Sorry Jen, the title lied: I can’t think of anything else about bread right now. Except that I wish I had some “bread of the gods” (as Mrs Elbeno and I know it – Sainsbury’s unsliced granary loaf to the rest of the world) in the cupboard. If so, I would be a bread-muncher right now.<\/p>\n
Anyway the more accurate title of this update would be: Turning Native or Not? It’s been almost two years, and my neural pathways are still resolutely British about some things.<\/p>\n
Even now, if I’m not thinking about it quite hard, I write down the date the wrong (the right!<\/em>) way around. Happened just yesterday.<\/p>\n I still say “shedule” rather than “skedule”, “zed” rather than “zee” and of course a hundred other Britishisms. I still spell the British way: always -ise rather than -ize and -our rather than -or. And here’s the thing: I do this without thinking, rather than in some attempt to hold on to my British identity. If I’m talking to someone and they just said “zee” then I am likely to say “zee” too. But left to my own thought patterns, the British way comes out without my noticing. The two people I talk to most often at work are actually Canadian, so that’s just fine.<\/p>\n The other day I made some email joke about the Four Yorkshiremen sketch, and email tumbleweeds blew by. Did my joke fall on barren ground? Or did the workaday business merely spring up and choke it? Where I come from, people launch into the Four Yorkshiremen sketch as quickly as thinking.<\/p>\n I still can’t remember whether “a quarter of four” means quarter to, or quarter past, four o’clock. I don’t hear it much around these parts though.<\/p>\n And yet, it seems to me that I already have a mid-atlantic accent. I can hear my own speech and it’s definitely different from how it used to be. The first symptom is Ts changing to Ds.<\/p>\n Should I just go with the flow? I just sound fake to myself, which makes it hard. It’s getting so that when I talk to someone Californian, it’s “hey dude”, but when I’m talking to someone British, it’s “awwright?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sorry Jen, the title lied: I can’t think of anything else about bread right now. Except that I wish I had some “bread of the gods” (as Mrs Elbeno and I know it – Sainsbury’s unsliced granary loaf to the rest of the world) in the cupboard. If so, I…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-baked-goods"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}