Quote:
Accents are funny, period.

Miss-pronounciations have been a source of comedy for stand up and screen comics for years.

You just always have to remember, it works both ways


To qoute the movie "Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels":

Barry: "Fuhckin Norven monkies!"
Gary: "I 'ate these fooking soothern fayries!"

I don't normally knock on people with accents, becuase half the time, it's not even accents that are the communication barrier, but a lack of understanding of colloquialisms (Sp?) or dialects. For example, when I went to school in Jersey, a friend of mine I met who lived there showed me Molfetto's, great Italian place ((Run by Iranians, oddly enough, best pizza around)). I asked for an Italian hoagie while my friend was out getting cigarettes. He comes back to me trying to explain to the pizza guy what a "hoagie" is. My friend knew people from Philly before, turned to the guy and said "He wants an Italian sub", which the pizza guy understood perfectly. I, however, had not a goddamn clue what an Italian sub was.

However, I do feel that there are certain positions that should not be filled by those who are unfamiliar with the speech of areas they will be servicing, or have accents so thick the locals will have a hard time understanding. For example, the chemistry lab TA I had my first year of college, who could only correctly pronounce "Very dangerous" and "This very bad". What was so dangerous, none of us had a goddamned clue. And I mean no one. Even someone in the class whose family was from the same general region as the TA could not understand her accent and dialect. This actually impeded our grades and ability to understand what we were doing.

Now, same class, but the recitation instead of the lab, we also had a non-Enligsh speaker who had a heavy Japanese accent. However, he tried hard, and made sure to check himself, his pronunciation, and encouraged us to ask him to repeat himself if we didn't understand, or even to offer ((constructively of course)) corrections to his English so he might improve. I can say, without a shadow of a doubt, more than half of that LARGE chemistry class, probably 90+ people, owe their passing grades to that guy. The reason? He knew of the communication barrier and he worked around it. There are people, like the TA, who told us they just didn't give a damn and if we couldn't understand them, tough shit, it was OUR fault for not being more "culturally aware."