Re: CHAT: Being taken for a furriner ...

Andreas Johansson wrote:

> Had a strange experience on the train this morning; I went to the train
> hostess
> to buy new tickets, and, of course, addressed her in Swedish. Yet, she
> replied
> in English...,
>
> I've been taken for a foreigner before, but that's always involved me
> speaking
> in a foreign language. Possibly, my recent one-year stay in Germany has
> left
> some mark on my Swedish, but the whole incident nonetheless seems somewhat
> extraordinary to me.
>
> Anyone else here experienced something similar?
>
Similar but different:  when I was in England, long long ago, I was having
tea in the hotel lounge and fell into conversation with the lady at the next
table.  After a while she asked where I was from, and was surprised to learn
I was American.  "I thought you were from the North..." Maybe "the North" is
Brit-speak for "you talk funny ~not like me"....?  But I was rather
flattered.  In those days I was fresh out of fancy boarding school and
Harvard, where I'd adjusted my midwestern twang to the upper-class Eastern
speech of my classmates (dropping r's, frinstance), and suffering from
severe Anglophilia.

After a year and a half in Georgia and S.Carolina with the Army, friends
claimed I'd picked up a Southern accent.  Cringe.

"I am so easily assimilated".

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