"Neverehhdd uvvit!"

One of the few reasons I haven't completely given up on the New York Times, despite their complicity in the Bush administration's phony baloney war in Iraq and myriad other abuses of power emanating from Washington, Albany and other seats of government, is that the Arts, Metro, Home, Travel and other sections are often still damn interesting sources of information. One recent example is this article about Liverpool and the peculiar dialect of English spoken there, called Scouse.

Liverpool, in the Northwest of England, is the home to the team I support in the English Premier League, Liverpool FC. When English football is mentioned in US newspapers outside of the sports sections, the team almost always mentioned is Manchester United. For example, there are 657 references to "Manchester United" in the New York Times since 1996 and, well, far fewer for any combination of words and phrases I can combine for Liverpool. (Americans tend to drop the "FC" so a search for "Liverpool" doesn't help and "Liverpool FC" yields zero results.) Additionally, we're having a very rough season, so attention is even harder to get.

That said, not only is this piece interesting from a linguistic and cultural standpoint, the third and fourth word of the piece are "Rafael Benitez," who happens to be the Spanish-born manager (the NYT called him the "coach") of Liverpool FC! Not only that, but the story on the website has a picture of 'Rafa" as well as one of our Captain, midfielder Stephen Gerrard.

Care to guess what the title of this post says?