Do de Hassle

With Sean in Cork, I don’t get to analyze a person’s accent much these days. Enter: a 2-week long visit with my parents! My parents have been speaking English for nearly 35 years. After all that time, you’d expect them to be fluent – and they are – but sometimes, the flaws in their fluency come through. Since they speak to me in Italian over the phone, I’ve rarely heard them speak English since I moved out of the house. Sometimes, when it’s been a while, I forget that English is their third language until I hear them speak. A small sample of my Guatemalan dad’s pronunciation quirks:

• dump/jump/plump/etc = domp/jomp/plomp. Colomboss Circle really used to be the domps.
• snail/stop/sell/etc = eh-snail/eh-stop/eh-sell. I keep getting all this jonk mails. Who are this eh-sexy eh-slots and why are they mailing me?
• bus/fuss/just = bass/fass/jast. In the 70s, The Jackson 5 and ABBA were popular, as well as De Hassle. The who, dad? You know; do de Hassle ….

Idioms:

• “global warming” = “global warning”
• “kid in a candy store” = “pig in a candy store.”

Spelling, as discovered through IMs:

• “yuppies” = “yappies.” There is a new Applebease [sic] in town and all the yappies were there.
• “Thanksgiving” = “Thanksgiven”

My Italian mother has an easier time of it; her accent is quite good and her pronunciation issues are only limited to the inclusion of “l” in “salmon,” “h” in “graham,” or “o” in “leopard.” Sometimes, though, she too confuses her idioms and phrases:

• Bumble Fork = Fork Wood. They kidnapped your cousin’s son and left him in the middle of Fork Wood.
• [Pizza Hut] Pan Pizza = Pizza Pan. Hi, yes. I’d like to order one Pizza Pan with mushrooms.
• Hearts of palm = palmetto hearts
• Milk cartons = milk cartoons
  

When she spells, she tends to follow Italian rules, resulting in sentences like Hei! Uao! I really liked the pictures of the lasagna. It looked gnammy!

My parents love to jeer at each other’s English mistakes almost as much as they laughed at my own Italian and Spanish errors when I was a child. That’s right, my own – lest you think I was just mean-spiritedly picking on my parents as though my own eh-sheet didn’t eh-steenk. Four words for you: I eat my pigeon. But it’s all good. The mistakes you make in a foreign language sometimes help you learn, and sometimes remind you of how far you’ve come.