Could "be" BE anymore stressed?
Chandler Bing (played by Matthew Perry) uniquely stressed the verb “be” in the sentence, “could I be…?”.
Perry called Binge’s unique way of speaking the “Murray-Perry Cadence” - a way of speaking he (Matthew) and his friends developed in 3rd grade.
From Perry’s memoir - ““I read the words in an unexpected fashion, hitting emphases that no one else had hit. I was back in Ottawa with my childhood friends the Murrays; I got laughs where no one else had. I was talking in a way that no one had talked in sitcoms before, hitting odd emphases, picking a word in a sentence you might not imagine was the beat. I didn’t know it yet, but my way of speaking would filter into the culture across the next few decades. For now, though, I was just trying to find interesting ways into lines that were already funny, but that I thought I could truly make dance. (I was once told that the writers would underline the word not usually emphasised in a sentence just to see what I would do with it.)"
#language #linguistics #English #sentencestress #stress #friends #friendstv #matthewperry #chandlerbing #rip