Paul Schroeder

From Brooklyn to Texas: Culture Shock (part 1)



Posted: Tuesday, December 14, 2010

by Paul Schroeder
alien / demonic attachment

Dog should rhyme with log, not be pronounced, "dawg"....

I had moved to Flower Mound Texas a small town of 3,500 souls from one of the largest city municipalities in the United States, Brooklyn, New York, during the Abe Beame mayoral "crunch" when city jobs were scarce and teachers, firemen and police were laid off in record numbers.

I quickly found a job to teach college freshman English but soon found out that English there was different.

I didn't think that I HAD an accent.

That's the way that everybody talked where I grew up.

I was, though, aware of the sharp similarities in dialect, between the twangy ergot spoken in Flatbush, Brooklyn which was identical to natives in Jersey city, New Jersey.

"Toiday Toid Street?",

"Ta New- Joisey?

"Forgetabout it!"

"Ya Nuts!?".

"At rush hour?, C'heez.!!.."

MY particular nasal Brooklyn accent, however, had never seemed an accent to me, at all.

But, when I had moved to Denton, Texas, I had heard a slow drawled, colorful dialect:

Instead of,"The humidity is moider", I would hear,

" So dagblam moist sticky,Y'all could walk a goldfish on a leash!"

Instead of "Howya Doin?", it was a crisp,

"Hidy!"

I was suddenly soon to be painfully aware that local culture was ALSO very different.

Their slow, drawled accent ruffled my inner ear feathers, just as mine did theirs.

I could not digest, accept their 'word salad', which seemed slow baked in the Texas sun.

My ear would baffle .

Instead of, "C'mon, ya' ready?; my car's right dare.", I heard,

"Ya'll fixen, to mosey?" "Im'a parked, over yonder".

As well, my rapid delivery always had them scratching their heads:

"Y'all haf-ta just run that by me, right agin, but ya'll talk SLOWER; ya'll talk so FAST!"!"

I found that I had to repeat virtually everything that I had said, but this second time, much, much slower.

Frustrated and frankly disoriented by my fast Brooklyn nasal whine with all of its truncated words, nice, friendly, unsuspecting Texas people would often ask me, with an intense curiousity,

"Where ya'll FROMMMM? "

"Ya'll talk so FUNNNNY!"

And I, with a straight poker face, would retort,

" FRANCE; we speak this way, in FRANCE!", and I would make eye contact and nod seriously.

They'd always look happily informed and would then always deeply smile, as though suddenly illuminated; they were always unaware, tone-deaf to my New York wry, sarcasm..

New Yorkers were not far less gullible, but were certainly more "cosmopolitan" than Texans.

 New York is an international city, like Paris, London or Athens and thus people are certainly more likely to recognize a French vestigial accent, by comparison, or recognize an out and out joke.

Ninety-nine percent of the amazingly slow witted Texans who I met, who knew nothing of the outside world, certainly gave the other one percent a bad name.
“....a bunch of slow-witted Texans are re-writing the history books for America.....”