New Accents Quotes

I’m nobody’s sidekick,” Annabeth growled. “And, Percy, his accent sounds familiar because he sounds like his mother. We killed her in New Jersey.” Percy frowned. “I’m pretty sure that accent isn’t New Jersey. Who’s his—? Oh.” It all fell into place. Aunty Em’s Garden Gnome Emporium—the lair of Medusa. She’d talked with that same accent, at least until Percy had cut off her head. “Medusa is your mom?” he asked. “Dude, that sucks for you.

Oh my. He's English. "Er. Does Mer live here?" Seriously, I don't know any American girl who can resist an English accent. The boy clears his throat. "Meredith Chevalier? Tall girl? Big, curly hair?" Then he looks at me like I'm crazy or half deaf, like my Nana Oliphant. Nanna just smiles and shakes her head whenever I ask, "What kind of salad dressing would you like?" or "Where did you put Granddad's false teeth?" "I'm sorry." He takes the smallest step away from me. "You were going to bed." "Yes! Meredith lives here. I've just spent two hours with her." I announce this proudly like my little brother, Seany, whenever he finds something disgusting in the yard. "I'm Anna! I'm new here!" Oh, [Gosh]. What. Is with. The scary enthusiasm? My cheeks catch fire, and it's all so humiliating. The beautiful boy gives an amused grin. His teeth are lovely - straight on top and crooked on the bottom, with a touch of overbite. I'm a sucker for smiles like this, due to my own lack of orthodontia. I have a gap between my front teeth the size of a raisin. "Étienne," he says. "I live one floor up." "I live here." I point dumbly at my room while my mind whirs: French name, English accent, American school. Anna confused. He raps twice on Meredith's door. "Well. I'll see you around then, Anna." Eh-t-yen says my name like this: Ah-na.

Who's that new guy with the snooty accent who came out and talked to the police?" Evan persisted. "He looks like some kind of male model." "That's just my cousin Ian," Amy explained. "Not much of a family resemblance," Evan noted sourly. "He's like a twenty-fifth cousin, ten times removed." Evan was not satisfied.

Mrs. Reilly called in that accent that occurs south of New Jersey only in New Orleans, that Hoboken near the Gulf of Mexico.

Travel is little beds and cramped bathrooms. It’s old television sets and slow Internet connections. Travel is extraordinary conversations with ordinary people. It’s waiters, gas station attendants, and housekeepers becoming the most interesting people in the world. It’s churches that are compelling enough to enter. It’s McDonald’s being a luxury. It’s the realization that you may have been born in the wrong country. Travel is a smile that leads to a conversation in broken English. It’s the epiphany that pretty girls smile the same way all over the world. Travel is tipping 10% and being embraced for it. Travel is the same white T-shirt again tomorrow. Travel is accented sex after good wine and too many unfiltered cigarettes. Travel is flowing in the back of a bus with giggly strangers. It’s a street full of bearded backpackers looking down at maps. Travel is wishing for one more bite of whatever that just was. It’s the rediscovery of walking somewhere. It’s sharing a bottle of liquor on an overnight train with a new friend. Travel is “Maybe I don’t have to do it that way when I get back home.” It’s nostalgia for studying abroad that one semester. Travel is realizing that “age thirty” should be shed of its goddamn stigma.

My aim is not to provide excuses for black behavior or to absolve blacks of personal responsibility. But when the new black conservatives accent black behavior and responsibility in such a way that the cultural realities of black people are ignored, they are playing a deceptive and dangerous intellectual game with the lives and fortunes of disadvantaged people. We indeed must criticize and condemn immoral acts of black people, but we must do so cognizant of the circumstances into which people are born and under which they live. By overlooking these circumstances, the new black conservatives fall into the trap of blaming black poor people for their predicament. It is imperative to steer a course between the Scylla of environmental determinism and the Charybdis of a blaming-the-victims perspective.

I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company.

The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them.

Bath," I said, relishing the short A of my new accent. "Baaaath. Privacy. Aluminum. Laboratory. Tomato. Schhhhhedule." The giggles come over me, and I stop right there, hand against my chest, trying to catch my breath. I know I'm laughing mostly because I refuse to give in and start crying. The grief for my father has nowhere to go and is twisting every other mood I have into knots. And... tomahhhhto. That's hilarious.

Where are you from, Mr. Pendergast? Can't quite place the accent.” “New Orleans.” “What a coincidence! I went there for Mardi Gras once." “How nice for you. I myself have never attended.” Ludwig paused, the smile frozen on his face, wondering how to steer the conversation onto a more pertinent topic.

New Rule: Colin Firth has to admit that he's not a human being but a robot designed by women as the perfect man. He's handsome, charming, witty, he's got that accent and a gay best friend...the only way he could be any better is if he ejaculated Häagen-Dazs.

The duende....Where is the duende? Through the empty archway a wind of the spirit enters, blowing insistently over the heads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and unknown accents: a wind with the odour of a child's saliva, crushed grass, and medusa's veil, announcing the endless baptism of freshly created things.

Too often we focus on the greater shcemes in life, like making money, or getting promoted at work, or starting a new relationship - and yea, of course, those things matter - but sometimes it's the tiny, gradual, stepping-stone victories that bring real joy and signify the positive changes in our life.

What turns us on (or off) is learned from culture, in much the same way children learn vocabulary and accents from culture.

Where are you from? New York?" "Weird you picked up on that," she said, "I've been gone from there for so long." Like a couple of decades could dilute that accent.

There are areas of New England, plenty of them, with quaintness to spare, with color-changing leaves and folksy folks full of folksy homespun wisdom accompanied by folksy accents

The Japanese have a saying that for every new food we try, we gain seven days of life. I may be immortal by now.

-in New York, a cat could look at a king. Hell, a cat could get himself elected king. But in England, where people had windows reminding them of ancestors whose bones had long since gone to dust? In England, the country that had perfected the art of the devastating remark? In England, where the servants' entrance waited, where all ears were tuned for the tiniest wrong accent, where the exquisitely subtle vocabulary of Us and Them held ten thousand complicated traps, uspoken and unarguable?

So, the thing is, my dad, the immigrant, is really, really disappointed that I have an allergy. A peanut allergy. Because immigrants do not believe in allergies. I swear to God, ask any brown person with an accent that you see and they’ll tell you that allergies are some New World shit.

I had a friend at Princeton, a Russian graduate student. He had a cute message on his answering machine, delivered in his thick Russian accent: Who are you and what do you want? Some people spend a lifetime trying to answer these questions. You, however, have thirty seconds. My father and I chuckled. What happened to him? Gone. My point is that you could think of the people you meet in your life as questions, there to help you figure out who you are, what you’re made of, and what you want. In life, as in our new version of the game, you start off not knowing the answer. It’s only when the particles rub against each other that we figure out their properties.

When she says margarita she means daiquiri. When she says quixotic she means mercurial. And when she says, "I'll never speak to you again," she means, "Put your arms around me from behind as I stand disconsolate at the window." He's supposed to know that. When a man loves a woman he is in New York and she is in Virginia or he is in Boston, writing, and she is in New York, reading, or she is wearing a sweater and sunglasses in Balboa Park and he is raking leaves in Ithaca or he is driving to East Hampton and she is standing disconsolate at the window overlooking the bay where a regatta of many-colored sails is going on while he is stuck in traffic on the Long Island Expressway. When a woman loves a man it is one ten in the morning she is asleep he is watching the ball scores and eating pretzels drinking lemonade and two hours later he wakes up and staggers into bed where she remains asleep and very warm. When she says tomorrow she means in three or four weeks. When she says, "We're talking about me now," he stops talking. Her best friend comes over and says, "Did somebody die?" When a woman loves a man, they have gone to swim naked in the stream on a glorious July day with the sound of the waterfall like a chuckle of water rushing over smooth rocks, and there is nothing alien in the universe. Ripe apples fall about them. What else can they do but eat? When he says, "Ours is a transitional era," "that's very original of you," she replies, dry as the martini he is sipping. They fight all the time It's fun What do I owe you? Let's start with an apology Ok, I'm sorry, you dickhead. A sign is held up saying "Laughter." It's a silent picture. "I've been fucked without a kiss," she says, "and you can quote me on that," which sounds great in an English accent. One year they broke up seven times and threatened to do it another nine times. When a woman loves a man, she wants him to meet her at the airport in a foreign country with a jeep. When a man loves a woman he's there. He doesn't complain that she's two hours late and there's nothing in the refrigerator. When a woman loves a man, she wants to stay awake. She's like a child crying at nightfall because she didn't want the day to end. When a man loves a woman, he watches her sleep, thinking: as midnight to the moon is sleep to the beloved. A thousand fireflies wink at him. The frogs sound like the string section of the orchestra warming up. The stars dangle down like earrings the shape of grapes.

I love that accent you have when you say hello You relocated from New York a month ago That minivan that you drive really gets me going And if it feels like it's right Then it can't be wrong No one understands the chemistry we have And it came out of nowhere Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah It's not like we planned this, it's getting out of hand And now we're gonna go there Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Walk my way Mrs All American Say my name No need to pretend Don't be shy Mrs All American I'll show you why You're not gonna walk away Yeah Not just a neighbour Oh hey there I'll ring your bell Open your door, pucker up And I'll kiss you well My lips are sealed There's nobody that I would tell Your secret's mine, close your eyes And I'll make you melt No one understands the chemistry we have And it came out of nowhere Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah It's not like we planned this, it's getting out of hand And now we're gonna go there Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Walk my way Mrs All American Say my name No need to pretend Don't be shy Mrs All American I'll show you why You're not gonna walk away Oh yeah Na na na na na na na na You know what she like Na na na na na na na na You know what she like Na na na na na na na na Ah you know what she like Na na na na na na na Walk my way Mrs All American Say my name No need to pretend Don't be shy Mrs All American I'll show you why You're not gonna walk away (Walk my way) Oh yeah (Say my name) You're not gonna walk away (Don't be shy) (I'll show you why) You're not gonna walk away

...sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves. At times even the names of the inhabitants remain the same, and their voices’ accent, and also the features of the faces; but the gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place. It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old postcards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one.

It's not that Daniel wants to let Natasha go. He holds on for as long as he can. But he hearts the strain in her voice across the distance. In her new accent, he hears the cadence of her slipping away from him.

That air of electric tension, of a great city on the edge of an abyss, is more noticeable than ever at the White Russian cabaret called, not inappropriately, "New York." You wouldn't know you were in China. An almond-eyed platinum-blonde has just finished wailing, with a Mott Street accent, "You're gonna lose your gal." ("Jane Brown's Body")

Are you checking me out?” he asked, smirking slightly. His sexy southern accent made him exponentially hotter. I felt my face blush scarlet and instantly looked down at my lap. Then I decided that I wouldn’t let that embarrass me. I was checking him out, and there was absolutely nothing wrong with that. The new, more confident me was pushing her way to the surface. “I was,” I said, trying to sound bold, as I took a long pull from my drink. I wasn’t nearly intoxicated enough for this conversation.

Impatiently I waited for evening, when I might summon you to my presence. An unusual– to me– a perfectly new character, I suspected was yours; I desired to search it deeper, and know it better. You entered the room with a look and air at once shy and independent; you were quaintly dress– much as you are now. I made you talk; ere long I found you full of strange contrasts. Your garb and manner were restricted by rule; your air was often diffident, and altogether that of one refined by nature, but absolutely unused to society, and a good deal afraid of making herself disadvantageously conspicuous by some solecism or blunder; yet, when addressed, you lifted a keen, a daring, and a glowing eye to your interlocutor’s face; there was penetration and power in each glance you gave; when plied by close questions, you found ready and round answers. Very soon you seemed to get used to me – I believe you felt the existence of sympathy between you and your grim and cross master, Jane; for it was astonishing to see how quickly a certain pleasant ease tranquilized your manner; snarl as I would, you showed no surprise, fear, annoyance, or displeasure, at my moroseness; you watched me, and now and then smiled at me with a simple yet sagacious grace I cannot describe. I was at once content and stimulated with what I saw; I liked what I had seen, and wished to see more. Yet, for a long time, I treated you distantly, and sought your company rarely, I was an intellectual epicure, and wished to prolong the gratification of making this novel and piquant acquaintance; besides, I was for a while troubled with a haunting fear that if I handled the flower freely its bloom would fade – the sweet charm of freshness would leave it. I did not then know that it was no transitory blossom, but rather the radiant resemblance of one, cut in an indestructible gem. Moreover, I wished to see whether you would seek me if I shunned you – but you did not; you kept in the school-room as still as your own desk and easel; if by chance I met you, you passed me as soon, and with as little token of recognition, as was consistent with respect. Your habitual expression in those days, Jane, was a thoughtful look; not despondent, fro you were not sickly; but not buoyant, for you had little hope, and no actual pleasure. I wondered what you thought of me– or if you ever thought of me; to find this out, I resumed my notice of you. There was something glad in your glance, and genial in your manner, when you conversed; I saw you had a social heart; it was the silent school-room– it was the tedium of your life that made you mournful. I permitted myself the delight of being kind to you; kindness stirred emotion soon; your face became soft in expression, your tones gentle; I liked my name pronounced by your lips in a grateful, happy accent. I used to enjoy a chance meeting with you, Jane, at this time; there was a curious hesitation in your manner; you glanced at me with a slight trouble– a hovering doubt; you did not know what my caprice might be– whether I was going to play the master, and be stern– or the friend, and be benignant. I was now too fond of you often to stimulate the first whim; and, when I stretched my hand out cordially, such bloom, and light, and bliss, rose to your young, wistful features, I had much ado often to avoid straining you then and there to my heart.

Her voice was polished with a hint of a New England-boarding-school accent that shouted refinement over geographic locale. I was trying not to stare. She saw that and smiled a little. I don't want to sound like some kind of pervert because it wasn't like that. Femal beauty gets to me. I don't think I'm alone in that. It gets to me like a work of art gets to me. It gets to me like a Rembrandt or Michelangelo. It gets to me like night views of Paris or when the sun rises on the Grand Canyon or sets in the turquoise Arizona sky. My thoughts were not illicit. Ther were, I self-rationalized, rather artistic.

As we walk, he begins telling me all the names of the plants we pass. I already know their names, but I don't tell him that. He seems to think that scientists always want to know the names of things, and so I guess he thinks he's being helpful.Anyway, I like listening to his voice. It's deep and a little hoarse, as if he's been yelling all day, and his accent makes every word sound new and exciting, as if he's speaking another language I don't have to strain to understand. "Here is annatto,for repelling insects and curing snakebites. The girls say it makes a love potion, but I don't believe them. They have all tried it on me, and I don't love any of them.

I like how her New England accent cuts through her words, too. Mati reinvents the alphabet when she’s mad.

At this point in history, people didn’t know how to react to “Eddie, the mysterious wizard from the Orient.” They already had difficulty dealing with Eddie’s thick New Jersey accent.

She had always been a chameleon, taking on accents and manners suited to her circumstance, but now she felt as though she had changed into something new, and she couldn't change back.

No, but I am,’ Elliot says, quick as a flash. ‘That’s why I need Penny’s help.’ ‘Oh.’ Dad frowns and scratches his head. He doesn’t look convinced at all. ‘Well, when you’ve sorted your French crisis, come down and have some breakfast. I’m making eggs over easy,’ he says in an American accent, ‘and we need to talk about New York.’ ‘Will do,’ I call over my shoulder as Elliot and I race up the second flight of stairs. As soon as we’re in my room, I shut the door tight. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Elliot says. ‘I was too embarrassed.’ I sink down on to

He had an accent. A British one. There was something about a British accent that had always made me quiver deep down inside and touched me in places a regular New England accent just couldn’t reach.

When we arrived we were met by Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, both producers of the film. Lorri and I hadn't seen them in over a month and had missed them a great deal. As soon as I heard those New Zealand accents, the feel of "home" washed over me again. They have been with me every step of the way since my release, helping me. Thinking of them now makes my heart feel like it's about to burst with love.

