Whenever I go to a foreign country, I always learn how to say, “I am a stupid American and I never learned how to speak your language.†The recipients of this vast wit – even if French – always respond with a hearty laugh and lots of lovely English I can understand. I respond by pretending to be sheepish, kind and appreciative. It isn’t as if I can’t be arsed to learn a phrase or two in foreign languages, it’s just that I am so bad at ‘accents’ that it is really quite humiliating and people commonly take the piss out of me. That is, of course, if they can understand me.
My Michigan accent has slowly morphed into that accent which has caused Madonna – a fellow Michigander – much derision. ‘AmerEnglish’, the rednecks call it, like the accent is faked and has fuck-all to do with the fact that we’ve lived in the country for the better part of a decade. Fact of the matter is, I now round my vowels and generally sound like a big fucking ponce. I am ashamed to admit, I sound like Lloyd Grossman, and that man is a bit of a dick. I’ve adopted the ‘correct’ pronunciation of such words as ‘aluminium’ and ‘zebra’. I can pronounce place names like ‘Leicester’ and ‘Bicester’ they way the Saxons meant for them to be pronounced; with the wholesale removal of the middle syllable. However, I shall never reach pronunciation utopia, for I am extraordinarily flawed. A single word remains my bugbear, as a beacon of how I will never truly be ‘English’. That word? Yogurt.
Granted, whenever I say it, I think I sound fucking brilliant. Yet every time, others laugh. They mock. They call me names like, um, ‘Cheryl’ and ‘American’ (although I did have a friend who was convinced my name was Jamie, the bloody idiot.) And you know what? It hurts, it does, it hurts me right here in my heart. It has come to the point where I have stopped eating yogurt and yogurt-based products entirely for fear of being shown to be the Midwesterner I am. It isn’t though I am ashamed of where I’m from, it’s that I’m ashamed that my birth accent makes me sound like a chickenfucker
My mum’s currently staying with me in the UK. She is the living and breathing reminder of how I used to force all my vowels through my nose. I sounded like an oboe while speaking, and that’s pretty fucking annoying. I think you’ll all agree – except, of course, those of you from Michigan who are furiously mumbling to themselves, “I haven’t got an accent.†Suuuuure you fucking don’t.
I’ve got a Modern Toss ‘Mr Tourette’ print adorning my bedroom wall. Suffice to say, it contains the words ‘spunk’ and ‘cunt’. My mother looked upon the print and told me the story of a ‘little old lady’ who writes stories where the hero, a cat, likes to drink spunkwater. Spunk water. SPUNK WATER. The combination of spunk and water. Sperm and H20. “Mum,†I said, “Do you know what spunk is!?†I then had to explain to my 60 year old mother that spunk is, in fact, jism. And this ‘spunk drinking festival’ that Mr Tourette was on about had nothing to do with little old ladies, their hero felines and spunk water, but rather, cum guzzling in a church. I then walked out of the bedroom and saw my dad in his underpants. It was an awful, terrible day.
My mum, bless her, pronounced the word ‘sandwich’ as ‘samrich’ for some god forsaken reason. We went to a local samrich shop for some samriches, when my mum went to order her samrich with the Polish samrich waitress. The poor waitress, with an already limited grasp of correctly-pronounced English, didn’t have a fucking clue what my mum was on about. I, on the other hand, was utterly mortified and have thus decided to, from now on, only take her to restaurants where she can properly pronounce the cuisine. “STEAK.†You can’t fuck that pronunciation up, right?
