Pronunciation and British Geography

Posted on August 8, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

Let’s start out by all agreeing that English spelling is an invention of the devil—a being whose existence can only be confirmed by studying the way English is written. The experts tell us that English spelling was systemized at a time when the pronunciation was still changing, so it’s correct enough for the way words were pronounced at the time. And I’m sure that’s true (sort of—it doesn’t allow for regional variations, but let’s keep this simple), but honestly, did we ever a letter like C when either an S or a K would have done just fine? If we needed it to spell chunk, couldn’t we have assigned it the CH sound and saved it for that alone?

Mousehole, in Devon. Photo by Waterborough

So let’s agree that the spelling of a word isn’t a trustworthy guide to its pronunciation. Place names, though, are the real killers. Along the north Cornish coast is a town called Widemouth Bay, pronounced WIDmuth. Drive northeast and you come to Sandymouth and think, Right, that’s SANdimuth. Wrong. That’s SANdymouth. Go figure. (That’s an Americanism, by the way—something I found out only recently, when I used it and was met with a blank look.) Keep driving and you come to Woolfardisworthy, which has gone so far out of whack that the road sign actually gives the pronunciation: WOOLsery, only they don’t capitalize the accented syllable, so presumably you could think it was WoolSERRy. Or WoolserrEE. It makes as much sense as anything else. Go to the south coast and you’ll find Mousehole, pronounced MOWZul. A couple of years ago, I drove through a town called Towster (we’re not in Cornwall anymore, Toto, but the pronunciation problems carry over), which is pronounced TOASTer. Yes, the spelling and the pronunciation both make sense, in an English-language, devilish sort of way, but that only points out how little sense the spelling of toaster makes.

I expected to reach Coffee Pot in a few miles.

No one thought a town called Towster was funny except me. I was grief-stricken to be left alone with the joke.

Turn the British loose on American place names and they fall victim to their own language. Michigan becomes MITCHigan. (For all you non-U.S. readers, it’s MISHigun.) Houston becomes HOOSton. (It should be HYOUSton.)

Guys, you have no one to blame but yourselves.

Getting Organized in Britain

Posted on August 5, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

Clubs are a big thing in Britain. Introduce two people with an obsession in common and they’ll form a club. Introduce two people who find no meeting ground and they’ll form a Random Interests Club.

In our village, we have a camera club, a surf/lifesaving club, a table tennis (that’s ping pong) club, a tennis club, a crafts group, an allotment society, a fair-weather walking group (motto: “We’re not too proud to cancel”), a club of people over fifty who rent a bus once a month and go on day trips, the Women’s Institute (a branch of a national group), a very local women’s discussion group, an allotment society, and I’m not sure how many other clubs. Someone will let me know as soon as this goes online. Plus a proposed biking club that may or may not have taken off, and yoga and art classes. In a village of some 600 people.

Wild Thing and I were at a party last month and the talk turned to wild swimming, which is swimming outdoors, regardless of whether there’s a lifeguard or a beach or anything other than clean(ish) water. J. said she enjoyed it. T. asked if she was going to form a club.

“Right,” J. said. “Like I need officers and a constitution to throw myself in the water.”

Semi-Relevant Photo, by Rufus Nunus

She had a point. Clubs get formal very quickly here. Officers get elected. Minutes get taken and are read at the start of the next meeting. Dues are set and collected. Bank accounts are set up and need signatures and countersignatures and approval and disapproval and gossip.

I’m part of a countywide group that just organized to defend the National Health Service against privatization, and we immediately elected officers, adopted a constitution, and wrote a manifesto setting out our goals. All of which are good things to do and will help keep us on track, although I tend toward more chaotic approaches myself. What tipped me over the edge was when R. suggested we might want to adopt standing orders.

Standing what? I thought that was what the regulars had at the pub. You know: You come in the door and the bartender sets your drink on the bar before you ask. But no, it’s a set of procedures: The chair will consult with the secretary about the agenda; every meeting will open with the members singing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” to the tune of “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” Things like that, which everyone can agree are a good idea.

We decided against standing orders, but after two meetings we are well constitutioned and manifestoed. Now all we have to do is defeat privatization and get enough funding for the NHS to do its job. It should be a cinch.

Britain, Tea, and Hot and Cold Running Stereotypes

Posted on July 29, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

Am I calling up a lazy stereotype when I say that Britain’s a nation of tea drinkers? I know: This isn’t the most important question you’ll face today, but stay with me. I’ll make it worth your time (she said rashly).