A tremendous amount of my brain was fitted with noticing new things out where nothing was familiar: buildings, types of cars, types of people, accents, plants, packaged-food items. Before I left my brain never had to register my bedroom, my husband, mailbox, apple core, alarm clock, walls. My brain just said "—, —, —, —, —, —, —, —," to these things, because a brain lets you keep going, keep not seeing the same walls, underwear, husband, doorknobs, ceiling, husband, husband. A brain can be merciful in this way: sparing you the monotony of those monotonies, their pitiful cozy. A brain lets all the borefilled days shrink like drying sponges until they're hard and ungiving

It is indeed a tricky name. It is often misspelt, because the eye tends to regard the "a" of the first syllable as a misprint and then tries to restore the symmetrical sequence by triplicating the "o"- filling up the row of circles, so to speak, as in a game of crosses and naughts. No-bow-cough. How ugly, how wrong. Every author whose name is fairly often mentioned in periodicals develops a bird-watcher's or caterpillar-picker's knack when scanning an article. But in my case I always get caught by the word "nobody" when capitalized at the beginning of a sentence. As to pronunciation, Frenchmen of course say Nabokoff, with the accent on the last syllable. Englishmen say Nabokov, accent on the first, and Italians say Nabokov, accent in the middle, as Russians also do. Na-bo-kov. A heavy open "o" as in "Knickerbocker". My New England ear is not offended by the long elegant middle "o" of Nabokov as delivered in American academies. The awful "Na-bah-kov" is a despicable gutterism. Well, you can make your choice now. Incidentallv, the first name is pronounced Vladeemer- rhyming with "redeemer"- not Vladimir rhyming with Faddimere (a place in England, I think).

[Author's Note:] When my grandmother came to the United States from Puerto Rico in the 1940s, she was a beautiful, glamorous woman from a wealthy family in the capital city, and the young bride of a dashing naval officer. She expected to be received as such. Instead, she found that people here had a very reductionist view of what it meant to be Puerto Rican, of what it meant to be Latinx. Everything about her confused her new neighbors: her skin tone, her hair, her accent, her notions. She wasn't what they expected a boricua to be. My grandmother spent much of her adult life in the States but didn't always feel welcome here. She resented the perpetual gringo misconceptions about her. She never got past that resentment, and the echoes of her indignation still have some peculiar manifestations in my family today. One of the symptoms is me. Always raging against a perceived slight, always fighting against ignorance in mainstream ideas about ethnicity and culture. I'm acutely aware that the people coming to our southern border are not one faceless brown mass but singular individuals, with stories and backgrounds and reasons for coming that are unique. I feel this awareness in my spine, in my DNA. So I hoped to present one of those unique personal stories - a work of fiction - as a way to honor the hundreds of thousands of stories we may never get to hear. And in so doing, I hope to create a pause where the reader may begin to individuate. When we see migrants on the news, we may remember: these people are people.

Some studies of successful language learners have suggested that they're more "open to new experiences" than the rest of us. Temptingly, psychologist Alexander Guiora proposed that we have a self that's bound up in our native language, a "language ego", which needs to be loose and more permeable to learn a new language. Those with more fluid ego boundaries, like children and people who have drunk some alcohol, are more willing to sound not like themselves, which means they have better accents in the new language.

He had met John Kieran at a Dutch Treat Club luncheon and had been impressed with the depth and scope of Kieran’s knowledge. Kieran was a sports columnist for the New York Times whose writings had earned him the title “sports philosopher.” He was fluent in Latin and a scholar of Shakespeare, knew music, poetry, ornithology and the other branches of natural history, and had a strong base of general knowledge. This was wrapped up in a Tenth Avenue New York accent, a streak of what one writer termed “pugnacity concealed by modesty.

Did I ever tell you I went to school in America?" "What? No." "It's true,for a year. Eighth grade. It was terrible." "Eighth grade is terrible for everyone," I say. "Well,it was worse for me. My parents had just seperated,and my mum moved back to California.I hadn't been since I was an infant,but I went with her,and I was put in this horrid public school-" "Oh,no. Public school." He nudges me with his shoulder. "The other kids were ruthless. They made fun of everything about me-my height,my accent, the way I dressed.I vowed I'd never go back." "But American girls love English accents." I blurt this without thinking, and then pray he doesn't notice my blush. St. Clair picks up a pebble and tosses it into the river. "Not in middle school, they don't.Especially when it's attached to a bloke who comes up to their kneecaps." I laugh. "So when the year was over,my parents found a new school for me. I wanted to go back to London,where my mates were, but my father insisted on Paris so he could keep an eye on me. And that's how I would up at the School of America.

See you at breakfast?" "Yeah.See ya." I try to say this casually,but I'm so thrilled that I skip from her room and promptly slam into a wall. Whoops.Not a wall.A boy. "Oof." He staggers backward. "Sorry! I'm so sorry,I didn't know you were there." He shakes his head,a little dazed. The first thing I notice is his hair-it's the first thing I notice about everyone. It's dark brown and messy and somehow both long and short at the same time. I think of the Beatles,since I've just seen them in Meredith's room. It's artist hair.Musician hair. I-pretend-I-don't-care-but-I-really-do-hair. Beautiful hair. "It's okay,I didn't see you either. Are you all right,then?" Oh my.He's English. "Er.Does Mer live here?" Seriously,I don't know any American girl who can resist an English accent. The boy clears his throat. "Meredith Chevalier? Tall girl? Big,curly hair?" Then he looks at me like I'm crazy or half deaf,like my Nanna Oliphant. Nanna just smiles and shakes her head whenever I ask, "What kind of salad dressing would you like?" or "Where did you put Granddad's false teeth?" "I'm sorry." He takes the smallest step away from me. "You were going to bed." "Yes! Meredith lives there.I've just spent two hours with her." I announce this proudly like my brother, Seany, whenever he finds something disgusting in the yard. "I'm Anna! I'm new here!" Oh God. What.Is with.The scary enthusiasm? My cheeks catch fire, and it's all so humiliating. The beautiful boy gives an amused grin. His teeth are lovely-straight on top and crooked on the bottom,with a touch of overbite. I'm a sucker for smiles like this,due to my own lack of orthodontia. I have a gap between my front teeth the size of a raisin. "Etienne," he says. "I live one floor up." "I live here." I point dumbly at my room while my mind whirs: French name, English accent, American school. Anna confused. He raps twice on Meredith's door. "Well. I'll see you around then, Anna." Eh-t-yen says my name like this: Ah-na. My heart thump thump thumps in my chest.

Do…you…have…a…hard…time…finding…Steve’s dick?” she enunciated, enjoying Mary’s extreme discomfort. “He’s big as a fuckin’ house so I imagine it might be a bit of a problem.” The New Jersey accent that was still there after more than fifteen years in the south, resurfaced in her aggravation.

Many of my new friends blame racism for this perception of the president. But the president feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor—which, of course, he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up: His accent—clean, perfect, neutral—is foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they’re frightening; he made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis; and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him. Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right—adversity familiar to many of us—but that was long before any of us knew him.

Dutch was the first language of noted abolitionist Sojourner Truth, born Isabella Baumfree in Swartekill, New York, near the end of the 1790s. She almost certainly spoke English with a Dutch-inflected accent. Yet, reproductions of her speech were written in the stereotypical dialect universally chosen to portray the speech of enslaved Blacks, no matter where in the country they lived. Under this formulation, the experiences of growing up hearing and speaking Dutch had no effect upon Truth. It was as if the legal status of being enslaved, and the biological reality of having been born of African descent, fixed her pattern of speech, almost as a matter of brain function.

In theory, the word revolution retains the meaning that it has in astronomy. It is a movement that describes a complete circle, that leads from one form of government to another after a complete transition. A change of regulations concerning property without a corresponding change of government is not a revolution, but a reform. There is no kind of economic revolution, whether its methods are violent or pacific, which is not, at the same time, manifestly political. Revolution can already be distinguished, in this way, from rebellion. The warning given to Louis XVI: "No, sire, this is not a rebellion, it is a revolution," accents the essential difference. It means precisely that "it is the absolute certainty of a new form of government." Rebellion is, by nature, limited in scope. It is no more than an incoherent pronouncement. Revolution, on the contrary, originates in the realm of ideas. Specifically, it is the injection of ideas into historical experience, while rebellion is only the movement that leads from individual experience into the realm of ideas.

The city had the air and movement of hysteria, and the citizens were crying, in every accent of anger and alarm, that the new forces must at any cost be brought under control. Prosperity never before imagined, power never yet wielded by man, speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid.

Many of the people who left the South never exactly sat their children down to tell them these things, tell them what happened and why they left and how they and all this blood kin came to be in this northern city or western suburb or why they speak like melted butter and their children speak like footsteps on pavement, prim and proper or clipped and fast, like the New World itself.

Mila held out a dress so lovely that Snow gasped. She lovingly touched the blue bodice with the cap sleeves that had red accents woven throughout and the shining yellow satin. She hadn't had anything new to wear in a very long time. She almost hesitated to put the dress on- what if she ruined it in the woods? But when else would she have a chance to wear such a fine gown? She slipped into it with glee.

Now, my all-time favorite accolade from a book reviewer was when Fernanda Pivano, Italy’s best-known critic, wrote in a leading Italian newspaper that “Tom Robbins is the most dangerous writer in the world.” I never read my reviews, even in English, but others sometimes pass choice bits along, so when I had occasion to meet the legendary Signora Pivano at a reception in Milan, I asked her what she meant by that wonderfully flattering remark. She replied, “Because you are saying zat love is zee only thing that matters and everything else eese a beeg joke.” Well, being uncertain, frankly, that is what I’d been saying, I changed the subject and inquired about her recent public denial that she’d ever gone to bed with Ernest Hemingway, whom she’d shown around Italy in the thirties. “Why didn’t you sleep with Hemingway?” I inquired. Signora Pivano sighed, closed her large brown eyes, shook her gray head, and answered in slow, heavily accented English, “I was a fool.” Okay, back to the New York Cinematheque. Why did I choose to go watch a bunch of jerky, esoteric, often self-indulgent 16mm movies rather than sleep with the sexy British actress? Move over, Fernanda, there’s room for two fools on your bus.

Yet with the rise of AI, robots, and 3-D printers, cheap unskilled labor will become far less important. Instead of manufacturing a shirt in Dhaka and shipping it all the way to the United States, you could buy the shirt’s code online from Amazon and print it in New York. The Zara and Prada stores on Fifth Avenue could be replaced by 3-D printing centers in Brooklyn, and some people might even have a printer at home. Simultaneously, instead of calling customer service in Bangalore to complain about your printer, you could talk with an AI representative in the Google cloud (whose accent and tone of voice would be tailored to your preferences). The newly unemployed workers and call center operators in Dhaka and Bangalore don’t have the education necessary to switch to designing fashionable shirts or writing computer code—so how will they survive?

He could surprise her sometimes, she had found. It had emerged that it was dangerous to assume that he wouldn’t catch her nuances; he caught a lot more than he let on. Also, his accent was improving. Or was it just that she had stopped hearing it? And he had started beginning his sentences with a “well” or an “oh,” on occasion. He seemed to take great delight in discovering new idioms—“jumped the gun,” for instance, which had sprinkled his conversations for the past several days. (“I was thinking the evening news would be on, but I see that I…” and then a weighty pause before “jumped the gun!” he finished up triumphantly.) Now and then, an expression he used would strike her as eerily familiar. “Good grief,” he said, and “Geez,” and once or twice, “It was semi-okay.” At such moments, she felt like someone who had accidentally glimpsed her own reflection in a mirror.

EYE MAKEUP 1. Makeup should be just a frame for the eyes. When you lay on all the bright-colored goop and slather white under the brows the eyes themselves are lost in camouflage. Just accent whatever God has given you with a subtle hand. 2. The more makeup a woman applies after forty the older she looks. 3. Early in my career I had plucked and plucked so that I'd have those spindly little lines that were the fashion then. When eyebrows came back a lot of girls found that they couldn't grow them anymore. They's plucked out the roots. I encouraged new growth by using castor oil and yellow Vaseline - half and half - and rubbing it the wrong way, toward the nose, with a brush. I still use it, it makes my brows grow like mad. It's good for lashes, too, but I always get the oil in my eyes, then they water and turn red. Brows frame the eyes. Encourage them. for they're a great asset.

Ladies, bonjour. My name’s Madame Fi-Fi.” Her French accent was thick, and I could hardly understand a word she was saying. “Welcome to the Gay Paris.” We both sniggered under our breaths, immature I know; Madame Fi-Fi gave us a stern look. “You are the new dancers?” she asked, sounding pretty disappointed. “You looked taller in your pictures” “Erm…” Fran smiled. “We were wearing high heels.” Fran got on her tiptoes and fell over and knocked over a coatrack. Great first impressions.

Not always do those who dare such divine conflict prevail. Night after night the sweat of agony may burst dark on the forehead; the supplicant may cry for mercy with that soundless voice the soul utters when its appeal is to the Invisible. "Spare my beloved," it may implore. "Heal my life's life. Rend not from me what long affection entwines with my whole nature. God of heaven, bend, hear, be clement!" And after this cry and strife the sun may rise and see him worsted. That opening morn, which used to salute him with the whisper of zephyrs, the carol of skylarks, may breathe, as its first accents, from the dear lips which colour and heat have quitted, -- "Oh! I have had a suffering night. This morning I am worse. I have tried to rise. I cannot. Dreams I am unused to have troubled me." Then the watcher approaches the patient's pillow, and sees a new and strange moulding of the familiar features, feels at once that the insufferable moment draws nigh, knows that it is God's will his idol shall be broken, and bends his head, and subdues his soul to the sentence he cannot avert and scarce can bear.

The piano entered the story, bringing a new voice to the narrative. Her fingers brushed the keys, her heart straining to find satisfaction in the harmonic shifts and subtle colorings. It wasn't there. Leila closed her eyes, tried new ways of speaking a phrase - holding back, pushing forward, adding an unexpected accent, waiting a breath before the harmonic resolution. But she couldn't find it. She pushed the music forward with frantic exhilaration, dragging the orchestra behind her.  René shot her a warning look. Leila drove hard, demanding they follow, viciously attacking the finale as she searched for what eluded her. But when the last chord exploded, ringing with a rage composed of love and longing, Leila felt nothing but a drained emptiness. It was as if the reins keeping her in control, in the carefully constructed environment where she'd always created music, had snapped and broken away.  Everything had felt just beyond reach. The notes had danced before her but she'd been unable to grasp them, to own and mold them into what she wanted to say. "Brava!" Leila blinked. People stood, flooding the hall with a deluge of approval for her sacrifice on stage.

The cheek meat is so tender it falls apart in your mouth! Then there's the gummy, chewy tripe and tongue- new textures and flavors to enjoy with every bite! It all hits you so fast it's like a roller coaster!" "This charcoal-grilled skirt steak is particularly amazing. Usually, skirt steak is served thinly sliced. But these are thick cut, taking their juiciness to a whole new level! Not only that, he added a grid pattern of shallow cuts to the meat's surface... ... so that once it was charcoal grilled, it would have a pleasantly springy texture to it. It makes for an excellent accent when dipped in the stew.

My dad graduated from the most prestigious university in Korea and designs computer software for some of the largest banks in New England. Even though he has a thick Korean accent, he speaks fluent English. And he has a daughter—me—who has a very good shot of getting into Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. But to people like Stephanie’s mom none of that matters, because the only thing she can—and will ever—see is the color of our skin. So what’s the point of getting into a good college and becoming successful, if in the end I’ll still run into more people like Stephanie’s mom who will never, ever believe that I’m good enough?

Megan was able to get me the single most important item in this entire house.” “She got you that new vibrator?” “Jesus . . .” “Oh, the cookbook, right,” he said, remembering. Megan used to work for the Food Network, and was able to secure me a signed copy of the original Barefoot Contessa cookbook. By Ina Garten. Signed to me by the way; one of those “Best wishes, Ina” deals. It honest-to-God said: To Caroline— Best Wishes, Ina Go ahead and be jealous. I’ll wait. Simon, on the other hand, would not. “Okay, so you remember Megan.” “Remember her? Did you not hear me say single most important—” “I got it, babe. Are you at all curious about hearing what they’re up to, or are you just going to spend some head-space time dreaming of Ina and her kitchen?” “And me in her kitchen. If you’re going to get into my daydream, you have to set the scene correctly. I’m there with Ina, in her kitchen in the Hamptons, and we’re cooking up something wonderful for you and her husband, Jeffrey. Something with roasted chicken, which she’ll teach me how to carve perfectly. And roasted carrots, which she’ll pronounce with that subtle New York accent of hers, where it sounds like she’s saying kerrits.” “I worry about you sometimes,” Simon said, reaching over to feel my forehead. “I’m perfectly fine. Don’t worry about me, I’ll continue my fantasy later.

Just tell me one thing. What are you doing not in your country right now? Why did you run off to America, Darling Nonkululeko Nkala, huh? Why did you just leave? If it’s your country, you have to love it to live in it and not leave it. You have to fight for it no matter what, to make it right. Tell me, do you abandon your house because it’s burning or do you find water to put out the fire? And if you leave it burning, do you expect the flames to turn into water and put themselves out? You left it, Darling, my dear, you left the house burning and you have the guts to tell me in that stupid accent that you were not even born with, that doesn’t even suit you, that this is your country?

