Accent? What Accent?

It is a vexation indeed when one first becomes aware that one’s manner of speech is a source of amusement to The Great Unwashed. For me, this first occurred when I went off to college and met, for the first time—New Yorkers. Besides not being aware that Boston was the Hub of the Universe, they had strange ideas about the pronunciation of the letter "r". They pronounced r’s in places where r’s were never intended to be pronounced; everyone knows, for example, that the "r" in "chowder" is silent (and inexcuseably, the word itself was misapplied to some heinous type of red soup). To make matters worse, the New Yorkers omitted r’s in places where they were supposed to be pronounced, such as in Cuber, the island nation off the coast of Florider.

Imagine the ignominy of sitting in a coffeehouse, outnumbered by barbarians who thought the height of wit consisted of repeating "Pahk the Cah in Hahvahd Yahd" ad nauseam. Some originality, at least, was needed. Then, exercising the ultimate in unconscious self-directed irony, they would proceed to order something called cawr-fee. Somehow, the server (obviously a moonlighting sociolinguistics major) would be able to decipher the order and bring the correct beverage. To preclude ridicule, I avoided saying the word "coffee" and simply ordered a cup of jarver.

Later in life, I encountered another linguistic pretender, my (ex)father-in-law, from New Jersey (or, as he would say, Joisey). He loved the Hahvahd Yahd cliché, but our major disagreement was over the pronunciation of the word "scallop". Some bizarre quirk of semantic in-breeding has New Jersey denizens pronouncing the word "skall-op" while the civilized world retains the more elegant and sophisticated "skoll-op". My father-in-law’s argument consisted of pointing out, "It’s an 'a', not an 'o'." He attempted the coup de grace one time, trying to pin me down with irrefutable logic, but committed semantic suicide instead.

"How do you pronounce c-a-l-l?" he demanded.

"Coll," I answered.

"OK, bad example. What about h-a-l-l?"

"Holl." This was too easy.

He was panicking. "W-a-l-l!"

"Woll." I was wearing smug like a second skin. "And boll, foll, moll, and poll, too."