You know, like in the grocery lineup, or while choosing the best cherries from the bins, or while sitting watching fascinating things involving heavy machinery happening (more on this later, I promise!)
A conversation I had the other night has lingered with me and I'm not really sure why.
I was in the lineup at the checkout at the grocery store (hello, I think I've covered all the obvious points, yes?) when a gentleman behind me asked if he could look at one of the items I was buying. I told him to go ahead and we chatted for a bit.
He talked about how he hadn't grown up with these things, having grown up in a "totalitarian society" and for the life of me I don't know why I didn't ask where he'd grown up because I really can't figure it out. I usually think I'm pretty good at figuring out accents, certainly those from around Great Britain and I would have thought this man's accent was Irish. ish. Irish-ish.
I've been trying to figure it out since and wish I'd asked.
Any thoughts out there? It's kind of stuck in my brain, as you can see.
8 comments:
My guess would be Central Europe; I am not a linguistic expert (far from it) but to my ears there are some similarities between the Irish accent and relatively thicker czech or polish accents.
Plus, I'd hazard a guess that a central european country is more likely to have been a totalitarian society in the last few decades than Ireland.
That's my 2 pence on the matter!
That's sort of what I was thinking :)
Thanks for your 2 pence! ;)
How old was he? If he's over 40, he might have grown up in any of the cold war countries.
Yeah, he was over 40, but his accent (to my ear, at least) wasn't at all Slavic....
It does sound likely he was from one of the Eastern Block countries. Probably Poland if his accent was not very strong, or possibly what was once East Germany.
Could he have been Cuban? I haven't heard the Cuban accent.
Well the key point for me besides the accent would be; what was the item he looked at???
One thing to consider is that any guy, when chatting up some hot young thing, is not entirely reliable; so I'm thinking Northern Ireland.
I don't think he was Cuban, Tom, but I could maybe believe Poland...
DG, I think he looked at my bottle of Iced Tea drink thing.
Mark, that's still my first guess, and maybe by "totalitarian" he meant... um, "bad/strict/something"?
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