Wait, what?
Another blog post? But I just published one the day before yesterday! Is my perennial laziness finally waning? Nope. I just feel like writing and hey, why not?
Okay, so fake accents.
We've all met that guy. Or girl. Or maybe a number of guys and girls. You know the kind I'm talking about: the ones who've gone abroad for some (mostly short) span of time and returned to the motherland with an accent. I've noticed that British and American are the most popular fake accents out there. Somehow nobody wants to come back with a Singaporean accent, even though it's a pretty popular destination for tourists and business folk. My theory is that people don't find Singapore as glamorous or show-off worthy.
I know a fair number of people who went to Old Blighty and I have concluded that of all the accents out there, the British one is either:
1. The hardest to shake.
2. The easiest to put on.
3. Perceived as the most impressive.
I must admit, putting on a British accent IS fun. I've tried it on occasion, especially when quoting P.G. Wodehouse. There's nothing quite so satisfying as saying "Tinkerty tonk" with a degree of stiffness in the region of the upper lip.
But would I do it consistently over a prolonged period of time? No. It hurts. After a while my face begins to feel like what Voldemort's must. Nope, the facial discomfort of a stiff-upper lip is too much to handle.
Okay then. What else?
Back when I was in The Hague, my favourite pub was this Irish place called O'Casey's. I started going there for the pub quizzes and Guinness and before long I was regular enough for the chaps behind the counter to start calling me by my first name. Good times. I decided I'd try out an Irish accent and did so for an entire evening. Although it was a lot of fun, it was even more tiring than the British one and so I laid it to rest.
Taking a cue from some of my colleagues at the former workplace, I learned there were ways to circumvent the difficulties any particular accent posed. A college senior (who as far as I could tell had never spent any considerable time in the US of A) used to dish out a pretty decent American accent. She'd butterrrr her toast, and take a break at the waterrrr coolerrrr where we'd discuss the thangs going on at wurrrk and in general. Of course, her Bengali roots did show themselves especially when it came to switching As with Os (still can't figure out why they don't say Kolkoto instead of Kolkata).
Another person, one of those YOLO, FOMO kind of chaps, decided to up the stakes. He'd been to a bunch of places and decided that no single accent was good enough for him. I'm not sure what he wanted to sound like, but in the end it seemed like all his accents had wound up in some kind of bacchanalia with regrettable events occurring afterwards. The results, which took a lot less than 9 months to show themselves, was a sort of American-British-Indian-Dutch-Spanish-Whateverelsehaveyou hybrid. Dumbass.
But, all said and done, I DO sympathize and am guilty of putting on a fake accent myself. You don't believe?
In college, I took a week's trip to the USA. And not just anywhere in the USA. To Cambridge. That's across the river from Boston. I thought I was prepared to order Clam Chowdah in typical Boston fashion, but the accent defeated me. To demonstrate what a Boston accent's like, here's Matt Damon on The Late Late Show:
Halfway through my trip I realised I'd never be able to acquire an accent like that. But I was determined to go back to college and impress everyone with a brand new accent. So I went ahead and walked into class with something that sounded like this:
(The accent only; not the dialogue. Back then I was 'umbble geologist from Indiranagaraaa.)
Some of my friends have pointed out (and these are the Xavier's bunch who have their own range of accents depending on which part of Bombay they're from) that I have a Tamil twang to my voice.
Now this is where I must concede that I sometimes fake accents on a consistent basis.
You see, there is another reason why someone might fake an accent, particularly one from abroad. It reminds them of a time in their lives they were fond of and through their accent they're simply trying to relive those times in their own way. I remember with great fondness the days I spent in boarding school in Tamil Nadu, where a fair number of people went around saying things like "Ehhh, what da macha", "Podi!" and the like.
So yeah, fake accents can be annoying but maybe, just maybe, the person behind it isn't being the usual pretentious ******. But it's unlikely. They usually are.
Tinkerty tonk!
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