Tam is having fun with accents at the moment. Now I was born and raised just north of Boston MA by parents from the Mid-west part of the country. I was publicly made fun of (by my dad) if I ever dared mangle my R’s or do much else that resulted in improper pronunciation. If anything I sound vaguely mid-western, but generally have not much accent at all unless I’ve been hanging round someone who does, then I have to put conscious effort into NOT copying their accent. Though I can crack up my husband in a heartbeat by trotting out the old standard of “pahk the cah in Hahvahd yahd” in pure Bostonion.
The stories in the comments of her posts reminded me of the experience of a co-worker a while back. While I was working for Home Depot one of the front end supervisors came up to me quite horrified by a miss-translation he’d just had. Seems he’d had a customer ask him for a “dough”. My co-worker was quite confused, and it took several back and forths before he realized the customer was looking for a “door”. He was horribly embaressed by it, I just laughed.
I am a terrific mimic and can do just about any accent. My two favorites are, of course, the North Country New Hampshire and the Down East Mainer accents. They both make telling stories much more entertaining.
Having lived in quite a few places around the country growing up, I had to be able to decipher local accents. This was particularly so when there were a large number of immigrant families about. (My family dealt with many Scandinavian families where we had our summer beach house – Swedes, Norwegians, and Finns – with a couple of Italian families thrown in for good measure. Accents don’t bother me because I grew up with so many of them.