Well camel, I don't think I have mentioned this one before. I just happen to have a step-brother named Noel and he gets the same thing with his name. Only he works as head of juvenile probation for a county in California, so he gets to here his name butchered by the tweens he supervises all day long! Not to mention the 'cool' and 'like' he hears all day as part of that Cali Valley Girls invention - which is where that all started.

I find myself adapting my speech to fit local custom. For instance if I said 'twenty' it would seem to others around here like I was looking down on them and fairly soon I would have no one at all to talk to. And 'twunny' sounds too lacking in intelligence, so now I say 'twunty'. I don't say 'hafta' or 'have to' neither. Instead I say 'havto' really fast. Looks like I have created my own English dialect.

Mostly English is not properly spoken here. This is because the native language was originally 'High Dutch' (which by the way is actually a modified form of German itself). Most of the 'sloppy English' in this area comes from applying the inflections from that language to English. It just tends to happen that way I'm afraid.

At the very least I thought I would always maintain a proper sounding speech. Even after living here ten years I sounded nothing like the locals. So I mistakenly let down my guard. Big mistake. I heard myself on my friends answering machine a few months ago and am afraid that after twenty years my speech is finally replete with the local 'twang and drawl'. (er, better make that a twun-ty!) How embarassing!

And I don't use spell-check or those silly chat abbreviations either. Must have something to do with our age!

-Steve