Yesterday, I paid a water bill on the phone. I needed to give my home address for final statements to be sent on to. My house is called Mill Cottage. The conversation went thus:
Me: Mill Cottage
Her: Knoll Cottage..
Me: No, Mill.
Her: Knoll?
Me: Mill. M...I...L...L...
Her: M...O...
Me: No, no...MILL. As in a water mill, or a wind mill. M for Michael, I for Indigo...
Her: Oh, okay.
Bit later...
Her: So your card is registered at Knoll Cottage too?
Me: No, I'm sorry, I think you've still got my address wrong. It's MILL. Like a windmill.
Her: Oh, MILL! Sorry, it's your accent, I can't understand you.
My what?! I don't have an accent, thank you very much! ;) She was the effing northerner with a stupid accent. I have no accent. My voice is neutral. Normal.
:P
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4 comments:
It's 'cos you're righ' posh, bab, ennit?!
:-P
I think repeatedly mistaking 'Mill' for 'Knoll', even once spelled out, says more about the water company staff's inefficiency/ stupidity/ boredom than it does about accents, to be honest. But a favourite topic-for-provocation at universities all over the country!
On Thursday I am going oop north, a place where I presume they all indeed say 'oop'. I will be in Stockton...its claim to fame is that it has the widest high street in...the UK, the world..? The person I am going to see said "I've only been nearly-bottled once". Well, excellent! I'm scared, and even more scared that I will not be able to understand a word anyone says.
I have an embarrassing habit when that happens of reinforcing my poshness ("Ee'm teeeerribly sorry, whhat was thart? Didn't quite cartch it."), making the problem a million times worse.
I will most probably get the piss ripped out of me, too.
Accents are relative, though. Nobody has an accent in their own eyes, do they? But I know that other people think I'm terribly posh (as Callan once said, you'd think 'here this year' was spelled 'hyur this hyur' to hear me talk, and it's not as if he talks like a chav!!).
But I find that if I'm among northerners I go a bit northern myself pretty quickly, and at college I talk totally differently to how I do at home, and I don't do it deliberately! It's odd that you go the other way...
But they'll love you, and any piss that gets ripped will probably be done actually quite affectionately.
Unless you do get bottled... good luck!!
Oh dear :oP
I think I'm pretty much accentless but I get told at Uni I get twangs of Farmerland accent. Pffft, I'm just showing my variation, innit.
I take on accents when I'm talking to a person, entirely unintentionally. I feel utterly stupid doing it but I just can't seem to help it :oS
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