Do You Speak English...or American?

On another blog site, I read a post someone wrote about dealing with a McDonald’s employee in Arizona with what I presume was a heavy Spanish accent. This person was quite annoyed that he had to contend with someone in the customer service industry in America who had difficulty with speaking English. He was downright outraged.

His post reminded me of some of my own incidents of dealing with accented speech, or people who don’t understand English very well. My problem isn't with people from other countries, it's with good ol' red blooded Americans...specifically: Hillbillies.

I’m not referring to a nice southern drawl here…when I say “hillbilly”, that’s exactly what I mean.

I used to work at JC Penney, in the “home decor” department. When I had to order curtains for someone, it involved calling the company who makes the curtains.

One time, a total hayseed answered the phone, and I gave her the window measurements. She then asked me for the “seal hot”.

I said…"Um…what?"

She said, “The seal hot. I need the seal hot.”

“Seal hot?” I repeated back, just to make sure I had heard her correctly.

“Yes.” she said.

I had NO clue WTF she was talking about. I had to go find someone else in the store that speaks Hillbilly to talk to her. Turns out, she needed to know the sill height, as in, the height of the window sill.

Are the words “sill” and “height” really that difficult to pronounce? “Sill” has a short “i”, not a long “e”. “Height” has a long “i” and there is no short “o” sound in it.

Speak English, people!

Another hillbilly I dealt with at a UPS shipping center kept insisting that my “pitcher” got broken while being shipped. Of course, a normal person that understands and speaks English either thinks of a pitcher from which you pour liquids, or a pitcher in a baseball game.

I argued with him for a good five minutes that I had not packed a pitcher into the box I had shipped…until it dawned on me that he meant PICTURE. The picture frame I’d shipped must have cracked.

“Oh! You mean my PIK-CHUR.” I pronounced carefully, because I’m a bitch. “Picture, not pitcher.”

He looked at me like I was crazy.

To be fair, New England Yankee accents often stupefy me too. I had a good friend from Boston, and she was talking to me one day about the “rum” she’d had at a hotel.

Now, we were only 14 years old, and I found it unlikely that hotel personnel would have given her alcohol. “How did you get them to give you rum?!?” I asked, shocked.

“No! Not rum...rum! R-O-O-M…rum!” she said as if she was talking to an imbecile.

I’ve also struggled with the vernacular of various parts of the U.S.A. For example, I learned that in Indiana, “Ah’m gonna run the sweeper,” means, “I’m going to vacuum the floor.”

So...I guess to those Americans who become outraged when they encounter immigrants or visitors to our country that don't speak perfect English, I say...YOU FIRST.

:)