The Rain in Spain Stays Mainly in the Plain

We watched "My Fair Lady" for the culture class. The relevance was, that there is a chapter in the textbook on the development of the English language, and in particular a section on the connection between social class and pronunciation with respect to British English. The proper way to speak British English is known as "Received Pronunciation" or RP and that is what is used by BBC radio and television announcers. The book’s point is that there is no longer the strong connection between pronunciation and social calls with respect to British English that there once was. And there is nothing that serves as a better illustration of how strong that connection was than the musical based on George Bernard Shaw’s play and starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison. The plot, you may recall, involves the fact that Harrison plays Professor Henry Higgens who takes the flower girl Eliza Doolittle from off the streets and attempts, as part of a bet, to transform here into an elegant socialite and promising to pass her off as such a one at an elegant ball six months hence. He makes his own point about the connection between how one talks and they way one lives when he says (well, sings) to a fellow upper crust companion: "If you spoke like she does instead of the way you do/you’d be selling flowers too." They especially enjoyed the part where Eliza has her linguistic break through by being able to finally pronounce "The Rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain." At this point, you may recall, they break into one of the film's better known musical numbers. We didn’t get all the way through, but with some skipping around made it up to the point where Henry Higgins does a trial run by taking Eliza to the elegant race track and she ends up by reverting to her old style when a horse she has a bet on is involved in a close race. "Move you arse," she screams among the polite crowd, and there is quite a bit of consternation and even one case of a woman fainting.

Interestingly, there was just an article in a recent Newsweek (the Peace Corps sends us Newsweek) that mentioned this movie because it was about a British woman who was actually being tutored to make her pronunciation not so aristocratic but more like the way most of her fellow countrymen talk because she did not want to stand out from the crowd.

I'm not sure if they grasped the point of all this, but they sure do like a musical here.