Ey Up, Lad. Tha’ dunt se much, do tha’?

My husband, Jose is a pretty gregarious sort. He’s witty and interesting and therefore easy to take out in public. So when my mother and Sid, my late stepfather came here for Christmas the first year we were together, I was looking forward to them meeting him, and being suitably impressed.

“Awright, Ozie,” said Sid, shaking Jose’s hand warmly. I had spent the past several months coaching my mother over the phone to get her to pronounce Jose as Ho-say and not Jo-zee. Although I convinced them that the J was pronounced as an h, no amount of cajoling could get either of them to put the emphasis on the second syllable, and the letter h had never been uttered from Sid’s mouth in his life.

The four of us sat around and made conversation. Sid soon made himself feel at home and started in on some of his stories. He told the one about the day he drove home in fog so thick he couldn’t see the front of the car’s hood and ended up driving down the sidewalk. What he actually said was along the lines of “Fog wa’ that thick, I coont see’t end o’t’ bonnet. Nex’ thing I know, I’m on t’ causeway.”

I laughed and my mother gasped in shock, I think more in surprise that he’d survived as long as he had. Jose however, sat there staring blankly at Sid. I caught his eye and grinned, trying to pull him into the conversation, but he just gazed back at me. I frowned. This was no way to make a good impression on your future in-laws. He could at least put in a little effort to join in and endear himself to them. Perhaps, I thought, now he had seen where I descended from, he had changed his mind about our future together. I was slightly worried, but frankly, even more upset with him for being so rude.

It was somewhere in the middle of one of Sid’s stories about his long time friend and cycling partner, Billy, that the penny dropped for me. Jose didn’t understand a single word that Sid was saying. That disassociated frown on his face was in fact a look of concentration. “He may as well have been speaking Chinese,” he said to me later that night.

It was Churchill who once said we are “two nations divided by a common language.” How right he was. After 13 years here my once strong Yorkshire accent has softened considerably. It’s now what most of relatives would describe as “posh” and the rest would say is definitely American. Still, there are times that no matter how hard I try I cannot make myself understood. My greatest challenge seems to be in ordering water in a restaurant. I say war-ta, but what I need to try and say is wodder, or wawder, or something like that. It’s virtually impossible. Another favorite is the old Khakis/car keys, which apparently to my husband’s ears sound exactly the same.

Jacques Chirac allegedly stomped out when it was suggested that a meeting be conducted in the language of business, i.e. English. That’s all well and good if everyone around the table speaks the same version of English, but even in England you only have to travel to the next county to hear English spoken in a different dialect and with words unique to that region.

Perhaps we should all learn sign language, but even that has its issues. It would be all well and good until someone asked for two of something and caused the British delegation to leave in a huff.


In Memory of Sid
July 27, 1932 - March 18, 2004
It were 'ilarious.