When we hang up, I sigh long and look out the window to the darkness over the ocean, no delineation between water and sky. It's always disorienting when I speak to my mother, that pull of her voice back into our old life even though both of us have tried to move beyond it. In her soft Caribbean accent I hear my brother's laughter, see us both as children playing together in the backyard when it was still covered in crunch green grass and our toys were new. Mami's voice was the song of our home, even with no father, even as we lived with that black mass of the unspoken, even with the marks on our bones we didn't know we carried. Through all life's uncertainty, we felt anchored by the love in her voice.

Be an epic goofball. Seriously. Praise be to Pokemon Go for getting people out and doing stuff again. For about five minutes, Pokemon Go was beating out porn in internet usage. That’s crazy awesome. Who knows what the fuck the new hot thing will be by the time you are reading this book, but I am all in for anything that gives us permission to be epic goofballs. I will talk in a crazy accent, wear weird t-shirts (I love buying t-shirts from the boys’ section of the store) to work (the benefit of being self-employed… I set the dress code), dance with my waiter in the middle of the restaurant (thanks, Paul!), and have my husband (a deeply patient man) push me through the grocery store parking lot while I stand on the shopping cart.

We're in her bedroom,and she's helping me write an essay about my guniea pig for French class. She's wearing soccer shorts with a cashmere sweater, and even though it's silly-looking, it's endearingly Meredith-appropriate. She's also doing crunches. For fun. "Good,but that's present tense," she says. "You aren't feeding Captain Jack carrot sticks right now." "Oh. Right." I jot something down, but I'm not thinking about verbs. I'm trying to figure out how to casually bring up Etienne. "Read it to me again. Ooo,and do your funny voice! That faux-French one your ordered cafe creme in the other day, at that new place with St. Clair." My bad French accent wasn't on purpose, but I jump on the opening. "You know, there's something,um,I've been wondering." I'm conscious of the illuminated sign above my head, flashing the obvious-I! LOVE! ETIENNE!-but push ahead anyway. "Why are he and Ellie still together? I mean they hardly see each other anymore. Right?" Mer pauses, mid-crunch,and...I'm caught. She knows I'm in love with him, too. But then I see her struggling to reply, and I realize she's as trapped in the drama as I am. She didn't even notice my odd tone of voice. "Yeah." She lowers herself slwoly back to the floor. "But it's not that simple. They've been together forever. They're practically an old married couple. And besides,they're both really...cautious." "Cautious?" "Yeah.You know.St. Clair doesn't rock the boat. And Ellie's the same way. It took her ages to choose a university, and then she still picked one that's only a few neighborhoods away. I mean, Parsons is a prestigious school and everything,but she chose it because it was familiar.And now with St. Clair's mom,I think he's afraid to lose anyone else.Meanwhile,she's not gonna break up with him,not while his mom has cancer. Even if it isn't a healthy relationship anymore." I click the clicky-button on top of my pen. Clickclickclickclick. "So you think they're unhappy?" She sighs. "Not unhappy,but...not happy either. Happy enough,I guess. Does that make sense?" And it does.Which I hate. Clickclickclickclick. It means I can't say anything to him, because I'd be risking our friendship. I have to keep acting like nothing has changed,that I don't feel anything ore for him than I feel for Josh.

That wondrous instant of our meeting — my mind’s eye sees you standing there, a vision transient and fleeting, true beauty’s spirit, pure and rare. In toils of hopeless grief confounded, amid life’s noise and stress it seems for long that tender voice resounded and those sweet features came in dreams. Years passed; the storms that life engenders dispersed my former hopes of grace and I forgot those accents tender, the heavenly beauty of your face. And in my dark incarceration my days passed like the clouds above, bereft alike of inspiration, of tears, of life itself, of love. My soul awoke to new existence, again you stood before me there, a vision lasting but an instant, true beauty’s spirit, pure and rare. My heart relives the old sensation and once more steal down from above, God’s benediction, inspiration, and tears, and life itself and love.

work. When I moved from New York to Alabama in 1974, I was struck by the generalized American speech patterns of local broadcast journalists. They did not sound like southerners. In fact, they had been trained to level their regional accents in the interest of comprehensibility. This strategy struck me as more than odd; it seemed like a prejudice against southern speech, an illness, a form of self-loathing. As I wrote on the topic, I reached a point where I needed to name this language syndrome. I remember sitting on a metal chair at a desk I had constructed out of an old wooden door. What name? What name? It was almost like praying. I thought of the word disease, and then remembered the nickname of a college teacher. We called him “The Disease” because his real name was Dr. Jurgalitis. I began to riff: Jurgalitis. Appendicitis. Bronchitis. I almost fell off my chair: Cronkitis!

It was Lillian Bowman-now Lady Westcliff- dashing and radiant in a wine-red gown. Her fair complexion was lightly glazed with color from the southern Italian sun, and her black hair was caught fashionably at the nape of her neck with a beaded silk-cord net. Lillian was tall and slender, the kind of raffish girl one could envision as captaining her own pirate ship... a girl clearly made for dangerous and unconventional pursuits. Though not as romantically beautiful as Annabelle Hunt, Lillian possessed a striking, clean-featured appeal that proclaimed her Americanness even before one heard her distinctly New York accent. Of their circle of friends, Lillian was the one that Evie felt the least close to. Lillian did not possess Annabelle's maternal softness, or Daisy's sparkling optimism... she had always intimidated Evie with her sharp tongue and prickly impatience. However, Lillian could always be counted on in times of trouble.

Call him,” Vicky urges one last time, placing my phone on my desk, tapping her nail on the screen before leaving me to it. I stare at my phone and then with shaky fingers I pick it up and press redial on his number. He answers on the first ring. “Tru,” his voice comes deep and sexy down the line. “Hi, Jake.” Silence. “So…” I say, not really knowing what to say. “I’m taking it your boss beat me to it?” he states rather than asks. “She did.” “And?” “And what?” “Will you do it – the bio?” “Do I have a choice?” There’s a really long pause. I can practically feel his tension radiating down the line. “There’s always a choice, Tru.” He sounds a little pissed off. “Sorry,” I recover. “That sounded a little shitty, it’s just a lot of information to process this early in the morning. Especially when I haven’t even had a chance to have a coffee yet.” “You haven’t?” “No, and I don’t function without coffee,” I say in a Spanish accent. I’m actually fluent in Spanish, something my mum insisted on, and it does comes in handy at times – well, mainly holiday’s in Spanish speaking countries. And my crap Spanish accent always used to make Jake laugh when we were kids, so I’m aiming for just that again. He chuckles, deep and throaty down the line. It does incredible things to me. “I see you’re still an idiot.” “I am, and it still takes one to know one.” “That it does … so you’ll do it?” I get the distinct feeling he’s not asking me. And really in what world would I ever say no. “I’ll do it,” I smile. I can practically feel his grin down the phone. “Okay, so as your new boss – well one of them – I order you to go get some coffee as I can’t have you talking in that cute Spanish accent of yours all day. You’ll drive me nuts.” I’ll drive him nuts?! In a good or bad way… “I’m seeing you today?” “Of course. Go get that coffee and I’ll call you back soon.” He hangs up, and I sit staring at the phone in my hand, feeling a little dumbfounded. And somehow a little played. I just haven’t figured out as to how yet.

When I finally calmed down, I saw how disappointed he was and how bad he felt. I decided to take a deep breath and try to think this thing through. “Maybe it’s not that bad,” I said. (I think I was trying to cheer myself up as much as I was trying to console Chip.) “If we fix up the interior and just get it to the point where we can get it onto the water, at least maybe then we can turn around, sell it, and get our money back.” Over the course of the next hour or so, I really started to come around. I took another walk through the boat and started to picture how we could make it livable--maybe even kind of cool. After all, we’d conquered worse. We tore a few things apart right then and there, and I grabbed some paper and sketched out a new layout for the tiny kitchen. I talked to him about potentially finishing an accent wall with shiplap--a kind of rough-textured pine paneling that fans of our show now know all too well. “Shiplap?” Chip laughed. “That seems a little ironic to use on a ship, doesn’t it?” “Ha-ha,” I replied. I was still not in the mood for his jokes, but this is how Chip backs me off the ledge--with his humor.

The Swedish royal family’s legitimacy is even more tenuous. The current king of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf, is descended neither from noble Viking blood nor even from one of their sixteenth-century warrior kings, but from some random French bloke. When Sweden lost Finland to Russia in 1809, the then king, Gustav IV Adolf—by all accounts as mad as a hamburger—left for exile. To fill his throne and, it is thought, as a sop to Napoleon whose help Sweden hoped to secure against Russia in reclaiming Finland, the finger of fate ended up pointing at a French marshal by the name of Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (who also happened to be the husband of Napoleon’s beloved Desirée). Upon his arrival in Stockholm, the fact that Bernadotte had actually once fought against the Swedes in Germany was quickly forgotten, as was his name, which was changed to Charles XIV John. This, though, is where the assimilation ended: the notoriously short-tempered Charles XIV John attempted to speak Swedish to his new subjects just the once, meeting with such deafening laughter that he never bothered again (there is an echo of this in the apparently endless delight afforded the Danes by the thickly accented attempts at their language by their current queen’s consort, the portly French aristocrat Henri de Monpezat). On the subject of his new country, the forefather of Sweden’s current royal family was withering: “The wine is terrible, the people without temperament, and even the sun radiates no warmth,” the arriviste king is alleged to have said. The current king is generally considered to be a bit bumbling, but he can at least speak Swedish, usually stands where he is told, and waves enthusiastically. At least, that was the perception until 2010, when the long-whispered rumors of his rampant philandering were finally exposed in a book, Den motvillige monarken (The Reluctant Monarch). Sweden’s tabloids salivated over gory details of the king’s relationships with numerous exotic women, his visits to strip clubs, and his fraternizing with members of the underworld. Hardly appropriate behavior for the chairman of the World Scout Foundation. (The exposé followed allegations that the father of the king’s German-Brazilian wife, Queen Silvia, was a member of the Nazi party. Awkward.) These days, whenever I see Carl Gustaf performing his official duties I can’t shake the feeling that he would much prefer to be trussed up in a dominatrix’s cellar. The

They look like glittering golden cubes!" "And they're melting across the chicken breasts?!" "Wait a minute... OH! MORPHING FURIKAKE RICE!" "WELL, WELL! WHAT HAVE WE HERE?!" "The chicken's already savory and robust aroma... ... is growing even richer and stronger!" "A Furikake topping? At a glance, these look like cubes of some variety of aspic..." "The First and Second Seats were already over the moon about this dish." "Are you saying it is now even more delicious?!" "Aah! Unbelievable! Already the rich scent of roasted chicken tickles the nose!" "Hmph..." "This...? This flavor! I can hardly believe it! The warmth of the chicken has caused the aspic cubes to begin melting into a thick jelly... ... adding new and luxuriant layers to both the flavor and the texture of the dish! The salty savoriness of its flavor seeps quietly into the crispy rice crackers... ... while the scrambled-egg sauce is infused with an even more decadently creamy texture! "The sheer perfect balance of the dish is positively divine! Flavors clash and meld, amplifying and accenting each other in complete harmony! What creative originality! Who would have thought that one simple addition would add so much depth and complexity to the entire dish?!

As I became older, I was given many masks to wear. I could be a laborer laying railroad tracks across the continent, with long hair in a queue to be pulled by pranksters; a gardener trimming the shrubs while secretly planting a bomb; a saboteur before the day of infamy at Pearl Harbor, signaling the Imperial Fleet; a kamikaze pilot donning his headband somberly, screaming 'Banzai' on my way to my death; a peasant with a broad-brimmed straw hat in a rice paddy on the other side of the world, stooped over to toil in the water; an obedient servant in the parlor, a houseboy too dignified for my own good; a washerman in the basement laundry, removing stains using an ancient secret; a tyrant intent on imposing my despotism on the democratic world, opposed by the free and the brave; a party cadre alongside many others, all of us clad in coordinated Mao jackets; a sniper camouflaged in the trees of the jungle, training my gunsights on G.I. Joe; a child running with a body burning from napalm, captured in an unforgettable photo; an enemy shot in the head or slaughtered by the villageful; one of the grooms in a mass wedding of couples, having met my mate the day before through our cult leader; an orphan in the last airlift out of a collapsed capital, ready to be adopted into the good life; a black belt martial artist breaking cinderblocks with his head, in an advertisement for Ginsu brand knives with the slogan 'but wait--there's more' as the commercial segued to show another free gift; a chef serving up dog stew, a trick on the unsuspecting diner; a bad driver swerving into the next lane, exactly as could be expected; a horny exchange student here for a year, eager to date the blonde cheerleader; a tourist visiting, clicking away with his camera, posing my family in front of the monuments and statues; a ping pong champion, wearing white tube socks pulled up too high and batting the ball with a wicked spin; a violin prodigy impressing the audience at Carnegie Hall, before taking a polite bow; a teen computer scientist, ready to make millions on an initial public offering before the company stock crashes; a gangster in sunglasses and a tight suit, embroiled in a turf war with the Sicilian mob; an urban greengrocer selling lunch by the pound, rudely returning change over the counter to the black patrons; a businessman with a briefcase of cash bribing a congressman, a corrupting influence on the electoral process; a salaryman on my way to work, crammed into the commuter train and loyal to the company; a shady doctor, trained in a foreign tradition with anatomical diagrams of the human body mapping the flow of life energy through a multitude of colored points; a calculus graduate student with thick glasses and a bad haircut, serving as a teaching assistant with an incomprehensible accent, scribbling on the chalkboard; an automobile enthusiast who customizes an imported car with a supercharged engine and Japanese decals in the rear window, cruising the boulevard looking for a drag race; a illegal alien crowded into the cargo hold of a smuggler's ship, defying death only to crowd into a New York City tenement and work as a slave in a sweatshop. My mother and my girl cousins were Madame Butterfly from the mail order bride catalog, dying in their service to the masculinity of the West, and the dragon lady in a kimono, taking vengeance for her sisters. They became the television newscaster, look-alikes with their flawlessly permed hair. Through these indelible images, I grew up. But when I looked in the mirror, I could not believe my own reflection because it was not like what I saw around me. Over the years, the world opened up. It has become a dizzying kaleidoscope of cultural fragments, arranged and rearranged without plan or order.

Lady Panovar made mention of her French maid about a dozen times last night," Mrs Sedgewick informed the staff tiredly. "Lady Culver ended the night in a fury. She has insisted that I should find her some French maids at once." Lydia's mouth dropped open. "What?" she laughed. "Just like that? An' at her wages? Aren't French maids rather dear?" It was a sign of how very exhausted they all were that Mrs Sedgewick did not upbraid Lydia for her impertinence. The housekeeper normally insisted that the staff show strict respect for the Family, even when outside of earshot. “Obviously, there are no French maids to be had in the area, and Her Ladyship hasn’t the budget to import one, like Lady Panovar,” Mrs Sedgewick sighed. “And so, to sum the matter up - you shall all need to become French maids.” Effie blinked slowly. “Mrs Sedgewick,” she said carefully. “I don’t mean to be pert, but… what does that mean, exactly?” Mrs Sedgewick shot Effie a tight smile. “It means that you shall need new French names,” she said. “At least when you are above-stairs. And you will need to practise a French accent.” “Er,” George spoke up, with a slight cough. Not the footmen, too?” “No,” Mrs Sedgewick said long-sufferingly. “Lady Panovar does not have any French footmen, as far as I know, and so Lady Culver does not require any French footmen herself. You may remain English for the moment, George.

What If God Is a Creep? What if God is a creep who wishes He was taller who didn't get the girl who picks on people not His own size? What if God laughed when Jesus had second thoughts? What if His sense of order is no more complex than kids playing King of the Hill or Smear the Queer? What if God is really a creep who beats His wife embezzles when He can and jerks off to violent porn? Perhaps God put Darin on earth to help us understand that the very traits of man which survive the longest and determine the fittest are God's own favorite attributes? Maybe He's a boss who expects favors a professor who makes others feel stupid a witness obstructing justice. What if God is really just a creep? Maybe Machiavelli was His inspired son and The Prince remains our most sacred text. What if Hitler sits at God's right hand tended by a heavenly host of bigots, bullies, soldiers and other serial killers who look to an angel name Manson for advice. A God capable of biological brilliance and genetic genius is no more likely to care about justice and kindness than His creations are. Why assume that God likes women any more than men do? Why imagine He wouldn't hurt His children? God's morality might be just as steeped in struggle as accented by abuse as spiced with exploitation and as baked with brutality as our own common recipes. Drink up. One taste and you are in Heaven. If God really is a creep that certainly would explain a lot.

