As I stepped onto the elevator the other day, I was pleased to see a grossly obese young woman already squeezed into the metal compartment. The girl couldn't have been more than 25, and was tucking her fleshy folds into her elastic-waisted jeans--this was, I had been told, a feature exclusive to Yanks, and I was quietly jubilant to see that the Irish, on their diets of potatoes and creamed everything, were finally catching up. I grinned openly as we rose from one floor to the next.
As we got to the sixth floor and the girl got off, she squealed to the woman next to her in a distinctive American patois, "Dude, did you see Project Runway last night? It was, like, awesome!" Sigh.
On accents:
In Dublin, one gets used to hearing all sorts of accents. The city feels truly international sometimes, sometimes more so than New York ever did. So many countries are basing their European operations in Dublin now, that there are people from all over Europe and beyond crawling the cobbled streets.
This, of course, means that there are a lot of funny accents around.
When I was a youth (but not young enough that writing this doesn't humiliate me), I asked my mother why everyone else in the world had accents but Americans didn't.
I had learned about the pilgrims, and was trying to understand why the Americans wouldn't have the same accent as the English. Clearly they did to begin with, but then, somehow, we managed to throw off any sort of defining accent and emerged like blank slates, unable to be tied to any geographic area by our well-modulated voices.
My mother looked at me and and in horrified disgust said "you moron." This was when I learned, however harshly, that Americans have accents too.
I was reminded of this lesson when I was on the patio of the local pub, enjoying the last dying rays of the Irish sunshine. One might say that a good craic was being had. I was surrounded by locals and few friends from Northern Ireland, who sound more Scottish than the average Irishman. We had been there for a length of time that is too embarrassing to admit here, when a girl from California sat down at our table.
Her voice was jarring. I'm not even going to pretend that her voice was expecially annoying or that she said anything particularly idiotic, but after not hearing an American accent for so long, I finally had a sense of what we sound like to others. The answer is, simply, fucking stupid.