A while back, someone read part of an as yet unposted blog entry I’d written about tea and told me I was indulging in stereotypes. She mentioned beer (people do drink a lot of beer here; I’ll give her that), and Starbucks, and the country’s changing habits. She urged me to go deeper into the culture. She didn’t mention Starbucks’ untaxed profits, and I admit they’re not what everyone’s mind would race to in this context, but if you want to go deeper into the culture, they’re sitting there like the Titanic’s iceberg and I can’t type the company’s name without mentioning them. And don’t even get me started on Amazon.

A cup of tea, in motion. Photo by by ŇÄĵŵÅ Ă. Мǻŗǻƒįę.

She signed off by saying her husband had just made her a cup of tea, which either means she has a sense of humor (she hadn’t noticed mine, so I did wonder) or undercuts her argument, or possibly both. Either way, she left me thinking about stereotypes. Because they’re hard to resist if you’re trying to be funny—and the longer I work on this blog, the better I understand how deeply trying and funny dislike each other.

But I don’t want to stereotype stereotypes. They’re not all the same. Off the top of my head I can break them into two categories. And as soon as you say something like that, someone else comes along and breaks them into seven categories, and someone else comes up with forty-three. Settle down, everyone. It’s not a competition. All we need for this discussion are the harmful kind and the harmless kind. Think of them the way you’d think of spiders, or snakes: Some of them are venomous and some of them aren’t. Remember at the start of the Iraq War, when the French said, Guys, I don’t think this is an entirely good idea, and suddenly the geniuses who (as it turns out) helped destabilize the Middle East were calling them cheese-eating surrender monkeys? That’s not only a very weird stereotype, implying, among other things, that Americans think there’s something suspect about eating cheese, but it’s ugly. (I know, it started ironically, on The Simpsons, but by the time I’m talking about it had cut its ironic moorings and was loose in the world, untethered.) It’s not the most harmful stereotype I ever heard, but it’s surely one of the stranger ones in its category.

Now compare that to the claim that Britain’s a nation of tea drinkers. They’re different, aren’t they?

Is Britain a nation of tea drinkers? We have two cafes in our village, and both have invested in coffee machines. You know the kind. Huge silvery things. You stand behind them and you might as well be piloting a spaceship.

“Potential customer on the road, Captain.”

“Deploy the tractor beam, Lieutenant.”

So customers are tractored in, and they’re grateful. They order lattes and americanos and mocha half-decaf double skim vaguely Italian-sounding whatsaccinos, and they sit at tables in (if they’re lucky) the sun and sip them. But what they’re sipping are indulgences—the kind of thing people will invest in and think, I really needed this, or, Isn’t this nice, sitting here with a coffee? because it’s something special. Follow them home, though, and most of them will drink tea. If they have coffee in the house, it’ll be instant. How do I know? By what people offer me in their homes. By what they choose when they’re in mine.

But forget the cafes. Go to a village event—the kind the village has been holding since caffeine first came to these shores, raising money for the hospices, or the air ambulance, or the church—and you’ll have a choice of tea or coffee. And the coffee will be instant. Because that’s how it’s always been done and that’s how it’s still done. Any place has a tea pot. Any place can boil water. Not every place has a coffee pot.

What happens in the U.S.? Park yourself at the counter of any greasy spoon in the country and ask for coffee. The waitron will turn, grab a pot from a coffeemaker and pour. It’s already made, it’s waiting for you, and most of the time it’s no older than you are, so it’ll taste—well, it’ll taste like coffee. Whether that’s good is a matter of opinion. But it doesn’t matter. They go through enough of it to keep a pot on hand.

Two pots, actually: regular with a black (or is that brown?) handle and decaf with an orange one.

Ask for tea, though, and the waitron will have to check with the boss, because it’s been six years since anyone ordered a cup. I worked in a place like that. The boss probably kept a box of teabags stashed somewhere, but I never had a reason to ask about it.

That’s what life’s like in a nation of coffee drinkers.