The artillery and mortars had been silent for at least the past few hours. After awhile the rabbi stopped initiating new songs. He took a few more sips of wine and sat for a time, almost shining in obvious pleasure, and yet reflective and silent. All watched him, and after a few minutes he spoke again in his odd Moroccan/Brooklyn accent. "The weapons of a Jew are prayer and mitzvot. Tonight we are arming ourselves with mitzvot like the finest suit of armor ever made. Better than a ceramica," he said, referring to the bullet-proof flak vests worn by many Israeli soldiers by their street name. "By the mere act of sitting and eating and drinking, because we are doing so in a sukkah at the time that our Creator told us to do so, we acquire for ourselves a heavenly shield more powerful than any missile or tank." He let those words settle in as he beamed at all present at the table and standing in the sukkah. "A mitzvah—carrying out HaShem's commandment or doing a good deed, such as an act of kindness towards your fellow human being—creates a heavenly smell, a wonderful odor that is both spiritual and physical. When the Creator of the whole universe commanded the Jewish people to bring sacrifices upon His holy altar, and they did so exactly as he had instructed them, the Torah says that it created a Re-ach Tov, a good and wonderful scent, that pleased the Ribbono Shel-Olam. And in those moments when the Jewish people acted on the instructions of their Creator, there was a kesher and a devekus, a tie and a drawing closer, between the Jewish people and their Creator.

Moscow can be a cold, hard place in winter. But the big old house on Tverskoy Boulevard had always seemed immune to these particular facts, the way that it had seemed immune to many things throughout the years. When breadlines filled the streets during the reign of the czars, the big house had caviar. When the rest of Russia stood shaking in the Siberian winds, that house had fires and gaslight in every room. And when the Second World War was over and places like Leningrad and Berlin were nothing but rubble and crumbling walls, the residents of the big house on Tverskoy Boulevard only had to take up a hammer and drive a single nail—to hang a painting on the landing at the top of the stairs—to mark the end of a long war. The canvas was small, perhaps only eight by ten inches. The brushstrokes were light but meticulous. And the subject, the countryside near Provence, was once a favorite of an artist named Cézanne. No one in the house spoke of how the painting had come to be there. Not a single member of the staff ever asked the man of the house, a high-ranking Soviet official, to talk about the canvas or the war or whatever services he may have performed in battle or beyond to earn such a lavish prize. The house on Tverskoy Boulevard was not one for stories, everybody knew. And besides, the war was over. The Nazis had lost. And to the victors went the spoils. Or, as the case may be, the paintings. Eventually, the wallpaper faded, and soon few people actually remembered the man who had brought the painting home from the newly liberated East Germany. None of the neighbors dared to whisper the letters K-G-B. Of the old Socialists and new socialites who flooded through the open doors for parties, not one ever dared to mention the Russian mob. And still the painting stayed hanging, the music kept playing, and the party itself seemed to last—echoing out onto the street, fading into the frigid air of the night. The party on the first Friday of February was a fund-raiser—though for what cause or foundation, no one really knew. It didn’t matter. The same people were invited. The same chef was preparing the same food. The men stood smoking the same cigars and drinking the same vodka. And, of course, the same painting still hung at the top of the stairs, looking down on the partygoers below. But one of the partygoers was not, actually, the same. When she gave the man at the door a name from the list, her Russian bore a slight accent. When she handed her coat to a maid, no one seemed to notice that it was far too light for someone who had spent too long in Moscow’s winter. She was too short; her black hair framed a face that was in every way too young. The women watched her pass, eyeing the competition. The men hardly noticed her at all as she nibbled and sipped and waited until the hour grew late and the people became tipsy. When that time finally came, not one soul watched as the girl with the soft pale skin climbed the stairs and slipped the small painting from the nail that held it. She walked to the window. And jumped. And neither the house on Tverskoy Boulevard nor any of its occupants ever saw the girl or the painting again.

The tie that bound them to their neighbors, that inspired them in the way my patriotism had always inspired me, had seemingly vanished. The symptoms are all around us. Significant percentages of white conservative voters—about one-third—believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim. In one poll, 32 percent of conservatives said that they believed Obama was foreign-born and another 19 percent said they were unsure—which means that a majority of white conservatives aren’t certain that Obama is even an American. I regularly hear from acquaintances or distant family members that Obama has ties to Islamic extremists, or is a traitor, or was born in some far-flung corner of the world. Many of my new friends blame racism for this perception of the president. But the president feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor—which, of course, he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up: His accent—clean, perfect, neutral—is foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they’re frightening; he made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis; and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him. Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right—adversity familiar to many of us—but that was long before any of us knew him.

Colin. Just the name made Alessandro’s gut burn. He knew the man wanted his wife, even if Brianna was too blind to see it. The moron had been cuckolded by the paragon of supposed virtue, his wife Carrie and now he had finally opened his eyes and seen what Alessandro had known all along. Brianna put every other woman in New York to shame. No woman could come near her beauty, her passion, her fire. Colin had tossed her aside for the angelic Carrie and now he was changing his mind. Oh no you don’t, you miserable fucker. “Her friend indeed,” Bernardo drawled, his Italian accent thick with unmistakable implication. “Dat’s da truth. He no make her cry all da time.” That was directed at Alessandro, with small dark accusatory eyes. “He nice.” Alessandro couldn’t look at those eyes without feeling a sickening pang of guilt. She’s mine! He wanted to scream. Mine! Mine! Mine! “Oh yes. Very nice. He was very nice when he held her at the cemetery and very nice when he was dancing with her at Adresca.” That made Alessandro’s head lift in surprise. “Oh yes, my boy. She’s been there, cleaning up the rubble and word is that she’s working on re-opening it. Her friend Colin has been quite helpful in that endeavour.” “I don’ like how you say dat,” Will said scowling. “Really young William, I only speak the truth,” Bernardo taunted. Alessandro’s mind was racing. NO! Not Colin. He could not let that imbecile take Brianna away from him. He’d have to be eliminated somehow. Alessandro began to plot all the different ways he could ensure that Colin Neally stayed away from his wife, permanently. They all involved grisly, violent methods. He could not be allowed to win Brianna.

Mindy runs to the DVD player and delicately places the disk in the holder and presses play. “Will you sit in this chair, please, Princess Mindy?” I ask, bowing deeply at the waist. Mindy giggles as she replies, ”I guess so.” After Mindy sits down, I take a wide-tooth comb and start gently combing out her tangles. Mindy starts vibrating with excitement as she blurts, “Mr. Jeff, you’re gonna fix my hair fancy, ain’t you?” “We’ll see if a certain Princess can hold still long enough for me to finish,” I tease. Immediately, Mindy becomes as still as a stone statue. After a couple of minutes, I have to say, “Mindy, sweetheart, it’s okay to breathe. I just can’t have you bouncing, because I’m afraid it will cause me to pull your hair.” Mindy slumps down in her chair just slightly. “Okay Mr. Jeff, I was ascared you was gonna stop,” she whispers, her chin quivering. I adopt a very fake, very over-the-top French accent and say, “Oh no, Monsieur Jeff must complete Princess Mindy’s look to make the Kingdom happy. Mindy erupts with the first belly laugh I’ve heard all day as she responds, “Okay, I’ll try to be still, but it’s hard ‘cause I have the wiggles real bad.” I pat her on the shoulder and chuckle as I say, “Just try your best, sweetheart. That’s all anyone can ask.” Kiera comes screeching around the corner in a blur, plunks her purse on the table, and says breathlessly, “Geez-O-Pete, I can’t believe I’m late for the makeover. I love makeovers.” Kiera digs through her purse and produces two bottles of nail polish and nail kit. “It’s time for your mani/pedi ma’am. Would you prefer Pink Pearl or Frosted Creamsicle? Mindy raises her hand like a schoolchild and Kiera calls on her like a pupil, “I want Frosted Cream toes please,” Mindy answers. “Your wish is my command, my dear,” Kiera responds with a grin. For the next few minutes, Mindy gets the spa treatment of her life as I carefully French braid her hair into pigtails. As a special treat, I purchased some ribbons from the gift shop and I’m weaving them into her hair. I tuck a yellow rose behind her ear. I don my French accent as I declare, “Monsieur Jeffery pronounces Princess Mindy finished and fit to rule the kingdom.” Kiera hands Mindy a new tube of grape ChapStick from her purse, “Hold on, a true princess never reigns with chapped lips,” she says. Mindy giggles as she responds, “You’re silly, Miss Kiera. Nobody in my kingdom is going to care if my lips are shiny.” Kiera’s laugh sounds like wind chimes as she covers her face with her hands as she confesses, “Okay, you busted me. I just like to use it because it tastes yummy.” “Okay, I want some, please,” Mindy decides. Kiera is putting the last minute touches on her as Mindy is scrambling to stand on Kiera’s thighs so she can get a better look in the mirror. When I reach out to steady her, she grabs my hand in a death grip. I glance down at her. Her eyes are wide and her mouth is opening and closing like a fish. I shoot Kiera a worried glance, but she merely shrugs. “Holy Sh — !” Mindy stops short when she sees Kiera’s expression. “Mr. Jeff is an angel for reals because he turned me into one. Look at my hair Miss Kiera, there are magic ribbons in it! I’m perfect. I can be anything I want to be.” Spontaneously, we all join together in a group hug. I kiss the top of her head as I agree, “Yes, Mindy, you are amazing and the sky is the limit for you.

For four hours, Andrew and I were presented with course after course of delightful creations, imaginative pairings, and, always, dramatic presentations. Little fillets of sturgeon arrived under a glass dome, after which it was lifted, applewood smoke billowed out across the table. Pretzel bread, cheese, and ale, meant to evoke a picnic in Central Park, was delivered in a picnic basket. But my favorite dish was the carrot tartare. The idea came, along with many of the menu's other courses, while researching reflecting upon New York's classic restaurants. From 21 Club to Four Seasons, once upon a time, every establishment offered a signature steak tartare. "What's our tartare?" Will and Daniel wondered. They kept playing with formulas and recipes and coming close to something special, but it never quite had the wow factor they were looking for. One day after Daniel returned from Paffenroth Gardens, a farm in the Hudson Valley with the rich muck soil that yields incredibly flavorful root vegetables, they had a moment. In his perfect Swiss accent, he said, "What if we used carrots?" Will remembers. And so carrot tartare, a sublime ode to the humble vegetable, was added to the Eleven Madison Park tasting course. "I love that moment when you clamp a meat grinder onto the table and people expect it to be meat, and it's not," Will gushes of the theatrical table side presentation. After the vibrant carrots are ground by the server, they're turned over to you along with a palette of ingredients with which to mix and play: pickled mustard seeds, quail egg yolk, pea mustard, smoked bluefish, spicy vinaigrette. It was one of the most enlightening yet simple dishes I've ever had. I didn't know exactly which combination of ingredients I mixed, adding a little of this and a little of that, but every bite I created was fresh, bright, and ringing with flavor. Carrots- who knew?

Hey, can I help you—whoa!” As he wheeled around and settled into his attack stance, the black human salesperson jumped back and put his palms up. “Forgive me,” Xcor muttered. At least he hadn’t outed one of his weapons. “No problem.” The handsome, well-dressed man smiled. “You looking for something specific?” Xcor glanced around, and nearly walked back to that fancy stairwell. “I require a new shirt.” “Oh, cool, you got a hot date?” “And pants. And socks.” Come to think of it, he never wore underwear. “And undergarments. And a jacket.” The salesman smiled and raised a hand as if he were going to clap his customer on the shoulder—but then caught himself as he clearly rethought the contact. “What kind of look are you going for?” he asked instead. “Clothed.” The guy paused like he wasn’t sure whether that was a joke. “Ah . . . okay, I can work with non-naked. Plus it’s legal. Come on with me.” Xcor followed, because he didn’t know what else to do—he’d gotten this ball rolling; there was no reason not to follow through. The man stopped in front of a display of shirts. “So I’m going to go with the it’s-a-date thing, unless you tell me otherwise. Casual? You didn’t mention a suit.” “Casual. Yes. But I want to look. . . .” Well, not like himself, at any rate. “Presentable.” “Then I think what you’re going to want is a button-down.” “A button-down.” The guy regarded him steadily. “You’re not from here, are you.” “No, I’m not.” “I can tell by the accent.” The salesman passed a hand over the dizzying array of folded-up squares with collars. “These are our traditional cuts. I can tell without measuring you that the European stuff isn’t going to do you right—you’re too muscled in the shoulders. Even if we could get the neck and arm size right, you’d bust out of them. Do you like any of these colors?” “I don’t know what to like.” “Here.” The man picked up a blue one that reminded Xcor of the backdrop on his phone. “This is good with your eyes. Not that I go that way—but you gotta work with what you got. Do you have any idea of your size?” “XXXL.” “We need to be a little more exact.

we neared Liverpool’s Lime Street station, we passed through a culvert with walls that appeared to rise up at least thirty feet, high enough to block out the sun. They were as smooth as Navajo sandstone. This had been bored out in 1836 and had been in continuous use ever since, the conductor told me. “All the more impressive,” he said, “when you consider it was all done by Irish navvies working with wheelbarrows and picks.” I couldn’t place his accent and asked if he himself was Irish, but he gave me a disapproving look and told me he was a native of Liverpool. He had been talking about the ragged class of nineteenth-century laborers, usually illiterate farmhands, known as “navvies”—hard-drinking and risk-taking men who were hired in gangs to smash the right-of-way in a direct line from station to station. Many of them had experienced digging canals and were known by the euphemism “navigators.” They wore the diminutive “navvy” as a term of pride. Polite society shunned them, but these magnificent railways would have been impossible without their contributions of sweat and blood. Their primary task was cleaving the hillsides so that tracks could be laid on a level plain for the weak locomotive engines of the day. Teams of navvies known as “butty gangs” blasted a route with gunpowder and then hauled the dirt out with the same kind of harness that so many children were then using in the coal mines: a man at the back of a full wheelbarrow would buckle a thick belt around his waist, then attach that to a rope dangling from the top of the slope and allow himself to be pulled up by a horse. This was how the Lime Street approach had been dug out, and it was dangerous. One 1827 fatality happened as “the poor fellow was in the act of undermining a heavy head of clay, fourteen or fifteen feet high, when the mass fell upon him and literally crushed his bowels out of his body,” as a Liverpool paper told it. The navvies wrecked old England along with themselves, erecting a bizarre new kingdom of tracks. In a passage from his 1848 novel Dombey and Son, Charles Dickens gives a snapshot of the scene outside London: Everywhere

When I finally calmed down, I saw how disappointed he was and how bad he felt. I decided to take a deep breath and try to think this thing through. “Maybe it’s not that bad,” I said. (I think I was trying to cheer myself up as much as I was trying to console Chip.) “If we fix up the interior and just get it to the point where we can get it onto the water, at least maybe then we can turn around, sell it, and get our money back.” Over the course of the next hour or so, I really started to come around. I took another walk through the boat and started to picture how we could make it livable--maybe even kind of cool. After all, we’d conquered worse. We tore a few things apart right then and there, and I grabbed some paper and sketched out a new layout for the tiny kitchen. I talked to him about potentially finishing an accent wall with shiplap--a kind of rough-textured pine paneling that fans of our show now know all too well. “Shiplap?” Chip laughed. “That seems a little ironic to use on a ship, doesn’t it?” “Ha-ha,” I replied. I was still not in the mood for his jokes, but this is how Chip backs me off the ledge--with his humor. Then I asked him to help me lift something on the deck, and he said, “Aye, aye, matey!” in his best pirate voice, and slowly but surely I came around. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but by the end of that afternoon I was actually a little bit excited about taking on such a big challenge. Chip was still deflated that he’d allowed himself to get duped, but he put his arm around me as we started walking back to the truck. I put my head on his shoulder. And the camera captured the whole thing--just an average, roller-coaster afternoon in the lives of Chip and Joanna Gaines. The head cameraman came jogging over to us before we drove away. Chip rolled down his window and said sarcastically, “How’s that for reality TV?” We were both feeling embarrassed that this is how we had spent our last day of trying to get this stinkin’ television show. “Well,” the guy said, breaking into a great big smile, “if I do my job, you two just landed yourself a reality TV show.” What? We were floored. We couldn’t believe it. How was that a show? But lo and behold, he was right. That rotten houseboat turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

If Mamaw's second God was the United States of America, then many people in my community were losing something akin to a religion. The tie that bound them to the neighbors, that inspired them in the way my patriotism had always inspired me, had seemingly vanished. The symptoms are all around us. Significant percentages of white conservative voters--about one-third--believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim. In one poll, 32 percent of conservatives said that they believed Obama was foreign-born and another 19 percent said they were unsure--which means that a majority of white conservatives aren't certain that Obama is even an American. I regularly hear from acquaintances or distant family members that Obama has ties to Islamic extremists, or is a traitor, or was born in some far-flung corner of the world. Many of my new friends blame racism for this perception of the president. But the president feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor--which, of course, he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up; His accent--clean, perfect, neutral--is foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they're frightening; he made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis; and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him. Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right--adversity familiar to many of us--but that was long before any of us knew him. President Obama came on the scene right as so many people in my community began to believe that the modern American meritocracy was not built for them. We know we're not doing well. We see it every day: in the obituaries for teenage kids that conspicuously omit the cause of death (reading between the lines: overdose), in the deadbeats we watch our daughters waste their time with. Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren't. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we're lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn't be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it--not because we think she's wrong, but because we know she's right.

