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All right... this keeps distracting me, and I think I'd best have a go at it now before I end up giggling in class any more about it. I have come to the conclusion that more than half of the people teaching me this quarter are secretly and not-so-secretly Canadian. I wasn't sure about my Shakespeare TA until today, when his constant "aboat"ing caught up with his detached stance on the US. I'm sticking him firmly under the "likely" category, and the moment he utters "eh" casually, he's getting stamped. My film prof's got an odd sort of accent, but I'm not entirely sure it's not just a weird variant on some more obscure midwestern accent, so I'm sticking him under "maybe", even though memory faintly recalls a casual "eh" or two. The prof for the other section of Intro to Film (which I sat in on the first day of classes), in unabashedly Canadian, however. You could look at her and be able to tell. Honest. (I also have proof, because it was something she proudly declared). The Shakespeare prof, I think, is most certainly American. She reminds me of one of my aunts for some reason, and I'm not sure if this means I think she's from California or not, but I wouldn't be surprised if she was. (Northern California, though, if I had to go with something at random, even though that's not where my aunt lives.) And there's no question where my creativing writing instructor is from, since she told us about getting her masters in Dublin on the first day. My Modern Fiction TA I'm unsure on, but she hasn't given me anything to go on that'd make me think she wasn't from the US, so I'll stick with that. It gives me two out of six instructor-types that I'm sure are from the US.
The one that perplexes me most, though (and got me thinking about all of this), is my American Modern Fiction prof. He's the head of the English department. He teaches American Lit pretty much exclusively. ... But he pronounces the last letter of the alphabet as "zed". As much of a lexiconical novelty it is, even I haven't picked that up, and I've thrown together a gigantic mishmash of other people's regionalisms over time. I have a theory that you could pick up the rythm of an accent through reading, but you're not going to pick up the pronunciation. That's why, until I found the Hitchhiker's Guide radio plays, I would have argued very hard in support of Earth being in ZeeZeeNine Plural-Zee Alpha (even though it even sounds better as ZedZedNine etc). You don't pick up zed except in places where other people say it. Often. And since this guy has no trace of any other accent, I'm totally confused. If he was natively from the UK or somesuch, in his effort to get rid of the accent, I doubt he would've overlooked switching from zed to zee. So I'm going with Canadian. Secretly Canadian. I tried to look up where he'd gone to school, but I can't find anything that goes farther back than getting his PhD at Stanford. (And the picture on one of the sites feels like it's watching me.) Very suspicious. Any idea where he would've picked up the zed thing? Is there some secret part of the US that calls it that? Is there an underground movement in the English-y circles that has moved over to zed like some kind of cult or exclusive club? (NO ADMITTANCE UNLESS YOU PRONOUNCE THIS LETTER CORRECTLY: Z) Actually, I want to start a club like that. But my loyalty to zee isn't that great. Maybe I could talk someone else into it, and be the person behind the charismatic scary cult leader. Not sure I'd want that on my resume, though. And it'd probably mean I'd have to take care of all the paperwork.
I think my solution to this will be to survey all of them on what sort of container milk is supposed to come in.
Honestly, I don't think I could live in Canada for an entire year without wanting to chuck one of those at someone, just to see what'd happen. It'd probably be, unfortunately, a very American sort of thing for me to do, too.
And now, since I'm bored out of my mind with my reading, I think I'm going to attempt to write something. Something that maybe I can eventually turn in for my class. Hmm.
The one that perplexes me most, though (and got me thinking about all of this), is my American Modern Fiction prof. He's the head of the English department. He teaches American Lit pretty much exclusively. ... But he pronounces the last letter of the alphabet as "zed". As much of a lexiconical novelty it is, even I haven't picked that up, and I've thrown together a gigantic mishmash of other people's regionalisms over time. I have a theory that you could pick up the rythm of an accent through reading, but you're not going to pick up the pronunciation. That's why, until I found the Hitchhiker's Guide radio plays, I would have argued very hard in support of Earth being in ZeeZeeNine Plural-Zee Alpha (even though it even sounds better as ZedZedNine etc). You don't pick up zed except in places where other people say it. Often. And since this guy has no trace of any other accent, I'm totally confused. If he was natively from the UK or somesuch, in his effort to get rid of the accent, I doubt he would've overlooked switching from zed to zee. So I'm going with Canadian. Secretly Canadian. I tried to look up where he'd gone to school, but I can't find anything that goes farther back than getting his PhD at Stanford. (And the picture on one of the sites feels like it's watching me.) Very suspicious. Any idea where he would've picked up the zed thing? Is there some secret part of the US that calls it that? Is there an underground movement in the English-y circles that has moved over to zed like some kind of cult or exclusive club? (NO ADMITTANCE UNLESS YOU PRONOUNCE THIS LETTER CORRECTLY: Z) Actually, I want to start a club like that. But my loyalty to zee isn't that great. Maybe I could talk someone else into it, and be the person behind the charismatic scary cult leader. Not sure I'd want that on my resume, though. And it'd probably mean I'd have to take care of all the paperwork.
I think my solution to this will be to survey all of them on what sort of container milk is supposed to come in.
Honestly, I don't think I could live in Canada for an entire year without wanting to chuck one of those at someone, just to see what'd happen. It'd probably be, unfortunately, a very American sort of thing for me to do, too.
And now, since I'm bored out of my mind with my reading, I think I'm going to attempt to write something. Something that maybe I can eventually turn in for my class. Hmm.
