Sunday, August 06, 2006

So

As an instructor of HEL (History of the English Language), it's cracking me up to watch the Kid picking up the Arkansas/Oklahoma accent. It also puts a nice spoke in the wheel of those who think parents have all that much control over what happens in their children's lives -- she's with us almost all the time; she's with her peers maybe seven hours a day, and only that during the school year. Who is she learning to speak like? Well, it ain't me, can I point that out?

She's getting the Oklahoma monophthong -- mah, she says, for my, and raht, for right.

She's got the Arkansas double diphthong -- da-uh, for day, the-uh, for there.

And cran for crayon. I'm not sure if this is AR or OK. It's very cute, though.

Nearly everything she says these days, I say it right after her. "Stop mocking my accent!" she yells.

"I'm not mocking it," I insist, "I'm recording it! For Science!"

But she doesn't believe me.

Why yes. I am warping my child. How kind of you to ask.

2 comments:

zelda1 said...

I do love those accents. It wasn't until I moved to California and people wanted me to talk and asked me to say things like window and I'm a gonna and I'm a fixin to and things like that, well, I realized that I did sound way different from the avearage Califonian. I never lost my accent, the entire ten years that I lived there, but I did get a softer accent, and since I am back here in Arkansas, my accent is way back and you know, it just doesn't bother me, not like it did when I was twenty something. Leave that baby alone and let her embrass her accents and someday when she is going to Harvard, people will stop and say, wow, you have such a nice southern drawl, she will then be exotic in a nice way.

zelda1 said...

There's that arkie thing, embrace her not embrass. Wow, all those xanax and that ativan, well, it has made me an few digits lower on my already too low IQ. By the way, love the Ativan shot. Totally knocked me on my butt; the sad thing, I had to wake up later and the pain, well it was still there.