Happy Father’s Day!

“I have the accent?” I shrieked. Chicago Mary was on the phone for one of our hilarious visits. “Accent?” I chortled before she could get her reply out. "You’re the one with the accent!”

The topic that started it all regards our favorite varieties of grape juice, the kind you sip through mouthfuls of dark chocolate. Well, any chocolate. We were both drooling when the word came up. “Bottle,” we said or thought we did. Mary’s came out bahttle, mine bawttle. Which of course put us on accent alert and now we find ourselves slipping into each other’s vernacular. Love it. English has its regional inflections and pronunciations although it is decipherable despite its inconsistencies.

Not so when someone speaks other languages and tries to find similarities. Many Anglophones strive to learn other languages and then figure those all sound the same. “French is just like Italian,” someone said to me knowingly. “I know because my daughter studied both.” This dual-dialect Italian differs. After seven years of French language studies, and test answers written in the wrong language because someone was not paying attention, it is clear that words may indeed sound alike. They are not.

Gateau, for example, is recognized in France as a dessert, while gatto is known in the boot shaped country as a family pet. Put the accent on the wrong end of that piece of cake and the animal rights activists will come after you. The borrowing of words from another language is another interesting matter. The moniker for fun food tiramisu, for example, has nothing to do with food. It means pull me up. Pick-me-up, we could understand, but pull me up? I wonder if getting the boot means someone is going to give us a free trip to Italy? I hear they have some wonderful grape juices over there.

Tira su your favourite father and present him with a bawttle of vino!

--lmg