipedia to help explain this one:
The construction involves replacing a common word with a rhyming phrase of two or three words and then, in almost all cases, omitting the secondary rhyming word (which is thereafter implied), in a process called hemiteleia, making the origin and meaning of the phrase elusive to listeners not in the know.[3]
One example is replacing the word "stairs" with the rhyming phrase "apples and pears". Following the pattern of omission, "and pears" is dropped, thus the spoken phrase "I'm going up the apples" means "I'm going up the stairs".
Another example that I've heard Ollie say is he's going to use the dog and bone. Which means he is going to use the phone, because phone rhymes with dog and bone. It's mostly outdated because you will mostly hear older generations using this kind of slang. At this point English, at least British English, is no longer something Americans and Brits have in common. Since living here it has only highlighted more and more how different the two are. My intention here is to bridge the gaps that media has taught us about the UK. Now other Americans and people from other nations can get more of an understanding of the UK, since the media can only depict so much. I mean, of course I won't be able to tell you every single difference between the UK and US because some things just cannot be articulated. However I think it's fun decoding the UK culture.I'm off to watch Despicable Me, the storyline seems to be picking up!
Happy 2015, readers
Leah
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