I’m the kind of patriot whom people on the Acela corridor laugh at. I choke up when I hear Lee Greenwood’s cheesy anthem “Proud to Be an American.” When I was sixteen, I vowed that every time I met a veteran, I would go out of my way to shake his or her hand, even if I had to awkwardly interject to do so. To this day, I refuse to watch Saving Private Ryan around anyone but my closest friends, because I can’t stop from crying during the final scene. Mamaw and Papaw taught me that we live in the best and greatest country on earth. This fact gave meaning to my childhood. Whenever times were tough—when I felt overwhelmed by the drama and the tumult of my youth—I knew that better days were ahead because I lived in a country that allowed me to make the good choices that others hadn’t. When I think today about my life and how genuinely incredible it is—a gorgeous, kind, brilliant life partner; the financial security that I dreamed about as a child; great friends and exciting new experiences—I feel overwhelming appreciation for these United States. I know it’s corny, but it’s the way I feel. If Mamaw’s second God was the United States of America, then many people in my community were losing something akin to a religion. The tie that bound them to their neighbors, that inspired them in the way my patriotism had always inspired me, had seemingly vanished. The symptoms are all around us. Significant percentages of white conservative voters—about one-third—believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim. In one poll, 32 percent of conservatives said that they believed Obama was foreign-born and another 19 percent said they were unsure—which means that a majority of white conservatives aren’t certain that Obama is even an American. I regularly hear from acquaintances or distant family members that Obama has ties to Islamic extremists, or is a traitor, or was born in some far-flung corner of the world. Many of my new friends blame racism for this perception of the president. But the president feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor—which, of course, he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up: His accent—clean, perfect, neutral—is foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they’re frightening; he made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis; and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him. Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right—adversity familiar to many of us—but that was long before any of us knew him. President Obama came on the scene right as so many people in my community began to believe that the modern American meritocracy was not built for them. We know we’re not doing well. We see it every day: in the obituaries for teenage kids that conspicuously omit the cause of death (reading between the lines: overdose), in the deadbeats we watch our daughters waste their time with. Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren’t. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn’t be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it—not because we think she’s wrong but because we know she’s right.

The mixture of a solidly established Romance aristocracy with the Old English grassroots produced a new language, a “French of England,” which came to be known as Anglo-Norman. It was perfectly intelligible to the speakers of other langues d’oïl and also gave French its first anglicisms, words such as bateau (boat) and the four points of the compass, nord, sud, est and ouest. The most famous Romance chanson de geste, the Song of Roland, was written in Anglo-Norman. The first verse shows how “French” this language was: Carles li reis, nostre emperere magnes, set anz tuz pleins ad estéd en Espaigne, Tresqu’en la mer cunquist la tere altaigne… King Charles, our great emperor, stayed in Spain a full seven years: and he conquered the high lands up to the sea… Francophones are probably not aware of how much England contributed to the development of French. England’s court was an important production centre for Romance literature, and most of the early legends of King Arthur were written in Anglo-Norman. Robert Wace, who came from the Channel Island of Jersey, first evoked the mythical Round Table in his Roman de Brut, written in French in 1155. An Englishman, William Caxton, even produced the first “vocabulary” of French and English (a precursor of the dictionary) in 1480. But for four centuries after William seized the English crown, the exchange between Old English and Romance was pretty much the other way around—from Romance to English. Linguists dispute whether a quarter or a half of the basic English vocabulary comes from French. Part of the argument has to do with the fact that some borrowings are referred to as Latinates, a term that tends to obscure the fact that they actually come from French (as we explain later, the English worked hard to push away or hide the influence of French). Words such as charge, council, court, debt, judge, justice, merchant and parliament are straight borrowings from eleventh-century Romance, often with no modification in spelling. In her book Honni soit qui mal y pense, Henriette Walter points out that the historical developments of French and English are so closely related that anglophone students find it easier to read Old French than francophones do. The reason is simple: Words such as acointance, chalenge, plege, estriver, remaindre and esquier disappeared from the French vocabulary but remained in English as acquaintance, challenge, pledge, strive, remain and squire—with their original meanings. The word bacon, which francophones today decry as an English import, is an old Frankish term that took root in English. Words that people think are totally English, such as foreign, pedigree, budget, proud and view, are actually Romance terms pronounced with an English accent: forain, pied-de-grue (crane’s foot—a symbol used in genealogical trees to mark a line of succession), bougette (purse), prud (valiant) and vëue. Like all other Romance vernaculars, Anglo-Norman evolved quickly. English became the expression of a profound brand of nationalism long before French did. As early as the thirteenth century, the English were struggling to define their nation in opposition to the French, a phenomenon that is no doubt the root of the peculiar mixture of attraction and repulsion most anglophones feel towards the French today, whether they admit it or not. When Norman kings tried to add their French territory to England and unify their kingdom under the English Crown, the French of course resisted. The situation led to the first, lesser-known Hundred Years War (1159–1299). This long quarrel forced the Anglo-Norman aristocracy to take sides. Those who chose England got closer to the local grassroots, setting the Anglo-Norman aristocracy on the road to assimilation into English.

Because they write ‘harbor’ instead of ‘harbour’? Then one would have to attribute a language of their own to the Austrians for saying ‘Sessel’ when they mean ‘Stuhl’ [for chair] or turn ‘Januar’ [January] into ‘Janner.’ Because American slang is spoken differently from British slang? That’s true, but in both countries the standard languages are about as identical as ‘Austrian’ and German.”27 What is “American” supposed to communicate to German readers? An accent? But then writings by an author from Glasgow would have to be titled “from the Glaswegian” or those by a writer living in Manchester as “from the Mancunian.” John Lennon’s books would have to be graced with the formulation “from the Liverpudlian” and those by Woody Allen with “from New Yorkish” or, to be more precise, “from the Brooklynese.” If it’s not about accent, is the criterion perhaps geography? Then Germans would have to use “from the Canadian” or “from the New Zealander

Since she couldn’t break me with her eyes, she went back behind her desk, sat down, and pressed a button on her phone. “Mr. Milagros,” she said, “are you there?” A second later, a crackly walkie-talkie voice with a thick Cuban accent said, “Para servirle.” “How is the chicken cleanup going?” “¿Bueno?” he began, stretching the word out to three seconds. Usually, “bueno” means “good,” but the way he said it then meant “welp.” And that’s all he said. “Mr. Milagros, are you still there?” “Para servirle.” Principal Torres massaged her forehead. “Me puede servir by telling me about the mess you had to clean up.” “¿Bueno?” She waited five Mississippis, tapping each second out on the desk with her finger. Then, carefully controlling her voice, she asked, “What does ‘bueno’ mean?” He sighed. “It’s like this. I went back to the locker to clean it up. Made up a whole new bucket of cleaner for it, bien fuerte. Like, I could mop up a dead body with it, because basically that’s what it was, a dead chicken body. If a student accidentally tripped and fell in my mop bucket, ooh, sería un desastre! It’d turn that kid into Kool-Aid.” “The chicken, Mr. Milagros. Did you clean it up?” The walkie-talkie crackled as Mr. Milagros put his thoughts in order. “¿Bueno? I was going to. I was all ready to. But when I got to the lockers, no chicken.

She was right. Apparently, my new Southern accent had not been fleeting. Like racism and bigotry, it wasn’t going anywhere.

English and half Nigerian, Stacey had never set foot outside the United Kingdom. Her tight black hair was cut short and close to her head following the removal of her last weave. The smooth caramel skin suited the haircut well. Stacey’s work area was organised and clear. Anything not in the labelled trays was stacked in meticulous piles along the top edge of her desk. Not far behind was Detective Sergeant Bryant who mumbled a ‘Morning, Guv,’ as he glanced into The Bowl. His six foot frame looked immaculate, as though he had been dressed for Sunday school by his mother. Immediately the suit jacket landed on the back of his chair. By the end of the day his tie would have dropped a couple of floors, the top button of his shirt would be open and his shirt sleeves would be rolled up just below his elbows. She saw him glance at her desk, seeking evidence of a coffee mug. When he saw that she already had coffee he filled the mug labelled ‘World’s Best Taxi Driver’, a present from his nineteen-year-old daughter. His filing was not a system that anyone else understood but Kim had yet to request any piece of paper that was not in her hands within a few seconds. At the top of his desk was a framed picture of himself and his wife taken at their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. A picture of his daughter snuggled in his wallet. DS Kevin Dawson, the third member of her team, didn’t keep a photo of anyone special on his desk. Had he wanted to display a picture of the person for whom he felt most affection he would have been greeted by his own likeness throughout his working day. ‘Sorry I’m late, Guv,’ Dawson called as he slid into his seat opposite Wood and completed her team. He wasn’t officially late. The shift didn’t start until eight a.m. but she liked them all in early for a briefing, especially at the beginning of a new case. Kim didn’t like to stick to a roster and people who did lasted a very short time on her team. ‘Hey, Stacey, you gonna get me a coffee or what?’ Dawson asked, checking his mobile phone. ‘Of course, Kev, how’d yer like it: milk, two sugars and in yer lap?’ she asked sweetly, in her strong Black Country accent.

She said her name was Cherise. Her accent said she had probably started out life as Sherrie or Cherry. She did not look as happy to see him as he did her. She had no idea what she had let herself in for when she’d run away from an abusive stepfather and an in-denial alcoholic mother who refused to entertain any thoughts about what her husband might be doing to her daughter after she’d passed out at night. Now Cherise struggled with adapting to this new and very scary lifestyle that she’d drifted into. She would soon find out that as bad as her old situation had been, there were worse things that could happen to a girl, especially if no one cared if she lived or died. Her body would not be found for nearly a year, and then only because a task force created by the FBI, acting on the events of the previous year which determined that there were sufficient reasons to search the woods in and around Picketsville, had finally begun to sift through the sector where she’d been dumped. In any case, it would be long after the man who killed her had had his own appointment with destiny. Because of that, the irony of her passing would go unappreciated and her murder, like so many others involving lost children, would go unheralded and unsolved. Hers would be just another life served up on the altar of societal ennui.

I’M SITTING at the counter in my favorite New York diner, tucking into eggs over easy with hash browns—very English, the breakfast fry-up, but very American, too. I’m washing it down with cranberry juice—caffeine is probably the only vice I don’t have—and someone turns on the radio. Most of the time, I don’t hear music. My brain just tunes it out. We’re all bombarded with some sort of music on a daily basis—in shops, TV commercials, restaurants, lifts—most of it simply noise pollution, deadening us to the real joy of music. So I only listen when I really want to. But the Puerto Rican waitress has turned on a Spanish channel, and a seductive salsa rhythm seeps into the room. It’s a charanga band—a traditional group that uses flute and violin over the standard latin rhythm section of congas, bongos, and timbales—and now I’m half-listening. Then the violinist takes a solo, and I’m hooked. He’s a great, inspired player. The band is playing a simple three-chord vamp, and he follows the chords closely, and yet still manages to come up with witty, ingenious, melodic twists. And the way he plays with the time! Dragging a phrase, and then ending it right on the beat. Setting up syncopations—accents that go against the beat—and then turning them around, playing them backwards. Then he hits an unexpected high note, and it’s like a shaft of light going right through my body, filling me with warmth. Without even thinking, I cry out—“Yeah!” or “All right!” or something—and I marvel at the way that music, after all these years, can still surprise me. The guy next to me just goes on munching his cheeseburger. But something special has happened, even if I’m the only one who knows it. The band on the radio are most likely second- or third-generation Puerto Ricans who were raised uptown, way uptown—in the Bronx—in a different world from me. But through the music, they’ve connected with an Englishman way downtown, in a way that would otherwise never happen.

His burrito is halfway to his mouth as he says, “Takes me a week and a half to get through a self-help book when a new season of The Challenge comes out.” Then he takes a bite of his burrito, and honestly, from the lack of facial expressions, I can’t tell if he’s being serious or not. Might as well test his knowledge. “You watch The Challenge?” He nods slowly. “CT for life.” Okay, okay, don’t freak out. Gah . . . but CT! “He’s my dream man,” I say before I can stop myself. “Heavy Boston accent, troubled past, buff—even in his dad-bod era—and just a fine piece of ass.

Oh, I think she came here to try to sleep with your man, Jones,” Big Tag said. “Stop,” Jake nagged. “Come on. Tell me you don’t want to see what happens when her inner redneck makes an appearance. Ain’t no redneck like a Georgia redneck. Her accent’s already gotten deeper. Look at the way her hands have that slight shake to them. She’s thinking about killing Miss New York,” Taggart explained. “I’m going to lay a hundred on Georgia there.

These small surprises can do a lot to break the monotony of everyday routines. A few months ago I realized that though I loved our white dinnerware, I was getting a bit bored with it. But rather than consider buying a new set, I ordered two extra pink plates in each size. The pink dishes make the whole stack of plates seem more appealing, and when laid out on the table for a dinner party, they’re like joyful punctuation marks. Similarly, the “accent nail” trend, which involves painting the thumb or ring fingernail in an atypical color like lemon yellow or turquoise, offers a simple way to make a manicure special.

In the late summer of 2010, I visit Nowak at his home in Falls Church, Virginia. He is soft-spoken, slightly built, and a little stooped with age. Nowak has a cerebral demeanor, and in a Louisiana accent that softens his r’s, he might tell you he was born in the “fawties.” We sit in his living room, which is decorated with tiny statues of forest animals. Every few minutes, he darts down the hall to his desk - above which hangs a famous photo of a black-phase red wolf from the Tensas River - to retrieve books, graphs, and papers for reference. More than a decade after his retirement, Nowak remains engrossed by discussions of red wolf origins. Deep in conversation about carnassial teeth, he dives to grab his wife’s shitzsu, Tommy, to show me what they look like, then he thinks better of it. (Tommy had eyed him warily.) He hands me a copy of his most recent publication, a 2002 paper from Southeastern Naturalist. “When I wrote this, I threw everything I had at the red wolf problem,” he says. “This was my best shot.” He thumps an extra copy onto the coffee table between us. After a very long pause, he gazes at it and adds: “I’m not sure I have anything left to offer.” This is hard to accept, considering everything he has invested in learning about the red wolf: few people have devoted more time to understanding red wolves than the man sitting across the coffee table from me, absentmindedly stroking his wife’s dog. Nowak grew up in New Orleans, and as an undergraduate at Tulane University in 1962, he became interested in endangered birds. While reading a book on the last ivory-billed woodpeckers in the swamps along the Tensas River, his eyes widened when he found references to wolves. “Wolves in Louisiana! My goodness, I thought wolves lived up on the tundra, in the north woods, going around chasing moose and people,” Nowak recalls. “I did not know a thing about them. But when I learned there were wolves in my home state, it got me excited.

Roosevelt was a brilliant, vociferous, combustible man, not the type who ordinarily reaches the presidency. In his whirlwind career, which had taken him from college to the White House in less than twenty years, he had been many things: a historian, lawyer, ornithologist, minority leader of the New York State Assembly, boxer, ranchman, New York City police commissioner, naturalist, hunter, civil service reformer, prolific author, devoted husband and father, voracious reader, assistant secretary of the navy, war hero, empire builder, advocate of vigorous physical exercise, governor of New York, and vice president of the United States. He was a big, broad-shouldered, barrel-chested man, with tan, rough-textured skin. His hair was close-cropped and reddish-brown in color, with bristles around the temples beginning to show gray, and his almost impossibly muscular neck looked as if it was on the verge of bursting his collar-stays. He wore pince-nez spectacles with a ribbon that hung down the left side of his face. When he smiled or spoke, he revealed two very straight rows of teeth, plainly visible from incisor to incisor, their gleaming whiteness sharply accented by his ruddy complexion.

