linguistic snot knots
i know i've explored this theme in great detail here in my ds journal, but i was not able to find them and i need to vent.
i told off a mexican imperialist at swim lessons tonight. he was with a child approximately the same age as baby sis (3) and the parental small talk started friendly enough. children have that unifying way about them. the fellow was new to swim lessons and looking for reassurance that his daughter was okay for her current fear of her swim instructor. our 3 have been in swim lessons for long enough to be well adapted.
the problem arose when he turned his heavy mexican accent to bragging about his language skills with such smug superiority that i found myself bracing for the "los gringos no se pueden" routine. your accent gets uglier every time i'm forced to listen that routine, bubba. learning that i studied biology in ecuador didn't interest him in the slightest. his linguistic pride hadn't reached queen isabel's court yet. i walked away. i returned and he was off again as soon as i returned. i cut loose on him in spanish about the injustice of his pride. don't make me listen to your inflated ego when i am not even permitted to speak. of course he answered my spanish commentary in english with his foreign accent growing thicker and uglier each time he answered my spanish in english. that is saying allot since his accent started out thicker than the mexico city smog.
when i returned again, his linguistic pride was on how skillfully he was teaching his child to speak spanish. i didn't ask if she was afraid of her teacher because she doesn't understand english. instead, i began to speak in spanish, with him answering in english, about the difficulties children have in growing up listening to this linguistic prejudice. the child's eyes lit merrily to hear me speaking spanish with enthusiastic overtures of joining the conversation. daddy said good-bye in english while he picked up the confused child and ran. si, mi hija (mija in mexico) se pueden.
vent, vent, gnarl gnash. . .
si, se puede. no crees los racistas.
Replies
it has been a goodly while since i have been exposed to an accent nazi with a north american english accent. hubby had a pair of visitors from his high school days, one of whom is a dogmatic accent nazi. his expertise dated all the way back to the pre-columbian dialects spoken by indigenous tribes. i am far from certain, but i think it distinctly possible that the last accent nazi of this ilk i walked away from was an expert on how jesus pronounced his words. proof unavailable, my friend. arguing with a fool only proves there are two fools. you win. let me know where to mail your trophy. heil hitler.
the shock of the exposure catapulted me past all the frustrations of attempting to master spoken languages and triggered me into ruminations of the accent tyranny i was raised with. between the speech defect of my early childhood and the white supremacy of my criminally dysfunctional birth family, that exposure was substantial. the fact that my studies of written languages commenced before i was able to speak north american english makes it all too easy to wash away that approximately 15 years of confusion with the half a century of hearing heavy foreign accents telling me how ugly my accent is in **their** language.
am i remembering rightly that this hideous game used to be fairly standard here in north america, to the point of making me fearful to expose the accent of my speech defect? if the memory thread is accurate, the standardization of this game was knocked off its pedestal within the civil rights movement of the 60's, alongside its collateral damage of making children afraid of spoken language.
processing. . . pondering. . .
can i even hear my own accent? it is a physical fact that humans cannot hear their own voices. what we hear is the sonic vibrations off our own bones. the sonic vibrations other people hear never reach our ear drums far enough to drown out the vibrations of our bones. there are humans among us with the gift of being able to change accents more easily than they change clothes. is the same true for those individuals?
for sure, i donae believe the average grammar nazi can hear their own accents.