southernisms

it may surprise those of you who didn't know me as a child or adolescent to discover i have a rather thick southern accent. it creeps up at inopportune times like when i lose my voice, am terribly sleepy or have been yelling at concerts. it is thick. my whole cadence changes and i sound like an entirely different person.

the first time (apart from "fixin to", numbers, southern states and naming single objects at a time) where i noticed i had picked up a weird word habit because of the accent was grilled cheese sandwiches---which until i was 13 i thought were GIRL-Led cheeses because little girls ate them. in my accent it always came out GRLLED cheese....so i never knew where the I went. ah the embarassement of high school lunches.

the monotone bland accent nonsense from nowadays was cultivated over years of practice at boarding school, where i systematically taught myself to speak without the accent--it drove my bff crazy. most of the time, i have no problem jumping back and forth between the two (southern and bland) and can occasionally throw in a third that sounds like english is my second language. i speak spanish with a chilean accent, depsite my best efforts otherwise.

anyways, this weekend i discovered another of my southernisms, which i am documenting here to prove i was right. our campsite (see blog posts later this week) was covered in granddaddy long-legged spiders. of course, when i called them that Adam and Matt immediately announced i had the name wrong and that they were called daddy long legs. nor did they let me live it down for three days.

because i do not like being wrong, i looked it up.

Tahdow.

No. I didn't get it wrong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pholcidae and http://www.chattanoogan.com/articles/article_130290.asp both agree with my name choice. so there.