Showing posts with label spiders. Show all posts
Showing posts with label spiders. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

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.