I am watching Stephen Fry in America, where the celebrated British actor and author drove his black London cab through all 50 states, sampling a bit of each as he went, and I’m finding that as I talk to my wife during breaks that I keep wanting to speak with a British accent. Not as an affectation or joke, mind you, and I’m not using any obvious British slang.
I just quite naturally begin choosing my words more carefully, pronouncing them more traditionally, enunciating them more precisely. I place emphasis on different sections of the sentence, making observational sentences more of a question than a declaration. Somehow I manage the trick of sounding both self-deprecatingly apologetic and mildly superior at the same time.
As it seems to happen with appalling regularity whenever I watch such programmes, one must assume a genetic source. Somewhere in my history there lies an English gene, ready and willing to leap out out a moment’s notice and force me to pronounce “schedule” with a “shed.”
“I am going to be speaking to you this evening with a British accent, so do be prepared for the words you hear to come with a little more authority than you’re used to. And you could have had this, and that’s the real tragedy.” — John Oliver
It fades, it fades. A few hours from now I’ll once again be dropping my Gs and coarsening my speech. But for now I find myself transported with the challenge of delivering sentences with complex constructions, where clauses leap like playful porpoises around each other, swimming in the same depths as Wodehouse, Chesterton and the Pythons.
Mind you I’m well aware that Americans have whelped their fair share of speechifiers who could give any Brit a run for his money, and there are certainly any number of British accents that are at least as harsh to the ear as any Southern twang. And I perform the same linguistic gymnastics (in much different directions) whenever we watch the Beverly Hillbillies, or anything featuring mobsters (the movie “Oscar” can have us speaking in broken Italian for days).
I’m also painfully aware that to an actual Brit my accent would sound like nothing of the kind. Years of television and movies have instilled in me a sort of conglomeration of tongues from around the island, with some Yorkshire running into my Lancashire, with Black Country vowels trampling all through my Ipswitch and East Anglia and Liverpool mixed together in a hellish brew. Think John Cleese by way of Ringo Starr and Douglas Adams with some Dave Allen sneaking in, all the worse as Dave Allen was most definitely Irish. Or, to put it in more understandable terms to an American, imagine someone making an American accent by using pronunciations from Jersey, Georgia, Boston and Texas all in the same sentence.
But for now in my head I am British, soft-spoken and wryly humorous and calmly amused by everything. And a jolly good day to you all.
Thats funny that you write this because just yesterday I was watching episodes of Doctor Who and found myself speaking not with an accent but with sentence structures of a brit for a few hours after. I notice this a lot with me because I watch a lot of british television. I do, however, use some words more common with those across the pond because I was raised on this stuff.
Good man! I speak with an English accent all the time, but there’s a very good reason for that… 🙂