dinner with my people

Dinner with the Scotts this evening.  This means I'll be saying, "huh?" and "what's that again/" and "I'm sorry..." a lot.  I spend most of my time trying to figure out different and new ways of letting them know that I don't understand about half of what they're saying. (They're from the "old sod" by the way)

Do you remember the movie where Brad Pitt plays a boxer with a crazy thick accent?  It's sort of like that without the boxing.

I'm convinced that Americans have accents too.  I have friends from north east Ohio that have sort of a Michigan-Wisconsin kind of thing going.  I have friends from the south with sort of a Bo and Luke thing happening.  People in Boston, New York, Philly...they all have a regional thing going.

But not in Columbus, Ohio.  That is the vanilla of all the English speaking world.  If you were building a delicious ice cream of all our verbal gems, you'd start with a Columbus base.  Cincinnati is close, but we've got a case of the Kentucky that we can't seem to shake.  Nope, it's Columbus that really is the heart of the heart of it all...in terms of not adding R's in words that don't have R's.  They say it the way you hear it on those dictionary sites that have the audio help.

Because of this I think someone from Columbus probably stands a much better chance with the witness protection agency.  You've got a solid foundation to work with.  It's like starting from scratch; you've got a blank canvas from which to work.  There aren't many idiosyncrasies that you'd have to unlearn before you learned how to add an "eh?" or "don't ya know" to your sentences.

Yup, I guess what I'm saying is this is the perfect place to commit some sort of mob crime and then sing like a bird to the D.A.