Accents=Cool

I don't know what it is, but I think that accents are so cool. Listening to English or Scottish people speak just fascinates me. Sometimes, they talk so fast that you have stop what you're doing just so you can understand what they said five minutes ago! I don't know what started this fettish but when my cousin brought home an Englisher as a boyfriend, I knew I was hooked. Just noticing both the obvious and subtle differences in our pronunciation and word choice is really fun.

And it's not just English accents that are cool. In America there are so many different accents that are native to each state, and sometimes the regions within the states. For instance, us Kentuckians have a seemingly distinct accent. But western Kentucky has a totally different one than Eastern and that's where everyone gets confused. It's the mountaineers who have the extreme country accents and don't wear shoes, not us.

On one of our last days in Hawaii, we took this trip around the island to see what treasures it had to offer. At one of the stops we met up with several families who were jumping off a rocky edge into a ravine about 30 feet below. As we watched the crazies jump, a girl from another family stood next to me and after we'd talked for a while she asked, "Are you guys from Texas?" It took everything in me not to fall down laughing. In my mind, Texans are a completely different breed and our accents are nothing alike, but for this Orange County, CA native, we're one and the same. It was kind of cool to be compared to a Texan though; I'd never gotten that before this year.