Over the weekend I was persuaded to actually leave the house and meet new people, which was fairly pleasant and I will probably repeat the experiment again.
The only thing I found uncomfortable was being told by a person who I'd never met or spoken to before, that my british accent was "mellowing" (how the hell would you know buddy? Oh, and I'm pretty sure it isn't because my Mum would have told me when I spoke to her on Saturday) and that I'd probably end up losing it all together in a few years time. It's just an odd thing to declare to someone you've just met, isn't it?
Here's the thing, I love regional accents, but I myself have simply never had a regional accent of any sort, so I speak what is best described as nicely-brought-up-middle-class-ese. I am reasonably certain that if I was going to have picked up an accent, then logically it should have been whilst I was a child or a teenager, when I was presumably more easily influenced and wanting to fit in; why would I suddenly change my accent in my mid-thirties? I'm really quite happy with how I speak, and there isn't any pressure for me to change; in fact I get the distinct impression that having a British accent is one of my main selling points to an American market, if you want to be cynical about the thing. I'm sure I've picked up some new words and phrases, but that's just sensible if you want to communicate with people.
Yeah, so that annoyed me quite a bit now that I think about it. In fact I'm tempted to find a course of internet elocution lessons, or listen to a lot of BBC radio broadcasts from the fifties to really nail that received pronunciation thing down.
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