Curl your larshes and darsh out!

Why do people here in Missouri say: “warsh” instead of wash? They do their warshing in warshing machines and call the nation’s capital “Warshington”. I mean, they don’t darsh out of the house with a pocket full of carsh to spend in Narshville. Nor do they marsh their potatoes or eat yellow squarsh! So why warsh?

Whenever you move to a new place, you try to adapt and one of the biggest signs of being an outsider is an accent. So, by extension, one of the best ways to blend in is to speak like the locals. For the most part, I think I sound the same as Missourians. But, alas, my daughter tells me that her friends think I have a strong, funny accent. Oh, great. Funny? I doubt they mean ha-ha; it’s just a polite way of saying “weird”. They have no idea how hard it was to drop the urge to finish statements with the proverbial Canadian “eh” that humbly invites a listener to agree or disagree with stated opinions.

Other than “warsh”, however, there don’t appear to be many words that differ from the English that I learned to speak. It’s more that the vowels here are stretched out. Try it: say “sorry” like me and then say it like a local. First is SOH-REE with almost no differentiation in the emphasis placed on each syllable. Now the local way: SAAAAW-REE. Here’s another flashing “you are an alien” neon sign: I tell my daughter to finish her PRO-JECT, while her classmates say PRAW-JECT.

Yesterday, while volunteering, I asked the director for the fax number. She was very puzzled. She asked “Fox Number?” and I repeated “Fax”. She asked, “What’s a FOX number?”. I replied that I was trying to find the number for the office’s facsimile machines ... you know (I added for extra emphasis), the machine that sends and receives documents. “Oh!”, she said, “a FAAAAAAAAAHHHHHX machine!” You can’t take it for granted that you’re being understood, I guess.

It reminded me of a time years ago in Ireland, when my teen-aged nephew told me that he hadn’t understood a word that anyone had been saying since we arrived on the Emerald Isle. I told him that the local people probably didn’t understand anything he was saying either. He was astounded. He stopped walking to contemplate my words. I guess the revelation was too great to absorb while walking. “Why?”, he asked me, “I don’t have an accent!”

It’s always that way, isn’t it? We can’t hear our own accents. When I speak French, I think I sound exactly like the locals but the puzzled look that sometimes creases the brows of my French-speaking friends leads me to believe that I’m occasionally making them work really hard to follow my train of thought!

It’s the same here, even though it’s English. I am conscious of the look. There’s surprise, followed by curiosity and definitely confusion. I no longer have to ask people to repeat questions, but when I first got here, I had to concentrate to understand the checkout lady’s “Paper or plastic, honey?”

My strategy is to speak slowly and to adjust some of my words so that they’re longer and softer – so that they sound less alien, if you know what I mean. I’ll apologise now, however, because I’m sure that I shall never learn to say “warsh” and “warshing”. I guess I’ll never fully blend in.