Accents

Thanks to Al Fresco Holidays, for putting right the situation, and offering a second holiday prize.

Now, here's a story about accents. My kids have varying degrees of American accents. As you would guess, 7-yo, being the youngest, has the strongest. She sounds American to me. According to a local here, you would think she was an American child, with rather proper parents.

That's one aspect of the British accent that I think fuels the American love of it. Somehow it speaks to them of bygone eras, and feeds that vague nostalgia we all have somewhere in our psyches, the sense that things used to be better. There was a time when all was well with the world, or at least a bit more so than today. I might be wrong about this, but it's a working theory. For Brits, it plays out in period dramas. We all know intellectually that life in Edwardian England was oppressive, smelly, and you couldn't get antibiotics, but somehow we all have a slight yearning for Downton Abbey days. Not From Around Here has an interesting take on the matter.

Anyhoo, 7-yo has clearly picked up this idea that a British accent means you're a bit proper. I know this, because she was annoyed with me for some parental injustice or other - you know the kind of thing - and from the back of the car, she piped up with her rendering of what I was insisting. And out came this prim, disapproving, rather aloof, voice. Think Maggie Smith as Miss Jean Brodie in an English accent, with light hints of Penelope Keith as Margot Ledbetter, citrus suggestions of Judy Dench as Q in James Bond, and woody after-notes of Helen Mirren as The Queen. (I haven't yet seen Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher; otherwise I expect she'd be in there too.)

"Mummy, you always say [enter Maggie Smith combo stage left] 'We can't possibly go, it's far too late, and you need an early night because we've had a busy week'. [back to Midwest twang] You always say that." (Or whatever the details were. I forget the exact conversation, but you get the picture.)

We've all had those moments when we hear our child use our phrases, and think "oh my goodness, is that what I sound like?" I tell you, this occasion was that feeling in spades. Do I really sound all prim and proper to her now? Or was she just taking the mickey? Or is she so attuned to American cultural assumptions, that to her, an English accent now implies a whole package?

It made me laugh, but it also made me a little sad - this gap between us. It's not that I want her to be like me, but it's that need for shared heritage with your children. Why else do we have Christmas traditions, take our children to places we went to as children, and teach them history in school?

Of course the alternative interpretation is that I really do sound like that.

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