“YOU HAVE AN ACCENT!”
Creator: Benjamin Applebaum, Public Domain
I have a non-American accent.
I don’t have an extra head; I don’t boil babies at midnight; I pay my taxes and vote in elections and celebrate the holidays just like the majority of other Americans. Nevertheless, because I happened to grow up, not in Los Angeles, the city in which I have most happily lived for most of my life, but in faraway rainy England, I have, and presumably at this point will retain until I die, an English accent.
It’s generally considered to be an attractive accent, which is fortunate for me because it’s always nice to be admired, and this is for something I didn’t have to work for at all. But it does set me out, indelibly, as being from somewhere else, as being other. People will comment on an accent: I used to do it myself before I emigrated, but I had had no idea until I was on the receiving end of it just how darned often they will do it. They will exclaim, “Oh! You have an accent!” as if this were something about myself that I had not until then noticed. They will say, “I love your accent!” which is flattering but not necessarily relevant if I am, for instance, complaining about my utilities bill. (I once had a friend whose husband I stopped referring to by name, because we were required to pause the entire conversation for expressions of surprised delight every time I called him Mahr-tin instead of Mart’n. Every. Single. Time.) They will listen to me talk with an expression of rapt fascination, leading me to believe with smug contentment that what I’m saying must be really very interesting indeed, only to cut across my brilliant and incisive line of reasoning with a dreamy, “You know, I love your accent so much, I could listen to you read the laundry list.” Two women’s shirts and one deflated ego, by Saturday morning, please.
Having an accent means being placed into a category. It’s human nature: people make assumptions about people with accents anywhere. Americans from the Southern states are supposed to be one thing; Americans from New York, another. French people are supposed to be sexy, Germans, efficient, and I have an Irish cousin here in California, a steely academic with a mind like a scalpel, who waxes eloquent when her Leinster lilt causes the unwary to pigeonhole her as “whimsical.” When people hear my own accent, they assume that I’m upper-class, which I’m not. Or that I’m pretentious: I promise you I’m not that either, I just say toast-ah instead of toaster. They assume that I must love wet weather, and look confused and hurt when I suggest that the fact that I have chosen to live here in Los Angeles instead of there in England might just indicate that I might really not be quite so devoted to it as they suppose. They assume that I have intimate knowledge of, and am endlessly fascinated by, the inner workings of the Royal Family. I don’t. And I’m not.
It also means a steady stream of strangers asking me, brightly, where I am “from.” This is a fairly straightforward question to answer when I’m standing in line at my local supermarket, since a shopping cart containing a 20 pound box of cat litter, 32 fluid ounces of drain clog remover, and a giant bottle of Listerine will suggest to the observant that, from whichever part of the world I happened to emerge, I do set out my current garbage cans somewhere in the general vicinity. But when I’m in other places, it becomes socially fraught. If I say I’m from Los Angeles, people will look offended because I’m clearly not originally, and it sounds as if I’m making fun of them. But if I say London, Murphy’s law will guarantee that they will have been there more recently than I have, and will plunge headlong into a spirited discussion of the heat wave, or the bus strike, or the current political upset, leaving me to nod politely and strive desperately for the air of one who has the faintest idea what they’re talking about. If I tell the truth, which is that I was brought up in London but have spent most of my adult life in California, their eyes will dart in panic as they begin to wonder uneasily just how much of her life story this crazy woman is planning to relate to them before her caregiver arrives to lead her, gently, away.
Heigh ho, you say, but surely it also means you must fit in better when you return to the Old Country? Well, no. Imagine, if you will, visiting a place in which you haven’t lived for decades, where you no longer have the foggiest notion of how anything works in the day-to-day, not where to deposit your recycling, nor how much to tip in a restaurant, nor even how to buy a ticket for the Tube, and yet when you open your mouth to ask about these things, you sound exactly as if you’ve never left, leaving the locals to reach the conclusion that you either are having them on, or are, as a Liverpudlian friend once cheerfully suggested, “a bit simple.”
I know what you’re thinking: if that’s how she feels, why doesn’t she lose the accent? The honest answer is that I can’t. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I’m hopelessly non-musical; maybe it’s because I was well into my 20s when I emigrated; and my all-American husband Mr. Los Angeles is given enchantingly to suggest that it might be because I plain old don’t listen to a word anyone says; but for whatever the reason, my fussily up-and-down British trill refuses to flatten itself into the laidback Californian monotone. When I try to do an American “r”, I sound like Tony the Tiger; when I try to tackle an entire sentence, I apparently sound like Cary Grant. So I’ve learned to accept it and live with the fact that I will forever sound like a stranger in the country I call my home.
Inevitably, there have been Americanisms I’ve acquired over the years. It now feels natural for me to say gas instead of petrol, sidewalk instead of pavement, and bathrobe instead of dressing gown. I’ve also taught myself to pronounce a few easy words, like bay-sil instead of bassil, and skedule instead of shedule, mostly because I grew so tired of people stopping the conversation to say, “I love the way you said that.” In restaurants, I even ask for rannch dressing on my salad instead of rahnch because I have discovered that otherwise the entire table will expire of hunger while the waiter and I are playing Twenty Questions about what it was I just said.
It seems that I can run but not hide, however. I was recently having a lipsmackingly delicious gossip with a clued-up New York friend over breakfast in her local diner. She’d just reached a particularly juicy part about the latest celebrity chef saga when the waitress came to take our order: I glanced quickly at the menu, ordered the first thing my eye fell on, which was a cheese and tomato omelet, and turned eagerly back to my friend’s tale.
But the waitress was still with us. And she was not happy.
“Tom-ay-to?” she echoed mournfully. “Did you just say tom-ay-to?”
Her face fell over her order pad. Her shoulders slumped in disappointment.
“You said tom-ay-to,” she sighed. “I was so looking forward to hearing you say tom-ah-to.”
I actually felt a little sorry for her.