This past week as I was trying my best to give away all those spare tomato plants I was reminded (repeatedly) that I still say TOE-MAY-TOE rather than TOE-MA-TOE. Sometimes I say TOE-MAY-TOE-TOE-MA-TOE as a bit of a joke. But I truly feel I'd sound affected if I were to say TOE-MA-TOE, that's just not how I pronounce that word. While my word usage has changed over the 16+ years I've lived in New Zealand, and my accent has softened, I'm still not pronouncing things like a native. (The exception being those things that exist entirely in this context, like place names.) I think I'd sound affected, like I was putting it on.
But something happened the other day when I was out in the veggie garden that has had me thinking. I was talking to myself about "herbs," and pronounced them "herbs as in Herbert." Not "herbs is in urbs" the American way (or the French way without the l'). I stopped myself dead in my tracks. This had bubbled up automatically, straight out of my subconscious. I actually had to pause and think about how to say the word properly, or at least the way I always used to say it.
John jokes that my brain is being rewired. He blames Trump, with tongue firmly in cheek. In my view there are a lot of things to blame on Trump but this isn't one of them. It seems I'm becoming naturalised, progressively.
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