Sarah Wrote:
It’s a Sagittarius rumination on language, with a side-serving of aging factored in, but what caught me was language.
I love accents. I used to be good at location language, listening and determining a source of the accent, but over the years, and too much of the TV/Hollywood influence ruins that. I can’t pick out the root language, and my recent time in London only further hampered that. Except for the Irish lad. His language was exceptional. Different cadence, and pitch, clipped in the wrong places for a native American southern speaker, but his language delivery was poetic in form.
That’s the exception. When purchasing trinkets on High Street (London), I asked where the family of vendors were from.
“You tell me,” that thick Eastern European accent leaking through.
“I have no idea.” Standard response. Drawl a little for effect.
Subsequent questioning, and an educated guess, we arrived at an answer, “Albania.”
The accent that always throws me is County Cork. I’ve missed it too many times.
Seemed like the UK, especially London, was filled with varying degrees of immigrants.
As Americans, more pointedly, as North Americans, we have much to learn from the British and the British Isles about combating terrorism, home-grown or originating off-shore.
It was in the British National Gallery I relearned that point, several years ago, almost a decade past. All about what does – or doesn’t – work. I wanted to discard a coffee cup and the guards all suggested that the closest place to throw something away was a trash bin in the middle of Trafalgar Square.
I asked why, and the shorthand notation was about bombs in the previous decades from the homegrown variety of activists.
There’s a wealth of security and prevention we can learn from the pale, northern Europeans; they’ve been down a similar road.
Nowhere would this be more apparent than in a border town.
SXSW notations:
Me, obviously, I’m in El Paso. For work.
Most common SXSW Tweets.
And my (dated) advice.
West Texas Cattle News:
One word message: Two-headed calf.
“It’s not something you see every day, in fact, it only happens every one in 400 million times.
“Here’s another interesting fact, the two-headed calf was born on Martin County Sheriff John Woodward’s ranch.”