eptivity

So they put the salt and pepper in the wrong shakers here. The good news is that at least they’re consistent, so I really only had a problem just the once.

In other condiment news, I finally, finally know how to pronounce Worcestershire sauce. Like this: WOOST-ur-shur.

English proper names are sneaky, but the trick is just to not pronounce some of the letters—do kindly disregard the apparent randomness with which these silent letters were selected. There was a story in Outside magazine a year or so ago about an Englishman named Thomas Cholmondeley, whose name is pronounced “Chum-lee.” Naturally.

We live kind of nearby a place called Derby, which is of course pronounced “Darby.” We’ve been pronouncing the Kentucky Derby incorrectly for the last 133 years, people!

When our accents give us away as not-from-around-here, Stephan likes to tell people that we’re from Scotland. Our American is still hanging on, though—Stephan was accused of being posh because he pronounced garage as “ga-RAZH” instead of “GARE-azh”—except for one thing. People here say “sorry,” for everything, all the time, instead of “excuse me.” Since we’re simply imitating the English to fit in, it’s impossible for us to say it without a fake English accent.

And don’t tell any English people, but so far the only distinction we’ve been able to make between the dozens of differentiated English accents is “hard to understand” and “less hard to understand.” They ran a headline a few weeks ago about the Birmingham accent (”our” city) being voted “worse than silence,” but honestly, it’s just another accent to us.