But I hate being called superficial, so let’s consider countervailing trends: Before I left the U.S., I’d begun to worry about the younger generation’s moral fiber, because so many of them were getting their caffeine from soft drinks and energy drinks and cold bottled coffees or (yes, I admit it) teas with vacation-sounding names and enough sugar to fill a bathtub, condensed somehow into a fist-sized drink. This struck me as childish—self-indulgent, even. Adulthood involves learning to drink things that don’t taste good, and then learning to like them, and teaching other people to like them, and judging people on the basis of whether they like them. Weren’t these kids ever going to grow up? And more to the point, when it came time to give them house-warming presents, was I ever going to be able to give them coffee mugs?

I should probably pause here and say that I’d stopped drinking coffee by the time I passed this judgment on an entire generation, but I didn’t get my caffeine from cold, sugary drinks, so it was different. And I had once been a coffee drinker, so whatever I did after that was okay, because I’d survived the initiation.

I never claimed that this made sense. What I’m trying to do is make a point, which is, defensively, that I’m capable of going deeper into a culture. And still exaggerating. Which is the essence of stereotype. And the essence of humor. Or, yeah, I’m exaggerating again. It’s the essence of some humor.

If you go deep enough into any culture, you’ll find something to laugh at. Without dismissing it or being ugly.

The Cornish Heatwave

Posted on July 25, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

It’s hot in Cornwall. For days, everyone’s been telling each other that. And the papers agree. “Heatwave!” they write. Shock! Horror! Remind the elderly to drink liquids!

The elderly have been drinking liquids all their lives. That’s one reason they lived long enough to be the elderly. So unless we’re talking about the demented (in which case, don’t be shy, just say so), mind your own damn business. And drink your own liquids, while we’re at it.

What’s a heatwave here? Temperatures are soaring into the low 80s F. Yes, all you Minnesotans, you New Yorkers, you sweat-soaked Southerners, the low 80s. You’d count that as a nice summer day, wouldn’t you? Not a heatwave but relief from a heatwave.

Mostly irrelevant photo. The cows are probably hot too. Photo by Ida Swearingen.

Before I go on, I should say that I live about a mile from the ocean, so “hot” here is cooler than it is inland. And temperature’s relative. To anyone used to the British climate, the heat’s real. Take our dog, for example. I mention her instead of a person because she’s not what you’d call imaginative. She doesn’t fancy herself hot or cold or put upon or much of anything else, she simply is what she is, at whatever moment we’re talking about. If she wants attention, she doesn’t complain about the heat, she brings a goobery old chewy and dumps it in your lap. And she’s been hot. When we walk, she pulls for the shade. She lies down in it if we stop. She perks up if we soak her down. So yes, I accept that by the standards of this time and place, it’s hot.

But still, I swear the British have a strange relationship with hot weather. They crave it. They talk about it. They wilt in it.

M. stopped by. She picked up the village newsletter and fanned herself.

“It’s so hot,” she said.

“Mind you, I’m not complaining,” she added, in case someone tried to do her a favour by canceling her subscription.

This spring, before the heat set in, J. said, “I want to go someplace hot.” She said it with the kind of longing people usually reserve for life-changing wishes.

I don’t want to descend into national stereotypes here (and isn’t that just the kind of disclaimer you find before someone dives right in?) but it’s not just J. Sometimes I feel like every single person in Britain wants to go someplace hot. Except Wild Thing and me (or I, or both me and I), and maybe one or two other immigrants and weirdos. The rest of them, though, want to pack up and move someplace hot. They want to push poles into the ocean and shove the whole island south so they can sit by a pool and wait for tropical fruit to drop into off the trees and into their mouths.

The facts that (a) fruit trees don’t grow beside pools and (b) if they moved they’d have to work and wouldn’t have time to sit by a pool tell you something about the nature of the fantasy.

And then it hits 80—and they wilt.

“It’s so hot,” they say.

Umm. Yes. This is the price of hot weather.

Wild Thing let herself get lured into a conversation about hot weather a while ago. “This isn’t hot, she said,” she said, and she tried to describe a Minnesota summer. Hot, sticky, the air so thick you expect schools of fish to swim past. Wild Thing’s from Texas. She can’t help herself. And no, I would never stoop to relying on stereotypes. I can only refer you to a favorite phrase of hers: Never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Me, I tell the truth, and the truth is that I’ve made up the opening lines of this particular conversation because I want to get to what the other person said, which was this:

“But you all have swimming pools in America.”

Sure we do. Every sweaty one of us. If we have four people in a family, we dig four swimming pools. If we live in apartments, we dig them in the bathrooms and call them tubs.

You can tell when people have been watching too much TV.

