Saturday, February 13, 2016

A glory-hunter's guide to supporting Leicester City



With Leicester City five points clear at the top of the Premiership, the club will be attracting a lot of new supporters - particularly former Manchester United fans from Surrey.

So the Leicester Mercury is timely in producing its 'A glory-hunter's guide to supporting Leicester City':
"Interesting fact for you," tweeted Jason Manford. "As a rule of thumb, if you can't place someone's accent, they're from Leicester." 
Unplaceable it may be, but it's there. Even though the council tried to kill it off it the 1950s with elocution lessons in schools. 
It's arguably the first proper accent you hit when you drive north from London. 
Somewhere just south of Market Harborough a barrrth becomes a bath, and as you approach the city, magical things happen to the endings of words. 
The quickleee of RP English becomes quickleh. Less-terr becomes Lestuh. It slows things down a little when there's a run of them altogether, so if you have cause to ring 999 for instance and say: "quickly, quickly, it's an emergency, there's a dire fire at Leicester Snooker Centre," well, there's a good chance there will have been casualties by the time you've finished raising the alarm.
And, as the Mercury says, if you want to understand more about the city's culture, listen to the song above.

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