I use my Merriam-Webster online dictionary every day, and sometimes I find interesting articles or interesting people wiriting them. In this case, both.
In an article called “An Oxford-Educated Southerner in Berlin,” I was delighted to read about a journalist who has lived lots of places,
Johnson City, Tennessee
Little Rock, Arkansas
Omaha, Nebraska
Marietta, Georgia
New Orleans, Louisiana
Hamburg, Germany
Oxford, England
Brooklyn, New York
Berlin, Germany
(and now London, England)
fluent:
German
Spanish
French
Portuguese
Danishconversant:
Russian
Arabic
Italian
and still sounds like the sort of person who doesn’t think he’s too cool for school (or me, with my one language), you know? I love this:
I use y’all freely, and will duel (pistols, dawn) anyone who tells me not to. My accent gets a little southern lilt when I go back to Georgia, where my father’s family all still live.
Those of you who know me well, though, will understand why this delights me so:
Being a rootless cosmopolitan has its upsides (never boring) and its downsides (the mind-numbing stress of moving itself). But I never quite imagined that a major downside would be the inability to speak without self-consciousness. In a given day, I speak baby-talk Danish and English with my 14-month-old, grown-up Danish and English with my wife, English with my 12-year-old, and both German and careful Euro-English with assorted foreigners at work. My old normal English—very fast, slangy, moderately profane, slightly mumbled General American, lightly influenced by decades in the South—is limited to my few intimates in Berlin.
Read the article, check out Greene’s word-nerdy blog, and have a great weekend, y’all. 🙂
Tweet: A multilingual journalist finds he’s self-conscious of his speech.
Tweet: Born in Tennessee, educated in England, speaks Danish. What?
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