The Brooklyn Kid Meets Texans, Six Flags to the Wind:

English?

Dog should rhyme with log, and not be pronounced as, “dawg”….

I had moved to Flower Mound Texas a small town of 3,500 souls from one of the largest city municipalities in the United States, Brooklyn, New York, during the Abe Beame mayoral “crunch”, when city jobs were scarce and teachers, firemen and police were laid off in record numbers.

I relocated after nineteen hours of driving, due West and South, where I quickly found a job to teach college freshman English, and soon found out that English, there, was different.

I didn’t think that I HAD ever had an accent.

That’s just the way that everybody talked where I grew up.

I was, though, aware of the sharp similarities in dialect, between the twangy ergot spoken in Flatbush, Brooklyn, which was identical to natives in Jersey city, New Jersey.

“Toiday -Toid Street?”, “Yo!”

“Ta New- Joisey?

“Forgetabout it!”

“Ya Nuts!?”.”Gotta be”

“At rush hour?, C’heez.!!..”

MY particular nasal Brooklyn accent, however, had never seemed an accent to me.

But, when I had moved to Denton, Texas, I had heard a slow drawled, colorful dialect of English:

Instead of,”The humidity is moider”, I would hear,

” So dagblam moist sticky,Y’all could walk a goldfish on a leash!”

Instead of ” Yo, How’ya Doin?”, it was a crisp,

“Hidy!”

I was suddenly soon to be painfully aware that Texas’ local culture was ALSO very different.

Their slow, drawled accent ruffled my inner ear feathers, just as mine did theirs.

I could not digest, or accept their ‘word salad’, which seemed slow baked in the Texas sun.

My ear would baffle .

Instead of, “C’mon, ya’ ready?; “ma car’s right dare.”, I heard,

“Ya’ll fixen, to mosey?” “Im’a parked, over yonder”.

As well, my rapid delivery always had them scratching their heads:

“Y’all  now haf-ta just run all that by me, right agin, but ya’ll talk SLOWER; ya’ll talk so FAST!”!”

I found that I had to repeat virtually everything that I had said, but this second time, much, much slower.

Frustrated and frankly disoriented by my fast Brooklyn nasal whine with all of its truncated words, nice, friendly, unsuspecting Texas people would often ask me, with an intense curiousity,

“Where ya’ll FROMMMM? “

“Ya’ll talk so FUNNNNY!”

And I, with a straight poker face, would retort,

” FRANCE; we speak this way, in FRANCE!”, and I would make eye contact and nod seriously.

They’d always look happily informed and would then always deeply smile, as though suddenly illuminated; they were always unaware, tone-deaf to my New York wry, sarcasm..
  
Could I have taught Texans to speak less like Ox, and more like Oxford?
I once told a Texan,”You’re a moron, a stunted low-life and an n ass hole”,

and he said,”Ya’ll fo, try’n t’ TELL me, some-thang?”

Teaching there was like putting my head under mud for six hours a day. 

“….a bunch of slow-witted Texans are re-writing the history books for America…..”

Our Northeast seventh graders were more apt than their college freshmen

New Yorkers were not far less gullible, but were certainly more “cosmopolitan” than Texans.

 New York is an international city, like Paris, London or Athens and thus people are certainly more likely to recognize a French vestigial accent, by comparison, or recognize an out and out joke.

Ninety-nine percent of the amazingly slow witted Texans who I met, who knew nothing of the outside world, certainly gave the other one percent a bad name.

This New York City kid found that suddenly transplanted, living in Texas, was too different an electron spin energy level from living in urban NYC.

In New York City it’s coming at you so fast that sometimes, even paranoid people, are truly being followed.

Down there, by comparison, it’s coming at you, so very slowly, that it’s been a hundred years, since the beginning of this sentence.