Anyway, it’s hot in Cornwall, and people aren’t complaining but they are spending a suspicious amount of time talking about it.

Giving Directions in Cornwall

Posted on July 23, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

Britain’s as romantic as it is confusing. Outside the cities, British house are more likely to have names than addresses. You want to name your house Island of the Floating Feathers? As long as you work it out with the local council, you can. Although I don’t know how the council would react to that one. They’re more used to The Smithy, The Old Schoolhouse, Oak Tree Cottage, Trelawney. Every village in Cornwall has a house called Trelawny (or Trelawney), after John (or Jonathan, depending on your source) Trelawny, a Cornish national hero who got in a wrangle with James II back in the 17^th century and had a song written about him in the 19^th, by which time it was too late for him to appreciate it. That’s the sad bit about being immortalized.

But going back to the Island of the Floating Feathers: The council might agree to it. You can be pretty sure there won’t be a duplicate in the village, which is another reason to nix a name. And it’s not as if you’re calling it My Neighbour Painted Her House an Ugly Colour, which any council could find a reason to turn down.

Rock Cottage, by Geography 2013

The advantages of house names are romance, atmosphere, self-expression, and tradition. Ah, tradition. There’s a lot of that over here. I don’t know when houses were first given names, but it was long before civil engineers were invented. Naming houses is as natural as naming people. You have a bunch of these things, and you have to distinguish one from another. As soon as a settlement got too big for everyone to know everyone, a medieval village, say, might start informally talking about the manor, the blacksmith’s cottage, plum tree cottage, river cottage, bridge cottage, the old lady with the wart’s cottage. Eventually those became the houses’ names, only sooner or later the old lady with the wart’s cottage would be shortened to Wart Cottage, until someone new moved in and said, can’t we change this to Island of the Floating Feathers? And the person in charge at the council replied, “Please state your reasons for wanting to change this house name.” In triplicate and black ink. If you have to file a paper copy of anything official in Britain, they’ll want it in black ink.

Except for the black ink and the business about the wart, of course, I’m making this up. House names probably started much earlier than the medieval period. But it’s good to remember that everything started somewhere, at some time, with some set of people who had no idea what they were setting in motion.

The down side of this arrangement is that anyone from outside the village is immediately lost. Say you’re driving a delivery van with a package for Craken Wartha, and you’re new on the route. You’ve found the village, but after that you have two choices: Drive around aimlessly and hope you see a sign that says Craken Wartha or stop and ask directions. Or you can do both, one after the other after the other, with increasing degrees of frustration. Anyone marketing a sat-nav system with all the house names programed into it would make a fortune, but no one’s done it yet, so imagine you spot two women walking a small, silly dog. They look local, by which I mean they’re not carrying the beach or hiking gear that would mark them as visitors. Salvation, you think, and you roll down the window and ask where Craken Wartha is.

As it happens, the two women are Wild Thing and me (which should, grammatically speaking, be I, but c’mon, who actually says it that way?). And we smile and point and say, “Go down the hill, cross the ford, go up the hill, take a right at the chapel,” and so on, but you’ve stopped listening because we don’t sound like locals.

Have I mentioned that Wild Thing and I have American accents? And that we came by them honestly? No one who asks for directions believes a word we say. Their eyes glaze over and their faces get this look that says, There has got to be someone else I can ask.

Sometimes we don’t know the directions. It’s surprising how many times you can pass a house but not remember where it is when someone asks for it. It’s tempting to spew out a string of lefts and rights and obscure landmarks, since no one’s going to follow them anyway, but we don’t. We say what anyone else would: “Ask at the post office. They know everything.” And we point them to the post office, knowing that if they see anyone else on the road, even if they’re staggering under a load of beach gear or a snootful of alcohol, they’ll roll down the window and hope to hear the right accent.

British Brownies and U.S. Scones

Posted on July 18, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

My last post included a traditional British scone recipe, and American readers immediately wrote in (on the blog and on Facebook) and said, That sounds great. Can I add cranberries, chocolate chips, and marshmallows? The answer is, of course you can, and it may taste great, but it won’t be a British scone, it’ll be more like a British brownie.

Why is a brownie like a scone? Because once it crosses international boundaries you can’t recognize it.