Back in Turkey, he used to be: ÖMER ÖZSİPAHİOĞLU. Here in America, he had become an OMAR OZSIPAHIOGLU. His dots were excluded for him to be better included. After all, Americans, just like everyone else, relished familiarity — in names they could pronounce, sounds they could resonate, even if they didn’t make much sense one way or the other. Yet, few nations could perhaps be as self-assured as the Americans in reprocessing the names and surnames of foreigners. When a Turk, for instance, realizes he has just mispronounced the name of an American in Turkey, he will be embarrassed and in all likelihood consider this his own mistake, or in any case, as something to do with himself. When an American realizes he has just mispronounced the name of a Turk in the United States, however, in all likelihood, it won’t be him but rather the name itself that will be held responsible for that mistake. As names adjust to a foreign country, something is always lost — be it a dot, a letter, or an accent. What happens to your name in another territory is similar to what happens to a voluminous pack of spinach when cooked —some new taste can be added to the main ingredient, but its size shrinks visibly. It is this cutback a foreigner learns first. The primary requirement of accommodation in a strange land is estrangement of the hitherto most familiar: your name.

My letter was intended as a wake-up call to NIAID’s Dr. Fauci. The New Yorker had declared him “America’s Doctor.” Brad Pitt portrayed Fauci on “Saturday Night Live” as the omnicompetent medical expert with a Brooklyn accent.

He thrived on power and adulation and seemed to derive new energy from it, as if he had found a way to metabolize other people’s admiration. He had mostly shed his Brooklyn accent, and in its place he cultivated a sophisticated mid-Atlantic diction. He still spoke softly, but with a silken, cultured assuredness.

A wonderful ferment was working in Germany. Life seemed more free, more modern, more exciting than in any place I had ever seen. Nowhere else did the arts or the intellectual life seem so lively. In contemporary writing, painting, architecture, in music and drama, there were new currents and fine talents. And everywhere there was an accent on youth.

A wonderful ferment was working in Germany. Life seemed more free, more modern, more exciting than in any place I had ever seen. Nowhere else did the arts or the intellectual life seem so lively. In contemporary writing, painting, architecture, in music and drama, there were new currents and fine talents. And everywhere there was an accent on youth. One sat up with the young people all night in the sidewalk cafés, the plush bars, the summer camps, on a Rhineland steamer or in a smoke-filled artist’s studio and talked endlessly about life. They were a healthy, carefree, sun-worshiping lot, and they were filled with an enormous zest for living to the full and in complete freedom. The old oppressive Prussian spirit seemed to be dead and buried. Most Germans one met—politicians, writers, editors, artists, professors, students, businessmen, labor leaders—struck you as being democratic, liberal, even pacifist.

Dike, put it back,” Aunty Uju said, with the nasal, sliding accent she put on when she spoke to white Americans, in the presence of white Americans, in the hearing of white Americans. Pooh-reet-back. And with the accent emerged a new persona, apologetic and self-abasing.

Though both men could travel the normal distance from their accents to the neutral ear of the educated New Yorker, they were finding the distance between their respective homelands difficult to traverse.

The impression conveyed by these phrases of Vinteuil’s was different from any other, as if, in spite of the conclusions which science seems to be reaching, individuals did exist. And it was just when he was doing his utmost to be novel, that one could recognize, beneath the apparent differences, the deep similarities and the planned resemblances that underlay a work, when Vinteuil would pick up a given phrase several times, diversify it, playfully change its rhythm, bring it back again in the original form; this kind of deliberate echo, the product of intelligence, inevitably superficial, could never be so striking as the hidden, involuntary resemblances which sprang to the surface, under different colors, between the two distinct masterpieces; for then Vinteuil, striving powerfully to produce something new, searched into himself, and with all the force of creative effort touched his own essence, at a depth where, whatever question one asks, the soul replies with the same accent—its own. A particular accent, this accent of Vinteuil’s, separated from the accent of other musicians by a distinction much more marked than the one we perceive between the voices of different people, or even between the bellowing and the cry of two animal species; a real difference, the one that existed between the thought of some other musician and the eternal investigations of Vinteuil, the question that he put to himself in so many different forms, his speculation, endlessly painstaking but as free from the analytical forms of reasoning as if it had been conducted in the realm of the angels, so that we can measure its depth but no more translate it into human speech than disembodied spirits can when they are called up by a medium and interrogated about the secrets of death; his own accent, for in the end and even taking into account the acquired originality which had struck me in the afternoon, the family relationship which musicologists could trace between composers, it is to a single, personal voice that those great singers, the original musicians, always return in spite of themselves, a voice which is the living proof of the irreducible individuality of each soul.

His voice has the texture of an old blues singer. His accent peppered with the quintiscential New Orleans lilt. The way the vowels and words, like 'point' and 'joint' evaporate off the tongue. Replaced by a soft r that turns its language into jazz. The way words like 'corner' walk around the edges of the mouth before slipping off into the wind.

The actual antecedents of contemporary populist politicians like Trump are to be found not in interwar Central European totalitarian states but in state and local politics, particularly urban politics. In Europe, pro-Brexit Boris Johnson was the mayor of London before becoming prime minister, and Italy’s Matteo Salvini was on the city council of Milan from 1993 to 2012. In the United States, the shift from post-1945 democratic pluralism to technocratic neoliberalism was fostered from the 1960s onward by an alliance of the white overclass with African Americans and other racial minority groups. The result was a backlash by white working-class voters, not only against nonwhites who were seen as competitors for jobs and housing, but also against the alien cultural liberalism of white “gentry liberals.” The backlash in the North was particularly intense among “white ethnics”—first-, second-, and third-generation white immigrants like Irish, German, Italian, and Polish Americans, many of them Catholic. The disproportionately working-class white ethnics now found themselves defined as bigots by the same white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) elites who until recently had imposed quotas on Jews and Catholics in their Ivy League universities, but who were now posing as the virtuous, enlightened champions of civil rights. This toxic mix of black aspiration, white ethnic backlash, and WASP condescension provided a ripe habitat for demagogues, many of them old-school Democrats like Frank Rizzo, mayor of Philadelphia, Sam Yorty, mayor of Los Angeles, and Mario Angelo Procaccino, failed mayoral candidate in New York. These populist big-city mayors or candidates in the second half of the twentieth century combined appeals to working-class grievances and resentments with folksy language and feuds with the metropolitan press, a pattern practiced, in different ways, by later New York City mayors Ed Koch, a Democrat, and Rudy Giuliani, a Republican. In its “Against Trump” issue of January 22, 2016, the editors of National Review mocked the “funky outer-borough accents” shared by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Indeed, Trump, a “white ethnic” from Queens with German and Scots ancestors, with his support in the US industrial states where working-class non-British European-Americans are concentrated, is ethnically different from most of his predecessors in the White House, whose ancestors were proportionately far more British American. Traits which seem outlandish in a US president would not have seemed so if Trump had been elected mayor of New York. Donald Trump was not Der Führer. He was Da Mayor of America.

Yet one more encounter with new faces, he thought, as he watched a tree and a cloud move past in slow motion, and eventually this one would also blur into the others; all that would remain distinct, perhaps, would be a few words that only he would deem significant, or an angle of a face, which in turn his mind would link with other things, some oddity of accent, or some other words confusing time and place and people to look for a pattern, some essence.

There is a New Orleans city accent … associated with downtown New Orleans, particularly with the German and Irish Third Ward, that is hard to distinguish from the accent of Hoboken, Jersey City, and Astoria, Long Island, where the Al Smith inflection, extinct in Manhattan, has taken refuge. The reason, as you might expect, is that the same stocks that brought the accent to Manhattan imposed it on New Orleans.

George is American, white, and from a wealthy, largely homogenous neighborhood of Long Island, New York. His accent is flat, his voice stable, he liked categories and frameworks. He liked order and linearity. Cause led to effect. Action led to reaction. When we argued, he often called my claims and conclusions groundless, illogical, and contradictory. That my ground was different-- was less constant, was wilder-- than his ground was not something he was willing or equipped to consider. He understood the world through analytic deduction. I leaned more heavily on a more corporeal form of knowing.

I am not a different species, an alien creature, a changeling, a robot, a freak of nature. I am a familiar word, pronounced with a different accent. I am your mother's favorite recipe, prepared by a stranger. I am your favorite song, recorded by a new artist. I am a human being; I am Autistic.

my phone beeped. I took it from my handbag and saw a text message from Dixie. It read: that man is sizzling HOT HOT HOT!!!! truth! I texted back. omg! his accent! his body! im in lurv i noticed! hes a bilf wtf??? boss id like 2 fuk! I snorted out loud with laughter. Heller flicked his cold eyes to me. I wrote: norty girl! ooh! does he like norty asian girls? Another involuntary snort from me. “Ms Chalmers,” he warned. gotta go. my new daddys strict, I texted. spankz for u 2nite! lolz! only if im lucky! c u soon xx - heller 1

I am starting to talk fast now, and I have to remember to slow down because when I get excited, I start to sound like myself and my American accent goes away.

Death duties in Harcourt’s time were a comparatively modest 8 percent on estates valued at £1 million or more, but they proved to be such a reliable source of revenue, and so popular with the millions who didn’t have to pay them, that they were raised again and again until by the eve of the Second World War they stood at 60 percent—a level that would make even the richest eyes water. At the same time, income taxes were raised repeatedly and other new taxes invented—the Undeveloped Land Duty, the Incremental Value Duty, the Super Tax—all of which fell disproportionately on those with a lot of land and plummy accents.

accents started to be tinged with what was, stateside, referred to as an Irish brogue. I was finally

In one of the most scathing of these reviews, New York Times critic Robert Palmer wrote: “He has mastered the art of making lyrics that are banal—and, when they are about women, frequently condescending—sound vaguely important. He has mastered the art of making the simplest drum accent sound as portentous as a peal of thunder and of introducing his side-men’s solos with such dramatic flourishes that they almost sound like gifted, sensitive musicians rather than like the hacks they are. He has won a huge following by making emptiness seem substantial and Holiday Inn lounge schlock sound special.

That Yank glean is long gone anyway; money, sex, power, it’s gone global – no one has a monopoly on it anymore. The towering skyscrapers of New York had fallen long before the second plane; we all knew it. The twang of the Yank accent doesn’t give girls that twinge these days, even the dollar sign is looking dated, its day long past. No, America doesn’t have it anymore. But then nowhere does. We don’t chop the world up by borders anymore, don’t slice peoples and dice continents. It’s all a sweltering mess, a fucking free-for-all. We went global centuries ago, today we’ve gone digital, and digital doesn’t have borders.

The movie was an enormous hit in 1927. With Wings, it confirmed Bow as Hollywood’s leading female star. She received forty thousand letters a week—more than the population of a fair-sized town. In the summer of 1927, her career seemed set to go on indefinitely. In fact, it was nearly at an end. Winsome and enchanting as she was to behold, her Brooklyn accent was the vocal equivalent of nails on a blackboard, and in the new world of talking pictures that would never do.

Tell me, do you abandon your house because it's burning or do you find water to put out the fire? And if you leave it burning, do you expect the flames to turn into water and put themselves out? You left it, Darling, my dear, you left the house burning and you have the guts to tell me, in that stupid accent that you were not even born with, that doesn't even suit you, that this is your country?

The Holy Scripture is called the Book of the Old and of the New Testament. When a notary has drawn a contract or other deed, when a testament is confirmed by the death of the testator, there must not be added, withdrawn, or altered, one single word under penalty of falsification. Are not the Holy Scriptures the true testament of the eternal God, drawn by the notaries deputed for this purpose, duly sealed and signed with his blood, confirmed by death? Being such, how can we alter even the smallest point without impiety? “A testament,” says the great Ulpian, “is a just expression of our will as to what we would have done after our death.”898 Our Lord by the Holy Scriptures shows us what we must believe, hope for, love and do, and this by a true expression of his will; if we add, take away or change, it will no longer be the true expression of God’s will. For Our Lord having duly expressed in Scripture his will, if we add anything of our own we shall make the statement go beyond the will of the testator, if we take anything away we shall make it fall short, if we make changes in it we shall set it awry, and it will no longer correspond to the will of the author, nor be a correct statement. When two things exactly correspond, he who changes the one destroys the equality and the correspondence between them. If it be a true statement, whatever right have we to alter it? Our Lord puts a value on the iotas, yea, the mere little points and accents of his holy words. How jealous then is he of their integrity, and what punishment shall they not deserve who violate this integrity! Brethren, says S. Paul,899 (I speak after the manner of man), yet a man’s testament, if it be confirmed, no man despiseth, nor addeth to it. And to show how important it is to learn the Scripture in its exactness he gives an example. To Abraham were the promisesmade, and to his seed. He says not and to his seeds as of many, but as of one; and to thy seed, who is Christ. See, I beg you, how the change from singular to plural would have spoilt the mysterious meaning of this word. The Ephrathites [Ephraimites] said Sibolleth, not forgetting a single letter, but because they did not pronounce it thickly enough, the Galaadites slew them at the fords of Jordan.900 The simple difference of pronunciation in speaking, and in writing the mere transposition of one single point on the letter scin caused the ambiguity, and changing the janin into semol, instead of an ear of wheat expressed a weight or a burden. Whosoever alters or adds the slightest accent in the Scripture is a sacrilegious man and deserves the death of him who dares to mingle the profane with the sacred.

For colour’s sake alone, Purletta Johnson belonged to the Jamaican bourgeoisie. She was fair-skinned, had light grey eyes, and worse, she spoke the kind of upper-St Andrew English culled from the BBC news which radios in middle- and upper-class Jamaican houses were always tuned to. In America at the time they would have described her as ‘yellow’. In Jamaica, she had been ‘red’. In a future England they would call her mixed-race, but at the time Purletta arrived in the country there was no such denominator, so she was simply coloured. Only briefly did this new assignment of class and race disturb her. Others in her position did everything to pass for white; they straightened their hair even more and then lightened it; they bleached their faces. These young women would have counselled Purletta to do the same, arguing that she had a distinct advantage with her grey eyes. She had arrived in England in the late 1960s, burdened by her mother’s idea that she should live there long enough to transform the UK-Right of Abode stamped into her Jamaican Passport (a gift from her father who was a citizen), into a full UK passport. No doubt Purletta’s mother also wanted her daughter to come back a cultivated English woman. But Purletta did the opposite. In the land of the BBC she suddenly abandoned her BBC accent. Away from Jamaica, she learned to talk Jamaican. She braided her hair close to her scalp and thereafter gave in to every possible stereotype, whether negative or positive. She became loud and colourful. Learned how to laugh from her gut, clapping her hands, leaning over and placing the palms of her hands on her thighs, shouting wooooooooiiii. She became fat and started to walk a kind of walk that was all hips. She got a gold tooth. Then she transformed herself into the kind of person who, as they said in Jamaica, any pan knock she was there!, so she started to go to every reggae show and would boogie all night until she was sticky with sweat. Purletta began to grow ganja on her balcony. She smoked, especially on evenings when she was getting ready to go out, and this would make her even louder, even more outrageous. A bona

Modern art is a waste of time. When the zombies show up, you can't worry about art. Art is for people who aren't worried about zombies. Besides zombies and icebergs, there are other things that Soap has been thinking about. Tsunamis, earthquakes, Nazi dentists, killer bees, army ants, black plague, old people, divorce lawyers, sorority girls, Jimmy Carter, giant quids, rabid foxes, strange dogs, new anchors, child actors, fascists, narcissists, psychologists, ax murderers, unrequited love, footnotes, zeppelins, the Holy Ghost, Catholic priests, John Lennon, chemistry teachers, redheaded men with British accents, librarians, spiders, nature books with photographs of spiders in them, darkness, teachers, swimming pools, smart girls, pretty girls, rich girls, angry girls, tall girls, nice girls, girls with superpowers, giant lizards, blind dates who turn out to have narcolepsy, angry monkeys, feminine hygiene commercials, sitcoms about aliens, things under the bed, contact lenses, ninjas, performances artists, mummies, spontaneous combustion, Soap has been afraid of all of these things at one time or another, Ever since he went to prison, he's realized that he doesn't have to be afraid. All he has to do is come up with a plan. Be prepared. It's just like the Boy Scouts, except you have to be even more prepared. You have to prepare for everything that the Boy Scouts didn't prepare you for, which is pretty much everything.

