Still recovering from my THREE-HOUR interview (a three-hour tour, a three-hour tour) yesterday afternoon/evening ... by all accounts, I should be pleased that three high-level partners each wanted to spend one long unbillable hour with me. But they were all such great story-tellers, I can't tell if their willingness to talk with me was due to my impressive resume and magnetic personality or their own congenial natures. Time will tell ...
But for now, thanks to The Unlimited Mood, a distraction:
Your Linguistic Profile: |
50% General American English |
35% Yankee |
15% Dixie |
0% Midwestern |
0% Upper Midwestern |
***
ABOOT ME . . .
Which brings up an interesting point. I don't think I speak English like anyone else I know. Having grown up in an only-Korean-speaking home, possessing a particular ear for foreign languages, having the ability to absorb other people's accents as if they were my own, and having lived in the 'burbs, New York City and Boston for extended periods of time has made my speech into one weird amalgamation of all sorts of verbal and aural oddities.
I say "y'all" a lot because of Jack, from North Carolina, whom I met during a summer trip to The Motherland in 1992. A Korean-American boy with a Southern drawl = WEIRD.
I say "aboot" instead of "about" and "oat" instead of "out" because ... I don't really know why. That's just how my mouth shapes itself when forming that word and words like it.
I say "air-con" instead of "air conditioner" because that's how my Konglish-speaking parents say it and some habits are just too hard to break.
I say "cay-unt" and "stay-und" and the like instead of "can't" and "stand" because of Debbie, a sweet girl from WisCAHNsin who was really too nice to be in law school but tolerated the rest of us anyway.
I say "word" instead of "yes" because Cheech and I sometimes like to pretend that we're not from the leafy-green upper-middle-class suburb from which we actually hail.
I say "Mos-coe" instead of "Mahs-cow" because my Russian teacher told me the latter is totally incorrect, and now it makes me cringe to hear newscasters, especially the nasally ones, say it wrong.
I say "ttaccosssss" instead of "tah-coes" because that's how Sr. McKenney drummed it into me at a very young and impressionable age, and the latent Spanish woman inside me won't allow otherwise.
I say a lot of archaic words I find in 19th-century British novels because I think it's a shame that no one uses those cool, meaningful, emotion-laden words anymore. But then no one knows what I'm saying and they all think I'm being pretentious, which I'm not. I just wish I was Jane Austen.
I say a lot of other weirdly-pronounced things that make many people believe I'm from California. Southern California, to be exact. Alright, alright, I've been called a Valley Girl multiple times. AS IF!
I also add -al onto words that end in -ic, because those words tend to sound too short when spoken as they were meant to be pronounced. Something is not nearly "dramatic" enough until it is "dramaticAL." "Ironic" doesn't begin to describe the situation as well as "ironical" does. We've got "heretical," "magical," and "fantastical" -- so why not "genetical"?
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