Irrelevant Photo #2. Dorset. Photographer, Ida Swearingen

Let’s start with the American scone. It’s great, but it’s got only the faintest relationship to the original. Which is British, and a cousin to the American baking powder biscuit—plain, round, workaday, and delicious. Usually. If it comes in cellophane, be suspicious. It’s usually a little sweeter than a baking powder biscuit, and sometimes comes with raisins, which for reasons I don’t expect to ever understand are called fruit. I mean, yes, they are fruit, in a dried-up sort of way, but the world’s full of fruit. We don’t insist on calling a carrot “vegetable” instead of “carrot,” do we?

Never mind. The fruit scone has raisins. The cheese scone has cheese. The plain scone doesn’t have either one. And the scone with ginger and lemon and blueberries and chocolate chips and deep-fried Mars bars? It doesn’t exist. But the cream tea does exist. It’s tea with two plain scones, jam, and clotted cream, which is cream that’s been beatified. If you see one and you’re not in (a) a highway café or (b) a railroad café, try it.

The American scone is a British scone on steroids. Triple the sugar, double the shortening, quadruple the size, and add every kind of fruit and candy you can think of. Exactly when every American turned into a Texan (you know: Everything we have is bigger, and everything bigger is better) I don’t know, but somehow we did. Or it looks that way from here.

What about the brownie? The British call anything dark, slab-shaped, and sweetened a brownie. Mind you, I’ve had a few over here that were delicious, but if I see them advertised I approach the display case with extreme caution. Wild Thing ordered one in London once. It looked pretty reasonable in the display case but turned up at the table decked out with ice cream, whipped cream, chocolate sauce, and a blood-pressure monitor. The theory must be that if it’s American and you go over the top with it, it must be authentic. I mean, look what the bloody Americans do to the scone.

How to Bake a Scone

Posted on July 15, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

I can’t keep writing about life in Cornwall without posting a scone recipe. And not just any scone recipe, an English scone recipe.

You should understand that there’s no single, definitive English scone. Not only do scones divide into plain, fruit, and cheese (or savory, which is spelled savoury), but any one of those three will vary. You can also find griddle scones and drop scones. They’re like the brownie that way. Or religion. Lots of variations; lots of recipes; lots of people damning each other to hell for doing it wrong. You’ll also find regional variations. I could be wrong about this, but I believe scones get larger as they go north. It may have to do with the weather, or the longer O in the northern accents.

Some recipes include eggs, which is any right-living person would tell you is heresy, so this one doesn’t. I have no idea where I found it, or how much I’ve tinkered with it over the years. Whoever developed it, I’d give you credit if I could. All I can give instead is my apologies, and my thanks, because it makes a damned good scone.

Scone with jam. Photo by Benson Kua, and it’s from Canada, not the U.K.

Scones: Makes 5 or 6

1 ½ cups flour, unsifted (see below)
1 Tbsp. cold butter
1 Tbsp. sugar
½ tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. cream of tartar
½ tsp. salt
[raisins if you want them]
Enough milk to pull the ingredients into a ball

Sift the dry ingredients. (I was taught to sift flour before measuring, transfer it grain by grain into the measuring cup, then sift it again after measuring, but I can’t be bothered. Half the time I can’t be bothered sifting it at all, I just mix the dry ingredients together. If we’re talking about kitchen heresies, this is a big one, but my baking comes out fine, thanks. Just don’t whack your measuring cup down on the counter to make the flour settle, because it will and you’ll end up with too much.) Cut in the butter. (You want to keep the butter cold, which will keep the scone from being heavy, so if you can cut it with a pastry blender, do. If you use your fingers to crumble it into the dry ingredients, handle it as little as possible.) If you want raisins, this is the time to add them. Stir in just enough milk to form the dough into a ball. Roll out to about ¾” thick on a floured surface and cut with a biscuit cutter or, if you don’t have one, the rim of a glass. If you twist your cutter, the scones won’t rise evenly. If your scones don’t rise evenly, it won’t make the least bit of difference, so don’t lose sleep over this. Place the scones on a greased cookie sheet and bake 12 to 15 minutes at 400 degrees. (To make sure they’re done, take the cookie sheet out of the oven, pry one open partway, and peek inside. If it’s gooey, put the cookie sheet back in for a couple of minutes.) Eat with butter—lots of butter—or jam, or both. They’re fine cold, but they’re better hot.

This is the real thing.

Sports Talk in the U.K.

Posted on July 12, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

I’ve been the victim of sports talk recently. To sympathize properly, you have to understand that I have a sports allergy, and it’s severe.