Regulating the weather is beyond my expertise,” he informed me. Ooh, the aristocratic accent was out in full force. He’d rolled each “r” for nearly a full second, I’d swear to it. “How do you know until you try?” “Because I’m not some all-powerful protagonist in a ridiculous drama who acquires some new unheard of ability with each new improbable situation,” he snapped. I was impressed. “You get real articulate when you’re upset.” I wished I could do that. I tended to start stuttering when I was really angry. I fancied I saw steam rising from his ears. “I’m not saying you can do anything and everything you set your mind to, Taro. I’m rather glad you can’t, because then you’d just be impossible.” Another glare, and I resisted the urge to tell him he was beautiful when he was angry. “All I’m saying is that you’ve already proven Source abilities are not as limited as everyone thinks. Maybe this is something you or one of the others can do something about.

I’m mesmerized by the way he speaks—New Orleans is pronounced N’awlins. When he says backyard, it’s backyaaad. It’s the kind of voice that makes you feel instantly at home, like you’re a close friend or part of the inner circle. —SINGLE-MINDED

Did you get Paige to bed okay?” “Yes and no,” Kendra says quietly, coming down the steps to the parking lot. Andrea’s following on her heels like an obedient dog. “We got her upstairs, but she was all messed up and crying about the pony not being pink, and she woke up Catia.” “Bollocks,” I say, with feeling. “What is ‘bollocks’?” Luca asks, sounding very interested. “Never mind,” I say firmly to him. “We have to have a meeting tomorrow morning after breakfast,” Kendra says gloomily. “To set new house rules.” “Oh no,” I sigh. “Yup. We should go to bed now. I don’t think Catia really cares that much.” Kendra adds cynically, “She’s just going through the motions. But, you know, we shouldn’t look like we’re--” “Taking the piss,” I finish. “Taking the piss?” Luca echoes, his accent so funny that I stifle a giggle. Not quite well enough; he hears it and aims a playful smack to the back of my head, which I dodge with another giggle. That’s the thing about Luca. One moment we’re teaching each other, then we’re kissing, then we’re fighting, or being serious. And it can change so fast, it’s dizzying. No wonder I don’t feel in control of anything when I’m with him. And honestly, cool as he seems, I don’t know if he’s any more in control of what’s between us than I am.

Giorno,” says one of the girls working behind the counter. She looks like she’s around my age, maybe a year or two older. “Giorno.” My reply is timid, slow to dip my toes into the waters of Italian communication. She smiles brightly. “What can I get you?” I gape at her. “How did you know--?” “It is a combination. Camera around your neck? Tourist. Fair skin and lighter hair? Rules out quite a few countries. Accent? Definitely American.” “I only said one word, and it was Italian.” She laughs. “I get a lot of practice.” “Well, your English is perfect.” I’m amazed. And jealous. “Thank you. My parents made sure that I learned from an early age. And my uncle’s family lives in New York, so I spend much time there. Most every summer.” I have to force myself not to think about the Mafia.

his accent. “Spin classifiers v’reist neue ganga, yeah?” “If you need new parts, then buy new parts,” Marco said, his voice taking on a dangerous buzz. “Aber …” The harbormaster swallowed. “But you used to buy from Earth,” Marco said. “And our money doesn’t spend there.” The harbormaster lifted a fist in acknowledgment. Marco’s smile was gentle and open. Sympathetic. “No one’s money spends there. Not anymore. You buy from the Belt now. Just the Belt.” “Belt don’t make good parts,” the harbormaster whined. “We make the best parts there are,” Marco said. “History’s moved on, my friend. Try to keep up. And package everything there is for push-out, sa sa?” The harbormaster met Marco’s gaze and lifted his fist again in assent. It wasn’t as if he had a choice. The advantage of being in

I'll apologize," he said, "for the poor timing. And the sorry lack of forethought in not making my interest known. But no' for kissin' you, Leilani. Or, more t' the point, for wantin' to." He stopped, hearing the accent of his childhood creeping back into his words. He smiled broadly then, to cover how much that little backside had shaken him, knowing full well he was relying on his infamous rapscallion grin that had, from a very young age, gotten him out of countless scrapes and sticky situations. For a very long time, it had been the only thing he'd had going for him. Leilani would not likely be swayed... but it was a defense mechanism he couldn't override at the moment. "It wasn't exactly how I'd imagined it, but I promise you, I'm nothing if not diligent when trying to perfect something new. " She said nothing to that. Keeping the smile in place suddenly took quite a bit of work, so he turned and opened the door. "You imagined kissing me?" He jerked his gaze back to hers, his grin broadening further, without the least bit of calculation this time. "It's been the centerpiece of some of my very best daydreams." He wisely left unspoken the far more vivid ones he'd had at night.

Philip heard the twang of their New England accent through their bad German, and he glanced at them with suspicion; for he had been taught to look upon Americans as wild and desperate barbarians.

I never get it when I see people waving their national flag, getting all weepy, singing some dirge about their homeland. Everyone sobbing for the old country (which is just a wet piece of peat moss) going on and on about how many generations back their people lived on this potato farm (said with an Irish accent) and how they loved it even though they’ve probably emigrated to another country. To me it’s dirt, to them it’s land: same thing. My people this, my people that. I have no real people except when I was in the mental institution and then it was full of them. They were my people, because they did not answer with ‘fine’ when you asked how they were. We didn’t need a flag.

Cultural Diplomacy—and an Accolade Among Piazzolla’s tasks during his first summer at the Chalet El Casco was the composition of “Le Grand Tango,” a ten-minute piece for cello and piano commissioned by Efraín Paesky, Director of the OAS Division of Arts, and dedicated to Mstislav Rostropovich, to whom Piazzolla sent the score. Rostropovich had not heard of Piazzolla at the time and did not look seriously at the music for several years.7 Written in ternary form, the work bears all Piazzolla’s hallmarks: tight construction, strong accents, harmonic tensions, rhythmic complexity and melodic inspiration, all apparent from the fierce cello scrapes at the beginning. Piazzolla uses intervals not frequently visited on the cello fingerboard. Its largely tender mood, notably on display in the cello’s snaking melodic line in the reflective middle section, becomes more profoundly complex in its emotional range toward the end. With its intricate juxtapositions of driving rhythms and heart-rending tags of tune, it is just about the most exciting music Piazzolla ever wrote, a masterpiece. Piazzolla was eager for Rostropovich to play it, but the chance did not come for eight years. Rostropovich, having looked at the music, and “astounded by the great talent of Astor,” decided he would include it in a concert. He made some changes in the cello part and wanted Piazzolla to hear them before he played the piece. Accordingly, in April 1990, he rehearsed it with Argentine pianist Susana Mendelievich in a room at the Teatro Colón, and Piazzolla gently coached the maestro in tango style—”Yes, tan-go, tan-go, tan-go.” The two men took an instant liking to one another.8 It was, says Mendelievich, “as if Rostropovich had played tangos all his life.” “Le Grand Tango” had its world premiere in New Orleans on April 24, 1990. Sarah Wolfensohn was the pianist. Three days later, they both played this piece again at the Gusman Cultural Center in Miami. [NOTE C] Rostropovich performed “Le Grand Tango” at the Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires, in July 1994; the pianist was Lambert Orkis. More recently, cellist Yo-Yo Ma has described “Le Grand Tango” as one of his “favorite pieces of music,” praising its “inextricable rhythmic sense...total freedom, passion, ecstasy.

I have never lived anywhere but New York or New England, but there are times when I’m talking to you and I hit a Southern vowel, or a word gets caught in a Southern truncation, and I know it’s because I’m swimming in your cadences, that you permeate my very language.

In October, she spent three days on an official tour in Wales. This might have been a difficult tour. Unemployment in Wales was up to sixteen percent, and the economy was down. Traditionally, many Welsh had seen the British as snobs who believed that they were superior. Even the weather was against her as dark and cloudy skies scattered rain in her path. To the surprise of many, crowds lined the streets to meet this new princess as she passed by shops, trailer courts, and rundown coal mines. She smiled and waved, and people in the streets waved and smiled back. They wanted to touch her, to talk to her, and to listen to her voice. She answered their comments easily and naturally. She asked some how far they had come for the procession. She asked others if they had been waiting long for her. She expressed surprise and delight at their loyalty to her. She graciously accepted hundreds of gifts--among them flowers, poems, and a Welsh heifer. In Cardiff, she gave her first public speech as Diana, Princess of Wales. When she uttered a phrase in Welsh, the crowd roared their approval of her accent. As one spectator put it, Diana “speaks it like an angel, she does.

She coughed into her fist. “I, ahem, don’t want to sound didactic or fictitious in any manner,” she began, doing a great Woody impression. She had his timing, the speech delay tactics. She had the hand mannerisms. She had the New York accent. It was her best work. “But I may have some important information.” Myron

He's one sexy dead guy," she whispered as Jean barked orders at Jake and Collette, who'd dallied too long before returning to their transport post.... "That he is, very sexy for a dead guy," I said. "Accent on the word dead.

People say that money is the root of all evil,’ Khaled told me when we met in his apartment. His English was rich with accents of New York and Arabic and the Hindi that he spoke reasonably well. ‘But it’s not true. It’s the other way round. Money isn’t the root of all evil. Evil is the root of all money. There’s no such thing as clean money. All the money in the world is dirty, in some way, because there’s no clean way to make it. If you get paid in money, somebody, somewhere, is suffering for it. That’s one of the reasons, I think, why just about everybody—even people who’d neve break the law in any other way—is happy to add an extra buck or two to their money on the black market.

His fingers moved deeper and I thought that the dye may have given me new nerve endings because every hair prickled up to his touch. "We're sensualists, aren't we?" "Sensualists?" He lowered his hand to my neck and pulled me so close our foreheads touched. "What do you mean?" I asked, the tips of my lips- just slightly- against his. "Sensualism..." he repeated in his bizarre accent. He didn't press his lips against mine and I didn't dare press back. We let our mouths push and graze as we spoke. "We are passionate, you and I. We know how to give in to our senses." Then I felt the full heat of his mouth on mine and I lapped him up greedily, my hands grabbing his face and hair and shoulders. I had never thought of myself as much of a sensualist. I was a writer, a rationalist in a sensualist world. I was always worrying about what other people thought of me and more often than not I liked the company of babies and dogs instead of humans my own age. But what's rational about a man's lips on you, when he's touching you in a way that makes you feel the exquisite pleasure of belonging? Everything else is a distraction. We tussled with our shirts off, until he pulled me on top of him and slid his hands from under my hair, to my shoulders, down to my arms, and finally to the place where the top of my pants met my skin. "Leather pants, you little minx. Shall we have an encore?" he asked. By now my hair was a wild mess. I was red from the wine. The lights were sort of dark, but not dark enough. I was wearing some Kiki Montparnasse lingerie, black lace with tiny bows that were at once sweet and not so sweet. You could even describe them as naughty. He let the tip of one finger move around the edge of my pants. When he got to the button, he made a flicking motion that stressed its hold. The critical button.

After purchasing your new Echo, you might feel as if Alexa is not actually understanding as clearly as she should. This then just means that you must train her to learn your speech patterns. Just like all the other voice assistants available, at first Alexa will not be perfect when it comes to understanding what you say. This is because everyone’s speech patterns are different and unique including those who speak the same language. Voice training your echo can go a long way in helping it understand and interpret your commands in a more accurate manner. By completing maybe one or more voice training sessions, you get to improve the way your Echo recognizes your specific speech patterns. Luckily, just like with other voice assistants, there is a way that you can use to train Alexa so that it can understand your accent and speaking voice better. The

At school, everybody called her Irish, because of her name and her accent, but she felt more British than any of them. On rare occasions, a school friend would invite her over to her place, but there was never a flag to be seen, neither English nor British.

but rest assured, no foreigner can speak a new language without an accent. Don’t feel embarrassed,

Each time he returned, he looked slightly different, not merely older, but changed: a new accent, the cigarettes, three sharp knocks on the door. It was as if the city was entering his body and remaking it; he’d look at the low dark houses and wandering hens and farmers with their rope belts as if at film from another century.

It's also a working-class city peopled by men and women who love with a tough love, in thick accents and no time for bullshit.

Dorian? Is that an important publisher?" "Count Dorian is really famous. How do you not know him?" "I can only think of the Dorian in the painting. You know, Oscar Wilde’s beautiful, cursed one?" he says. "Sorry. And, anyway, why is he important?" he asks, noting her apprehension. "Well, for one thing, he’s a Count." "Pardon..." he mocks, in a French accent. "Why is this Count famous?" "Because he cultivates young talent. He’s launched a lot of young people in different fields: music, painting, sculpture, fashion, theater, movies." She pauses for breath. "And writers, too." "So he’s a type of patron." She nods. "And he’s contacted you about your novels?" She nods again. "And what’s the problem?" "He has an estate in Tuscany, as well as houses in New York and Hong Kong. And he’s asked to meet me." "Are you embarrassed to go on your own? I can take you if you want. But if he’s a talent hunter, you just need to act as natural as possible and you'll be fine. I imagine he’s used to it. He can’t not like you," he says, caressing her face. "He thinks I’m a man..," she whispers. Andrea freezes. "Eh?!" he exclaims, looking at her and suddenly feeling a strange foreboding. "I

Healthy families master the knack of keeping the accent on the positive. Although the family alters after a challenging placement, they work through grief, re-balance, add resources, and find new ways to make life good. Their identity is not wrapped around a child’s trauma or limitations. Instead, they find ways to accommodate special needs, without the special needs becoming the focal point of life.

You have many assets, Drusilla, but apparently a respect for time is not among them.” Deep, disapproving voice, French accent, broad shoulders encased in a red linen shirt, long dark hair pulled back into a tail, eyes such a cobalt blue they bordered on navy. And technically speaking, dead. He was as sexy as ever. “Sorry.” I slipped my hand

As soon as he leaves, I make the executive decision that given the circumstances, there will be no school or work today. First I call O’Callaghan and give him some bullshit excuse, but I need something legitimate for school in case I need to stretch it out for a while. I call the attendance office and lower my voice two octaves, thickening my New England accent to play Dad. I go with the first thing that pops in my head. I tell the woman that my son, Hank, is very ill. It could be flu, but there’s a possibility it could be encephalitis. The woman sounds shocked and concerned, so I know I’ve picked a good excuse. When I hang up, Peyton starts cracking up. “What? What’s so funny?” “Encephalitis is brain inflammation.” “Shit, I overdid it. I meant bronchitis. All I know is, there’s no way I can deal with school today.

Todd the manager was at her cubicle the moment her chair squeaked. “How you doin’, Jane?” he asked in his oft-affected pseudo-Sopranos accent. “Fine.” She stared. He had a new haircut. His white blond hair was now spiked with an incredible amount of pomade that smelled of raspberries, a do that could only be carried off with true success by a fifteen-year-old boy wielding an impressive and permanent glare. Todd was grinning. And forty-three. Jane wondered if politeness required her to offer a compliment on something glaringly obvious. “Uh…you, your hair is different.” “Hey, girls always notice the hair. Right? Isn’t that basically right?” “I guess I just proved it,” she said sadly. “Super. Hey, listen,” he sat on the edge of her desk, “we’ve got a last-minute addition that needs special attention. It may seem like your basic stock photo array, but don’t be fooled! This is for the all-important page sixteen layout. I’d give this one to your basic interns, but I’m choosing you because I think you’d do a super job. What d’you say?” “Sure thing, Todd.” “Su-per.” He gave her two thumbs-up and held them there, smiling, his eyes unblinking. After a few moments, Jane cringed. What did he want her to do? Was she supposed to high-five his thumbs? Touch thumb-pad to thumb-pad? Or did he just leave them there so long for emphasis? The silence quivered. At last Jane opted for raising her own thumbs in a mirror of the Todd salute. “All right, my lady Jane.” He nodded, still with the thumbs up, and kept them up as he walked away. At least he hadn’t asked her out again. Why was it that when she was aching for a man, everyone was married, but when she was giving them up, so many men were so awkwardly single?

