I was on the phone with someone at work, during the course of my dreadfully boring job, and we were waiting for his computer to reboot or what have you’ that part of the conversation I mentally refer to as ‘Insert Small Talk Here’. I wasn’t really holding up my side of the conversation. I was zoning.
Apparently he wasn’t as comfortable with silence, interrupted by the melodius tones of a Windows 2000 box grinding away at boot up. ‘Where are you located?’ He asked.
‘Huh? Oh’ Green Bay, Wisconsin.’ I always have to add the ‘Wisconsin’ part because sometimes, people don’t know where Green Bay is. They think maybe Canada. Or possibly the Yukon.
‘Oh’. You don’t sound like you’re from Green Bay. You don’t have that Midwestern accent.’
Which I inherently take as a compliment. When I was eight years old, I realized that some of the words I said didn’t really make sense. I never heard them on television. Thus I endeavored to quell my accent, soften it, polish it, so that I would no longer sound so Fargo-esque.
I am careful to pronounce ‘milk’ with a short I sound and not ‘melk’. I enunciate so that there is one syllable in ‘no’ (rather than noah), two syllables in ‘mirror’ (rather than pronouncing it mere) and there are three syllables in the word ‘jewelry’. Speaking of that, also that the R is in the correct spot so that it’s never JEWLREY or LIBARY or FEBUARY. I make a conspicuous effort to take gentle care with my vowels, not slam them over the head hard and fast and long. I caress my consonants: I try not to shove them deep into the recesses of my nasal cavity where they will stay until my next winter cold.
It’s hard for many people to hear their own accents. I am fortunate to have originated from a family with some fairly deep-rooted working class backgrounds. You can trace our lineage to this area back to 1830. Belgian and French with a little mix of German for flavor. It is a fairly common breed in this area and carries with it a lilting sing-songy accent, striking hard and prolonging words and phrases. I recognized it early on. When I lived in England, all of my friends from Wisconsin were appalled when they started to be able to hear their own accents for the first time. I had always known. The trip to England simply showed me how to turn it off.
When I was 8, I realized that ‘in so?’ didn’t make sense.
‘Ooooh, it’s a cold one out dere today, in so?’
What was that? IN SO? It was meant to prompt the listener into saying ‘Yaaaaah’ or the even more egregious ‘Ohhhh Yaah dere hey.’ Which translates into English as ‘Oh yes there’ with a ‘hey’ thrown in to show friendliness. Wisconsinites are all about showing the friendliness, willing to cook up a hotdish to share at a moment’s notice.
When I am tired or cranky or both, my accent flairs back up. And I can Fargo with the best of them. I brought a Southern gentleman to hysterical tears delivering a monologue of my great grandmother’s, about not sitting on the ground ’cause you’ll get a chill up into your bones dere and it’ll give you the pains in your female parts, don’t you know.’ I suppose it held a morbid fascination for him, the way that I cannot understand grits or chitlins or walking around with a toothpick in one’s mouth.
I suppose I cannot really escape Wisconsin. As much as I try to dampen my Midwestern tendancies, smooth out my Lutheran background, the proclivity to wear good clothes on Sunday and eat red Jello with bananas and Cool Whip, it will always be there. Perhaps it’s taken 30 years to realize that. No matter what I do, I will always be that little Lutheran girl who danced the polka at Cousin Eunice’s wedding with Uncle Milton, where they served all you can eat broasted chicken and Brandy Old-Fashioneds for the grown-ups. Part of me will long to be sitting above a hole in the ice; fishing for perch in sub-zero temperatures with people whom you could not necessarily tell which gender they were until they spoke, unless their snowmobile suit of choice was possibly pink. I still call a drinking fountain ‘a bubbler’. I still yearn to go further ‘up north’ whenever I vacation. I get nostalgic over the smell of Deep Woods Off.
Plus, I really love me a Brandy Old-Fashioned. They rock.
It’s really hard to understand what it is to be a Wisconsinite, I think, for the rest of the country. They see the idiots without shirts on at Packer games in sub-zero weather and they watch Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley. They know about the cannibalistic serial killers we spawn here in the Dairy State. They know about the cheese.
They don’t know about the important stuff though. They don’t know about how every November, half the school would be absent because they were sitting in a deer stand somewhere in the woods. They don’t know about going Christmas shopping with dead bucks strapped to the trunk of the car ahead of you. Or seeing them hanging from a tree, gutted, like some Wildlife KKK had lynched them.
Or how it didn’t matter what your costume was at Halloween because you’d be wearing your winter coat over it anyway. Or how the fall leaf decorations at Thanksgiving didn’t make sense, since there was snow on the ground. Nor did the flower decorations at Easter because there was still snow on the ground.
Or it’s not unusual to buy your new jeans, snow blower, candy, and livestock inoculation supplies at the same store. Or how all the men have fabulous tans’ which stop exactly midpoint between their elbow and their shoulder’. Or in a curved line on their forehead. Or how you go out for fish every Friday night, in Lent or not’ if you’re Catholic or not‘and it doesn’t matter that the Pope rescinded that whole ‘don’t eat meat on Fridays’ thing either.
They don’t know about how it’s not unusual for someone’s boat to be worth twice as much as their car or truck. They don’t know about eating fresh cheese curds, which squeak when you bite into them or about how a warm fresh cheese curd, with its little droplets of whey, is just about as close as you can get to heaven in your mouth. And they don’t realize that Miss Muffet must have been a Wisconsin farm girl. They don’t know how most kids have had warm milk, fresh from the cow, on their cereal in the morning. They don’t know how the cream will clot to the Frosted Flakes and against the side of the bowl, like the ring around a bathtub.
It’s not unusual to see a statue of the Virgin Mary in many front yards’. Usually standing in a recycled bathtub grotto, which is a bathtub, half buried, standing on one end.
They don’t know a bunch of boys, born in the early 70’s, with the name Bart. Or baby boomers with the name Vince. They don’t know the purgatory that is being on the waiting list for season tickets, or how those tickets are handed down like a legacy through generations, like a royal title.
They don’t know how Taco Bell is considered ‘ethnic food’ or ‘a touch on the spicy side’. They don’t know about booyah (which is a chicken soup type thing made in large quantities and served by state law at church picnics and fairs). They don’t know about putting noodles in your chili. They don’t know that knee caps are delicious but best not try eating one when wearing a black shirt. They don’t know how people feel that Joseph McCarthy just had a lot of bad press and they must have been ignoring his good points too.
So yes, I try not to sound like a hick from Wisconsin. But it doesn’t mean that I’m not a Wisconsin girl at heart. And by the way, it’s pronounced ‘green BAY’ not ‘GREEN bay’. And ‘wisCONsin’ not ‘WISconsin’.
In so?