At singers night at the pub last week, K. was oblivious to my condition and talked—not to the world at large, but to me specifically—about the World Cup. The U.S. team, he said, was his idea of what a team should be.

At this point, I plugged my ears to keep from breaking out in a rash, so I missed part of the conversation. Which wasn’t a conversation, both because I had nothing to contribute and because my ears were plugged. Still, I’d heard enough to wonder how a U.S. team could play world-class football. (And if you’re American, you have to understand here that football means soccer, not that game with the funny-shaped ball and the beefy guys running around in the modern-day equivalent of armour.) I mean, when I left the U.S., soccer never gave me a rash because I never heard about it. I’ve been gone for eight years now, but surely it takes longer than that for a sport to take hold of a culture and attract obscene amounts of money.

Of course, K. might have been messing with me. It’s hard to tell with him.

I took my fingers out of my ears long enough to hear him say that if the English team played well it would upset the natural order of the universe. So being an English football fan must be something you do to build character, not to enjoy yourself.

I went home scratching my rash.

Tour de Yorkshire. Photo by Dave Pickersgill

But it hasn’t just been the World Cup. The Tour de France, for reasons I can’t explain, ended up in Yorkshire this year. Is this the Second Coming of the Norman Invasion, using bikes instead of horses? Did someone post the route wrong, tricking the riders into hundreds of miles of wrong turn? If so, how did they get the bikes get across the Channel?

Whatever the explanation, swarms of bike riders zipped through the English countryside in a race with a French name. The Tour’s director suggested that close to 5 million people from Yorkshire had turned out to watch. If that’s true, it’s amazing, because the official population of Yorkshire is 5.3 million, and some of them surely had the flu, or a sports allergy serious enough to have kept them home.

Fortunately, Yorkshire’s a long way from Cornwall, and if they ever hold the Tour de France here they’ll be hard-pressed to get 5 million out of our population of 532,000 lining to roads to watch.

English Food: Cheese

Posted on July 8, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

The last time I wrote about English food, it was to make fun of baked beans. So let’s talk about a good part of English food: The English are known for their cheese, and justifiably. Cheddar takes as much space in the cheese aisle as baked beans do in the canned vegetable, only it tastes good. And it’s not just connoisseurs and food snobs who go in for the strong stuff, it’s normal people—kids, adults, people who eat baked beans on toast. Cheese turns up in soups, in sauces, on baked potatoes. Okay, everything turns up in baked potatoes, but still. If a store only sells one vegetarian sandwich, it’ll be cheddar. And it’ll be grated, not sliced.

English Blue Stilton. Photo by Dominik Hundhammer

Every year, at Cooper’s Hill in Gloucester, people race—or slide, or roll—down an insanely steep hill chasing a wheel of double Gloucester cheese. The winner gets to keep the cheese. And a generous portion of mud. The race’s official site says of the 2013 race:

“Due to warnings from the police … a substitute, plastic cheese was used this year, so a real cheese was not in fact rolled*.

“This did not seem to matter to either contestants or spectators, but it was a failure as it just did not have the weight to roll properly! In the ladies race, one lady (not the winner) picked it up and carried it down to the finish line.”

“*Upon careful analysis of the movement of the cheese in the videos of the events, it appears that the “cheese” in the first event was significantly heavier than the ones used in subsequent races, it was the only “fast cheese” of the day, it also bounced a lot higher. There is a strong suspicion that this was a ‘real Cheese,’ the ones in the remaining races were made of foam plastic and were much slower, in most cases being passed by the contestants.”

The only injuries that year were a dislocated shoulder and a broken leg. It took more than two hours to get the guy with the broken leg off the hill, with the rescuers walking backward and held back by ropes. It’s that steep. But, hey, the prize is a cheese, right?

One winner said publicly that she didn’t like cheese and was going to offer her prize on E-bay. The bids didn’t come up to reserve price and I hope she learned to love the stuff, because she was the proud owner of an eight-pound wheel of the stuff.

Folk Music and English Accents

Posted on July 1, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

I’ve lived in Cornwall for eight years, and I’ve gotten used to the gap between, on the one hand, Wild Thing’s and my accents and on the other the accents of pretty much everyone else we know. Most of the time, I don’t hear the difference. Even when I listen to the other Americans in the village, I don’t notice their accents. I’m listening to words, not what they’re wrapped in.

