Do You Get To Hang With This Woman?

One of my coworkers encountered some foreign visitors in Twin Falls.  He heard the accented English and asked if they were from New Zealand.  They were!  They were also stunned because very few people here can detect much of a distinction from an Australian accent.  Paul Hogan used to say he was often confused as English while traveling.

In other parts of the world most people can’t discern Canadian English from what they hear when we speak.

I subscribe to a YouTube Channel called Lost in the Pond.  The host is an Englishman who lives in Chicago (his wife is American).  He has also lived in a small town in Indiana.  He freezes in winter and roasts in summer but he loves his adopted country, although.

Sometimes he gets asked some really stupid questions.

I’m reminded of the question I often get.  “Where are you from?” when people hear my Great Lakes dialect (technically, called the Inland North Dialect).

I’ve learned not to say New York.  People outside New York State think only New York City, which was an 8 to 9 hour drive from my hometown when I was a boy.  Pittsburgh was roughly a 3 hour ride and pretty much the same for Cleveland and Toronto.  The latter is now more a 5 hour drive.  Border security is vastly changed following 9/11 and the quaint provincial city of my childhood is now gigantic and a traffic nightmare.

Back to Lost in the Pond.  You can watch the video and the dumb questions below: