Accents

I was listening to the BBC World Service the other day and they were interviewing a guy from Newcastle, a "Geordie" as they are called, or a "Scotsman with his brains kicked in" as Jackie Leven calls them.

I always had a hard time understanding a thick Geordie accent, and I know I haven't heard one in a while, but this guy might as well have been speaking Punjabi. I could not understand ONE SINGLE WORD.

I've been away from the UK for 8 years now and I guess I've lost the ear for it, but it amazes me how such a small country can have such an amazing array of accents and ways of speaking. In the States, with the exception of the Deep South, you pretty much can't tell the difference between a person from New Jersey and a person from Minnesota, a distance of 1200 miles. In Scotland, you can tell immediately whether a person is from Glasgow or Edinburgh, a distance of 45 miles. Go another 20 miles North of Edinburgh into Fife and you are in another accent zone altogether.

I miss the small idiosyncrasies about living in the UK; the fact that some places offer you salt and vinegar on your chips while others, just down the road, are salt and sauce. This doesn't sound like much but it keeps life interesting and has the effect of staving off the homogeneous existence that is being forced on us all by Mainstreet USA/UK.