Northampton, Northampton, Northhampton

April 13, 2015 11:59 AM

Energy in Northampton! (SLYT)

Via Dirty Modern Scoundrel

posted by Gilgongo (12 comments total)

Would be funny if Popper and Serafinowicz are secretly behind this.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 12:09 PM on April 13, 2015 [2 favorites]

As Alan Moore knows, Northampton is the mystical centre of England, so this isn't surprising.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:21 PM on April 13, 2015 [2 favorites]

The Northampton Development Council may have played a good game, but they were never going to compete for serious alien investment with the sheer Thatcherite-socialist Utopianism going on just a little further down the M1.

BTW, Milton Keynes still looks exactly the same as in the advert, just slightly tattier and with a worse bus service.
posted by Sonny Jim at 12:26 PM on April 13, 2015 [1 favorite]

Behind the fuzziness, those aliens speak with a really really British accent.
posted by benito.strauss at 12:31 PM on April 13, 2015

benito.strauss: "Behind the fuzziness, those aliens speak with a really really British accent."

Received Pronunciation is a hell of a thing, Bennie.
posted by boo_radley at 12:37 PM on April 13, 2015

I was referring to the voices around here. I'm not British, but I wouldn't have called that RP. In fact, I don't know how I would describe that accent. I can distinguish accents that are far from London, e.g. Welsh, Newcastle, Cornish, but I get confused in the mushy middle. How would you describe that?
posted by benito.strauss at 1:07 PM on April 13, 2015

Mushy middle is about it. The area is Northern enough not to have an Estuary sound, Southern enough not to have the Northernness that begins to creep in after Leicester, and is neither Eastern nor Western enough to have been affected by Coventry or Norfolk (respectively). I have friends from Corby who grew up there and have been living in the Midlands all their lives: she has a slightly Northern sound to her speech, with a touch of West Midlands, while he has no accent at all that I can place. It's an large area that happens to be hemmed in by lots of very different accents, which makes it something of a melting-pot.

It's also hard to tell under the alien-robot-voice.
posted by pipeski at 2:38 PM on April 13, 2015 [2 favorites]

(I reversed East and West in the above. Sorry, I do that a lot)
posted by pipeski at 3:08 PM on April 13, 2015

Wait, is it Northampton, or Northhampton?
posted by Llama-Lime at 3:43 PM on April 13, 2015

Spelling, Northampton. But the name comes from North+Hampton, so you do put the 'h' in there when saying the name. Westhampton and Easthampton have a hard 't' on the 'th'.
posted by YAMWAK at 11:12 PM on April 13, 2015

I don't pronounce the 'h' any more than the 'h' in 'Birmingham".
posted by salmacis at 2:16 AM on April 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

I don't pronounce the 'h' any more than the 'h' in 'Birmingham".

I admit that it isn't a strong 'h', but I spoke the name aloud several times and there is the slightest exhalation for the 'h' after the 'th' and before the 'a' kicks in. For me, with my accent. Admittedly, I don't use the word on a regular basis (I have relatives there, but haven't been in ages). Skipping it is fine. Maybe I just speak funny and no-one's had the heart to correct me.
posted by YAMWAK at 2:54 AM on April 14, 2015