Except for the times when I do, of course, when it’s like being hit on the head with a rock. A small, soft rock, but still a rock.

I was at Singers Night at a nearby pub last week when out of nowhere I heard my accent. Whack: small, soft rock to the side of the head.

Irrelevant Photo #2: Bude Canal in the late evening light. Photo by Ida Swearingen

Singers night is a wonderful, unpredictable gathering of mostly amateur singers, although one professional shows up regularly, for the sheer love of singing. In the summer, the place gets crowded, with some of the visitors singing and others listening and occasionally taking pictures, which is strange since they’ll go home with pictures of a bunch of people in chairs, with their mouths open. But who am I to judge? This particular night gathered in a strong group singers, and any song with a chorus sounded great—rich voices, good energy, harmonies. I admire the hell out of people who can harmonize spontaneously.

G. had started a song whose chorus repeats the line “Didn’t I dance?” and we must’ve sung the words three times before I heard myself: dahnce. My accent had melted into the accents around me instead of sending that good ol’ American A up my nose to spin itself so flat you could use if for a plate.

Dahnce? I thought. Dahnce? Who the hell am I turning into?

Some people pick up accents when they move, but I’m not one of them. To lose my accent, or even modify it, has always seemed like a much larger loss, as if I’d be losing some part of who I am, or hiding it behind a cardboard cut-out of a personality. I lived in Minnesota for decades without picking up more than a bit of shading on the O. Or so M.’s friend, who’s a dialogue coach, tells me. I’d have sworn I still sounded like the purest of New Yorkers, but she has an ear for accents, so I’ll have to take her word for it.

I’m not claiming my attitude’s better than anyone else’s, and to demonstrate how little sense it makes, I’ll tell you that I’m not bad at picking up accents in other languages. In my head, that’s a matter of respect—for the language; for the people who speak it. In English, though, I count the same act as disrespect.

To make even marginal sense of this, I have to mention the toxic history that imitating other people’s accents has in the U.S. When I was a kid, whites imitating African-American or Mexican accents did it badly and to make fun of them. It was skin-crawlingly awful. These days, I know white kids (okay, they used to be kids; you turn your back for ten minutes and they grow up) who adopt African-American accents because they like them and want to blend in. I’m not sure how I feel about that, but I don’t suppose it matters, because it’s not my feelings that count.

My point here is that there’s a do-not-cross line in my head that keeps me from picking up accents in English, but there I was, singing dahnce.

Every language, and every accent within a language, is a song. I’d love to claim credit for that insight, but I heard someone say it in a radio interview. Unfortunately, I haven’t a clue who it was. A woman, I think, so that narrows it down a bit. Whoever you are, I apologize for not crediting you. But to illustrate your point, whoever you are, when I was still living in the U.S., I heard a recording of kids playing in a schoolyard, and without being able to catch a single word I could tell they were English. The song of their accent rose free of the words. And that’s what swept me along in that chorus: the song.

British singers often sing in American accents. It drives the purists nuts, and they blame it on American rock music. If you listen to enough of it, the accent pours itself on top of the notes and you may not even notice that you’ve picked it up.

Unfortunately, picking up an accent doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get it right. You’re likely to revert to your own accent at any time. Sometimes a word is so firmly stuck in your head that you don’t notice you’re reverting: Michigan comes out Mitchigan; Houston comes out Hooston. The line that tickles me is from a hard-luck, down-and-out folk song with the line “I can’t go back home this a-way.” Only it was an English singer, and it came out as cahn’t. “I cahn’t go back home this a-way.” Hard-luck, down-and-out meets silver-spoon. Cahn’t isn’t limited to a silver-spoon accent here, but put it in an American song and it sure sounds like one. And that’s one of the problems with singing in accents that aren’t your own.

Me? I avoid songs that demand an accent transplant. Most of what I sing is American folk music, and the U.S. is a long way from here, so if I end up singing songs I can’t lay claim to by right of either geography or heritage (and I do; they’re fantastic songs), from this distance they don’t sound as absurd as they would if I were back home.

To the extent that I sing English songs, I keep my accent in place and avoid anything I know is going to sound ridiculous. And if anyone who’s heard me wants to warn me off some particular song because I do sound ridiculous, just throw a nice, soft rock at my head. It would be a kindness.

Notes from the U.K.

Exploring the spidery corners of a culture and the weird stuff that tourist brochures ignore.

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