Thursday, January 24, 2008

Heard while in the islands

"You two don't have an American accent. You sound like Canadians."

I don't know what the hell they were talking aboot. I don't sound like no Canadian, eh!

9 comments:

justacoolcat said...

People are always trying to guess where I'm from . . . Is it Australia?

WTF?

Anonymous said...

Talkin aboot? You are scottish!

BeckEye said...

Were you singing the praises of Bryan Adams?

Slave to the dogs said...

Cat, I can see being mistaken for a Canadian because for the most part we DO sound alike. But Australian? Huh? Makes no sense.

Mur - it's similar but the Canadian version is longer. Hard to express phonetically.

Beckeye - nope, nor Pam Anderson or Peter Jennings. Apparently the lack of a regional American accent makes one sound Canadian.

Tanya Espanya said...

Bwahahahaha!

And seriously, I've never heard anybody say "oot" or "aboot" or anything like that. It's Scottish, like Mur says.

You will totally fit in when you come up for a visit...you ARE coming up, arencha?

Slave to the dogs said...

Tanya - the sound I'm thinking of is definitely not Scottish. I've heard it on a few occasions. Not sure which of your states it comes from though.

Is that an invite? :)

Tanya Espanya said...

Yes, absolutely! That would be amazing if you came up!!!

Slave to the dogs said...

OK, watch Survivorman. It's on the Science Channel here. THAT is the accent I am talking about. I guess maybe it's more abewt than aboot.

Metro said...

Hmmm. In many cases it seems to be less about the sound than the behaviour. Perhaps the person was saying you were unusually polite? We seem to have that reputation.

On the converse: In Australia I was dining near a pie-shop somewhere, keeping to myself and watching pretty girls in bikinis, when a table nearby began to get rowdy.

A middle-aged man beside me expressed, fairly loudly, a wish that they should "bugger off back to America".

I felt a bit sad telling him they were from Edmonton.

I took my flag off my backpack because of that incident. One can be an @$$#013 in any language or from any nation, and the behaviour of the flag-wavin'est of my countrymen was as bad as I've ever seen on any US Tourist Terror.