“Can I get a glass of water?”
“I’m sorry, a glass of what?”
“Water.”
“No, you said ‘wooder’. In the rest of the country, we pronounce it wa-ter.”
Odds are you’ve met someone at Georgetown with this pronunciation. You’ve also probably also met the jerk ready to mock this and other linguistic quirks.
The truth is I am that jerk. Do you speak with that silly Long Island accent? Is your “y’all” just a little too twangy? Did you just say “pop” when you obviously meant soda? If I’m within earshot, I will point it out and educate you in proper pronunciation.
Although I usually try to pass it off as a friendly teasing, more than once I’ve seriously irritated close friends. In any case, the message is clear: my English is more generically American than your English!
Several days ago, a friend pointed out that my “California accent” comes out sometimes, and I’ve since spent far too much time dwelling on what that means. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no actual California accent, surfer-dude stereotypes aside. I used to say “hella” quite a bit, but now I think my accent is as pleasantly generic as it’s ever been.
Getting my English to be normal took me a long time. As I was growing up, my Peruvian parents were still learning and perfecting English. Most kids learn the proper pronunciation at home; my parents were a fountain of often-botched words. I’d dutifully learn their unique way of saying things and replicate it at school, often with disastrous results.
To this day, one of the words I most despise is “wafers.” For years I had heard my parents refer to them as “waffers,” the “a” sounding like it does in “waffles.” It wasn’t until middle school that I asked some kids if I could share in their “waffers,” resulting in no small amount of ridicule. My obsession with sounding like a normal American was born.
Georgetown gets a lot of criticism for not being diverse enough, and rightly so, but freshman year was my first experience with the lexical diversity of the country. I’d never known there was a national soda vs. pop schism, or that there were such things as bubblers. I had also been relatively sure that the southern accent had vanished sometime around the Civil War and was surprised to learn I was mistaken.
Confronted by these new and unique voices, I did what so many do when exposed to uncomfortable diversity: I attacked it. Mocking your speaking style has been my way of making up for those years of “waffers.” How great is it that I, for whom English was a second language, can now speak it better than these silly natives?
This is, of course, absurd logic. I likely have as many linguistic oddities in my vocabulary as anyone that I have picked up on. My friend pointed out, for instance, I sometimes stretch my u’s out to sound like someone saying ‘duuude.’ The presence or absence of these regional traits are no indicator of English-speaking ability or American-ness. Convincing myself otherwise, even subconsciously, was a bad move on my part. I will make more of an effort to lay off the snide comments regarding people’s accents.
It’s still called soda, though, because ‘pop’ is plain wrong.
