(no subject)
OK, so just be warned that this is going to sound terrible and bitchy and wrong.
I'm watching the NY Governor speaking on gay marriage becoming legal in NY State (which is fantastic), and I sort of can't pay attention to what he's saying because I'm cringing at his New Yawk accent.
Why does that sound bad, you ask? Because I was raised on Long Island (Lawn Guyland to the locals) and it's shitty of me to look down on my own. But good god do I hate that fucking accent. There's just something about it that sounds sort of... barbaric, and not in a good savage Scottish brogue sort of way.
I don't normally have much of an LI accent. If I get really really sleepy the "oh my gawwd" will rear its ugly head, and if I get really really mad the LI will start to become evident in direct correlation to the rise in percentage of swear words in my speech. But mostly I don't. This is not by design: my dad has a thick Irish brogue (the unwitting emulation of which got my sisters and me all sent to speech therapy because they thought we had lisps - and I do have a lisp, which I hate, but it's unrelated) and my mom always made a point of speaking with very clear, unaccented enunciation because she was a social worker and felt it was best to sound unbiased in any way.
So I never really picked it up. My oldest sister Kerry has it BAD. She hung out with a lot of very stereotypical Lawn Guyland types in school (and still does, she even married one), so she has this loud LI thing with "o" sounds made "aw" sounds and "g" sounds so hard they could break a diamond. My other sister Nancy affected a fake Boston accent in her senior year of high school because I think she thought it made her sound more sophisticated. Since then her speech has meshed into this weird hybrid of Valley Girl, bad Boston impersonation, and Westchester Rich Bitch (which is like the LI accent but a little less rough). She pronounces the word "night" "noight" for reasons I have never managed to comprehend.
Me? I dunno. I vary my pronunciation of words like "either" and "neither", sometimes in the same sentence, which sort of drives me crazy but I can't seem to pick a pronunciation and stick with it. I use the words "like," "totally," and "awesome" more than anyone probably should outside of the movie Heathers. But I don't think I have much of an accent except in the rare occasions mentioned above where my LI comes out to play.
I have noticed that no one in Connecticut can pronounce my god damn name properly. It's like the short "a" sound just doesn't even exist here. In New York I'm Tara, the first syllable of which should rhyme with "cat." (No, I am not named after the plantation in Gone With the Wind. I am named after the place in Ireland after which that plantation was named, and I'm sort of an elitist about it.) But in CT I'm "Terra." Or "Tahra," which I fucking hate because that's a poodle's name and I seriously kind of want to punch people when they say it that way. When I've tried to correct people it winds up being this long, arduous thing where my name suddenly becomes half an hour long as they try to produce a sound they make every day but suddenly can't comprehend: "TAAAAAAAA-ra?" "...nevermind."
And it's not just my name. On LI, I have a sister Kerry and a friend Carrie and they have two totally different names. But here in the Nutmeg State they apparently have exactly the same name only people really think they're saying it differently and look at you like you're speaking Urdu when you try to explain it to them. Erin and Aaron are also the same name here. Seriously. It's like they legally banned the short "a" sound in proper names. Everyone says "cat" and "bat" and "hat" just fine so really it's the only explanation I can conjure.
Aaaaaaaand now I'm rambling. But really. The governor's accent was annoying the shit out of me.
I'm watching the NY Governor speaking on gay marriage becoming legal in NY State (which is fantastic), and I sort of can't pay attention to what he's saying because I'm cringing at his New Yawk accent.
Why does that sound bad, you ask? Because I was raised on Long Island (Lawn Guyland to the locals) and it's shitty of me to look down on my own. But good god do I hate that fucking accent. There's just something about it that sounds sort of... barbaric, and not in a good savage Scottish brogue sort of way.
I don't normally have much of an LI accent. If I get really really sleepy the "oh my gawwd" will rear its ugly head, and if I get really really mad the LI will start to become evident in direct correlation to the rise in percentage of swear words in my speech. But mostly I don't. This is not by design: my dad has a thick Irish brogue (the unwitting emulation of which got my sisters and me all sent to speech therapy because they thought we had lisps - and I do have a lisp, which I hate, but it's unrelated) and my mom always made a point of speaking with very clear, unaccented enunciation because she was a social worker and felt it was best to sound unbiased in any way.
So I never really picked it up. My oldest sister Kerry has it BAD. She hung out with a lot of very stereotypical Lawn Guyland types in school (and still does, she even married one), so she has this loud LI thing with "o" sounds made "aw" sounds and "g" sounds so hard they could break a diamond. My other sister Nancy affected a fake Boston accent in her senior year of high school because I think she thought it made her sound more sophisticated. Since then her speech has meshed into this weird hybrid of Valley Girl, bad Boston impersonation, and Westchester Rich Bitch (which is like the LI accent but a little less rough). She pronounces the word "night" "noight" for reasons I have never managed to comprehend.
Me? I dunno. I vary my pronunciation of words like "either" and "neither", sometimes in the same sentence, which sort of drives me crazy but I can't seem to pick a pronunciation and stick with it. I use the words "like," "totally," and "awesome" more than anyone probably should outside of the movie Heathers. But I don't think I have much of an accent except in the rare occasions mentioned above where my LI comes out to play.
I have noticed that no one in Connecticut can pronounce my god damn name properly. It's like the short "a" sound just doesn't even exist here. In New York I'm Tara, the first syllable of which should rhyme with "cat." (No, I am not named after the plantation in Gone With the Wind. I am named after the place in Ireland after which that plantation was named, and I'm sort of an elitist about it.) But in CT I'm "Terra." Or "Tahra," which I fucking hate because that's a poodle's name and I seriously kind of want to punch people when they say it that way. When I've tried to correct people it winds up being this long, arduous thing where my name suddenly becomes half an hour long as they try to produce a sound they make every day but suddenly can't comprehend: "TAAAAAAAA-ra?" "...nevermind."
And it's not just my name. On LI, I have a sister Kerry and a friend Carrie and they have two totally different names. But here in the Nutmeg State they apparently have exactly the same name only people really think they're saying it differently and look at you like you're speaking Urdu when you try to explain it to them. Erin and Aaron are also the same name here. Seriously. It's like they legally banned the short "a" sound in proper names. Everyone says "cat" and "bat" and "hat" just fine so really it's the only explanation I can conjure.
Aaaaaaaand now I'm rambling. But really. The governor's accent was annoying the shit out of me.