D’aron the Daring, Derring, Derring-do, stealing base, christened D’aron Little May Davenport, DD to Nana, initials smothered in Southern-fried kisses, dat Wigga D who like Jay Z aw-ite, who’s down, Scots-Irish it is, D’aron because you’re brave says Dad, No, D’aron because you’re daddy’s daddy was David and then there was mines who was named Aaron, Doo-doo after cousin Quint blew thirty-six months in vo-tech on a straight-arm bid and they cruised out to Little Gorge glugging Green Grenades and read three years’ worth of birthday cards, Little Mays when he hit those three homers in the Pee Wee playoff, Dookie according to his aunt Boo (spiteful she was, misery indeed loves company), Mr. Hanky when they discovered he TIVOed ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ Faggot when he hugged John Meer in third grade, Faggot again when he drew hearts on everyone’s Valentine’s Day cards in fourth grade, Dim Dong-Dong when he undressed in the wrong dressing room because he daren’t venture into the dark end of the gym, Philadelphia Freedom when he was caught clicking heels to that song (Tony thought he was clever with that one), Mr. Davenport when he won the school’s debate contest in eighth grade, Faggot again when he won the school’s debate contest in eighth grade, Faggot again more times than he cared to remember, especially the summer he returned from Chicago sporting a new Midwest accent, harder on the vowels and consonants alike, but sociable, played well with others that accent did, Faggot again when he cried at the end of ‘WALL-E,’ Donut Hole when he started to swell in ninth grade, Donut Black Hole when he continued to put on weight in tenth grade (Tony thought he was really clever with that one), Buttercup when they caught him gardening, Hippie when he stopped hunting, Faggot again when he became a vegetarian and started wearing a MEAT IS MURDER pin (Oh yeah, why you craving mine then?), Faggot again when he broke down in class over being called Faggot, Sissy after that, whispered, smothered in sniggers almost hidden, Ron-Ron by the high school debate team coach because he danced like a cross between Morrissey and some fat old black guy (WTF?) in some old-ass show called ‘What’s Happening!!’, Brainiac when he aced the PSATs for his region, Turd Nerd when he hung with Jo-Jo and the Black Bruiser, D’ron Da’ron, D’aron, sweet simple Daron the first few minutes of the first class of the first day of college.

Key to the Pronunciations This dictionary uses a simple respelling system to show how entries are pronounced, using the symbols listed below. Generally, only the first of two or more identical headwords will have a pronunciation respelling. Where a derivative simply adds a common suffix such as -less, -ness, or -ly to the headword, the derivative may not have a pronunciation respelling unless some other element of the pronunciation also changes. as in hat //, fashion // as in day //, rate // as in lot //, father //, barn // as in big // as in church //, picture // as in dog //, bed // as in men //, bet //, ferry // as in feet //, receive // as in air //, care // as in soda //, mother /, her // as in free //, graph //, tough // as in get //, exist // as in her //, behave // as in fit //, women // as in time /t/, hire //, sky // as in ear //, pierce // as in judge //, carriage // as in kettle //, cut //, quick // as in lap //, cellar //, cradle // as in main //, dam // as in need //, honor //, maiden // as in sing //, anger // as in go //, promote // as in law //, thought //, lore // as in boy //, noisy // as in wood //, sure // as in food //, music // as in mouse //, coward // as in put //, cap // as in run //, fur //, spirit // as in sit //, lesson //, face // as in shut //, social // as in top //, seat //, forty // as in thin //, truth // as in then //, father // as in very //, never // as in wait //, quit // as in when //, which // as in yet //, accuse // as in zipper //, musician // as in measure //, vision // Foreign Sounds as in Bach // as in en route //, Rodin / / as in hors d’oeuvre //, Goethe // as in Lully //, Utrecht // Stress Marks Stress (or accent) is represented by marks placed before the affected syllable. The primary stress mark is a short, raised vertical line // which signifies that the heaviest emphasis should be placed on the syllable that follows. The secondary stress mark is a short, lowered vertical line // which signifies a somewhat weaker emphasis than on the syllable with primary stress. Variant Pronunciations There are several ways in which variant pronunciations are indicated in the respellings. Some respellings show a pronunciation symbol within parentheses to indicate a possible variation in pronunciation; for example, in sandwich //. Variant pronunciations may be respelled in full, separated by semicolons. The more common pronunciation is listed first, if this can be determined, but many variants are so common and widespread as to be ofequal status. Variant pronunciations may be indicated by respelling only the part of the word that changes. A hyphen will replace the part of the pronunciation that has remained the same. Note: A hyphen sometimes serves to separate syllables where the respelling might otherwise look confusing, as at reinforce //.

Betty’s accent was everything Cent’s wasn’t-deep and New England. Her ending R sounds were more like an H, and her word choices…they’d all but needed dictionaries to understand each other when they’d met the year before.

Reciprocal altruism brings its own agenda to the presentation of self, and thus to the deception of self. Whereas status hierarchies place a premium on our seeming competent, attractive, strong, smart, etcetera, reciprocal altruism puts its accent on niceness, integrity, fairness. These are the things that make us seem like worthy reciprocal altruists. They make people want to strike up relationships with us. Puffing up our reputations as decent and generous folks can’t hurt, and it often helps.

In fact, it is pretty certain that within, say, 20 or 30 years, local differences would have emerged, so that at minimum there were local accents. Given that the world changes, and that it changes in different ways in different cultures, there would be new words and expressions limited to particular places, but there would also be somewhat different local forms of speech. Within, let us say, 50 years, there would be clear local dialects, and quite certainly by the end of a century some of these would be so different from one another that speakers from some places would have considerable difficulty in understanding the speech of those from some other places. Depending on how those differences lined up with social and political realities, it would soon become common to speak of them as different languages.

PAUL: It was great at the beginning. I could speak the language almost fluently after a month and the people were fantastic. They’d come out and help us. Teach us songs. Man, we thought it was all going so well. But we got all the outhouses dug in six months and we had to stay there two years, that was the deal. And that’s when we began to realize that none of the Nglele were using these outhouses. We’d ask them why and they’d just shrug. So we started watching them very carefully and what we found out was the Nglele use their feces for fertilizer. It’s like gold to them. They thought we were all fucking crazy expecting them to waste their precious turds in our spiffy new outhouses. Turns out they’d been helping us because they misunderstood why we were there. They thought it was some kind of punishment and we’d be allowed to go home after we finished digging the latrines, that’s why they were helping us and then when we stayed on they figured we must be permanent outcasts or something and they just stopped talking to us altogether. Anyway, me and Jeff, the guy I told you about, we figured maybe we could salvage something from the fuckup so we got a doctor to make a list of all the medicines we’d need to start a kind of skeleton health program in Ngleleland and we ordered the medicine, pooled both our salaries for the two years to pay for it. Paid for it. Waited. Never came. So we went to the capital to trace it and found out this very funny thing. The Minister of Health had confiscated it at the dock, same man who got our team assigned to the Nglele Tribal Territories in the first place. We were furious, man, we stormed into his office and started yelling at him. Turned out to be a real nice guy. Educated in England, British accent and everything. Had this office lined with sets of Dickens and Thackeray all in leather bindings. Unbelievable. Anyway, he said he couldn’t help us about the medicine, he’d been acting on orders from higher up, which we knew was bullshit, then he said he really admired our enthusiasm and our desire to help his people but he wanted to know just out of curiosity, if we’d managed to start the medical program and save a thousand lives, let’s say, he wanted to know if we were prepared to feed and clothe those thousand people for the next ten years, twenty years, however long they lived. He made us feel so goddamned naive, so totally helpless and unprepared, powerless. We went out of there, got drunk, paid the first women we could find and spent the rest of the week fucking our brains out. And then for the next year and two months we just sat around in Ngleleland stoned out of our minds counting off the days we had left before we could go home. Anyway, since you asked, that’s what the Peace Corps was like.

But Christianity has protected itself from the beginning. It begins with the teaching about sin. The category of sin is the category of individuality. Sin cannot be thought speculatively at all. The individual human being lies beneath the concept; an individual human being cannot be thought, but only the concept "man." —That is why speculation promptly embarks upon the teaching about the predominance of the generation over the individual, for it is too much to expect that speculation should acknowledge the impotence of the concept in relation to actuality. —But just as one individual person cannot be thought, neither can one individual sinner; sin can be thought (then it becomes negation), but not one individual sinner. That is precisely why there is no earnestness about sin if it is only to be thought, for earnestness is simply this: that you and I are sinners. Earnestness is not sin in general; rather, the accent of earnestness rests on the sinner, who is the single individual. With respect to "the single individual," speculation, if it is consistent, must make light of being a single individual or being that which cannot be thought. If it cares to do anything along this line, it must say to the individual: Is this anything to waste your time on? Forget it! To be an individual human being is to be nothing! Think—then you are all mankind: cogito ergo sum [I think therefore I am]. But perhaps that is a lie; perhaps instead the single individual human being and to be a single human being are the highest. Just suppose it is. To be completely consistent, then, speculation must also say: To be an individual sinner is not to be something; it lies beneath the concept; do not waste any time on it etc. [. . .] Sin is a qualification of the single individual; it is irresponsibility and new sin to pretend as if it were nothing to be an individual sinner—when one himself is this individual sinner. Here Christianity steps in, makes the sign of the cross before speculation; it is just as impossible for speculation to get around this issue as for a sailing vessel to sail directly against a contrary wind. The earnestness of sin is its actuality in the single individual, be it you or I. Speculatively, we are supposed to look away from the single individual; therefore, speculatively, we can speak only superficially about sin. The dialectic of sin is diametrically contrary to that of speculation

What a funny and charming accent! Did you say it was New York you came from, Miss Hunter - the Bowery?" Gay lay down and yawned, and pulled the blanketing swaths of grass over herself. "Pity you weren't properly smacked in your younger days, Lady Jane. Good night.

The painter himself is a man at work who each morning finds in the shape of things the same questioning and the same call he never stops responding to. In his eyes, his work is never completed; it is always in progress, so that no one can prevail against the world...His labor, which is obscure for him, is nevertheless guided and oriented. It is always only a question of advancing the line of the already opened furrow and of recapturing and generalizing an accent which has already appeared in the corner of a previous painting or in some instant of his experience, without the painter himself ever being able to say (since the distinction has no meaning) what comes from him and what comes from things, what the new work adds to the old ones, or what it has taken from the others and what is its own...It is thus that the world as soon as he has seen it, his first attempts at painting, and the whole past of painting all deliver up a tradition to the painter—that is, Husserl remarks, the power to forget origins and to give to the past not a survival, which is the hypocritical form of forgetfulness, but a new life, which is the noble form of memory.

But let’s be clear: the madness of everyday life was its own issue. It didn’t have any relationship to whether or not Christianity was bullshit. Obviously, Christianity was total bullshit. It was the most insane bullshit! But it was impossible to make an argument against superstition and magical nonsense, and have it stick, when that argument was delivered from a society where every citizen was a magician. And yes, reader, that includes you. You too are a magician. Your life is dominated by one of the oldest and most perverse forms of magic, one with less interior cohesion than the Christian faith, and you invest its empty symbolism with a level of belief that far outpaces that of any Christian. Here are some strips of paper and bits of metal! Watch as I transform these strips of paper and bits of metal into: (a) sex (b) food (c) clothing (d) shelter (e) transportation that allows me to acquire strips of paper and bits of money (f) intoxicants that distract me from my endless pursuit of strips of paper and bits of metal (g) leisure items that distract me from my endless pursuit of strips of paper and bits of metal (h) pointless vacations to exotic locales where I will replicate the brutish behavior that I display in my point of origin as a brief respite from my endless pursuit of strips of paper and bits of metal (i) unfair social advantages that allow my rotten children to undertake their own moronic pursuits of strips of paper and bits of metal. Humiliate yourself for strips of paper. Murder for the strips of paper. Humiliate others for the strips of paper. Worship the people who’ve accumulated such vast quantities of strips of paper that their strips of paper no longer have any physical existence and are now represented by binary notation. Treat the vast accumulators like gods. Free blowies for the moldering corpse of Steve Jobs! Fawning profile pieces for Jay-Z! The Presidency for billionaire socialite and real-estate developer Donald J. Trump! Kill! Kill! Kill! Work! Work! Work! Die! Die! Die! Go on. Pretend this is not the most magical thing that has ever happened. Historical arguments against Christianity tended to be delivered in tones of pearl-clutching horror, usually by subpar British intellectuals pimping their accent in America, a country where sounding like an Oxbridge twat conferred an unearned credibility. Yes, the Crusades were horrible. Yes, the Inquisition was awful. Yes, they shouldn’t have burned witches in Salem. Yes, there is an unfathomable amount of sexually abused walking wounded. Yes, every Christian country has oriented itself around the rich and done nothing but abuse the fuck out of its poor. But it’s not like the secular conversion of the industrialized world has alleviated any of the horror. Read the news. Murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape...Despair. All secularism has done, really, is remove a yoke from the rich. They’d always been horrible, but at least when they still paid lip service to Christian virtues, they could be shamed into philanthropy. Now they use market forces to slide the whole thing into feudalism. New York University built a campus [in Abu Dhabi] with slave labor! In the Twenty-First Century AD! And has suffered no rebuke! Applications are at an all-time high! The historical arguments against Christianity are as facile as reviews on Goodreads.com, and come down to this: Why do you organize around bad people who tell you that a Skyman wants you to be good? To which the rejoinder is: yes, the clergy sucks, but who cares how normal people are delivered into goodness?

Maybe Dillon Samreen will decide to pick on this new kid with the weird name and the funny accent instead of me.

I'd thought we were the ones who'd suffered more, torn from everything we'd known, sudden strangers in a new town with no friends or family, having to start everything over - penniless, car-less, petrified, stuck in other people's houses with a strange accent and foreign tongue. I'd flown back to my homeland still feeling rejected and bruised and twelve. I'd expected apologies and atonement to heal my old wounds. I had no idea I'd been insensitive myself. I'd been so myopic, I didn't even know that I'd neglected my closest relatives.

Um,” Jason started, “is this your store?” The woman nodded. “I found it abandoned, you know. I understand so many stores are, these days. I decided it would make the perfect place. I love collecting tasteful objects, helping people, and offering quality goods at a reasonable price. So this seemed a good…how do you say…first acquisition in this country.” She spoke with a pleasing accent, but Jason couldn’t guess where from. Clearly she wasn’t hostile, though. Jason started to relax. Her voice was rich and exotic. Jason wanted to hear more. “So you’re new to America?” he asked. “I am…new,” the woman agreed. “I am the Princess of Colchis. My friends call me Your Highness. Now, what are you looking for?” Jason had heard of rich foreigners buying American department stores. Of course most of the time they didn’t sell poisons, living fur coats, storm spirits, or satyrs, but still—with a nice voice like that, the Princess of Colchis couldn’t be all bad. Piper poked him in the ribs. “Jason…” “Um, right. Actually, Your Highness…” He pointed to the gilded cage on the first floor. “That’s our friend down there, Gleeson Hedge. The satyr. Could we…have him back, please?” “Of course!” the princess agreed immediately. “I would love to show you my inventory. First, may I know your names?” Jason hesitated. It seemed like a bad idea to give out their names. A memory tugged at the back of his mind—something Hera had warned him about, but it seemed fuzzy. On the other hand, Her Highness was on the verge of cooperating. If they could get what they wanted without a fight, that would be better. Besides, this lady didn’t seem like an enemy. Piper started to say, “Jason, I wouldn’t—” “This is Piper,” he said. “This is Leo. I’m Jason.

The Travelling People, the final radio ballad, broadcast in 1964, was the most ambitious of all, grappling with the vilified nomadic population of Britain. The programme did not flinch from including the negative sentiments of the ‘not in my backyard’ brigade: one gentleman is heard to call them ‘misfits … the maggots of society’. The soundworld is particularly rich and evocative of difference: the travellers’ words are surrounded by the outdoor ambience in which they dwell – birdsong, horses’ hooves, the rush of road traffic. The voices of ‘respectable’ society speak in the dead air of cushioned interiors. Parker’s editing skills reach a new level of finesse, so a succession of phrases like ‘They call us the wild ones/ The pilgrims of the mist/ Romanies, Gypsies, diddikais, mumpers, travellers/ Nomads of the road/Blackfaced diddies/ … In Carlisle, they call you porters, dirty porters this, dirty porters that …’ whizz past in a kaleidoscope of lexicographic plurality and regional accents. Its conclusion – comparing Britain’s treatment of its nomads to the Nazi pogroms – is shocking, but is borne out by the words of Labour councillor Harry Watton, who is heard to say, ‘One must exterminate the impossibles.’ It is a bitter, troubling conclusion to the radio ballads.

I'm not going to Wichita,' Vladimir said, the word 'Wichita' rendered by his accent as the most foreign word imaginable in the English language. 'I’m going to live with Fran and it’s going to be all right. You’re going to make it all right.' But even as he was laying down the law, his hands were shaking to the point where it was hard to keep the shabby pay-phone receiver properly positioned between his mouth and ear. Teardrops were blurring the corners of his eyes and he felt the need to have Baobab hear him burst out in a series of long, convulsive sobs, Roberta-style. All he had wanted was twenty thousand lousy dollars. It wasn’t a million. It was how much Dr. Girshkin made on average from two of his nervous gold-toothed patients. 'Okay,' Baobab said. 'Here’s how we’re going to do it. These are the new rules. Memorize them or write them down. Do you have a pen? Hello? Okay, Rule One: you can’t visit anyone—friends, relatives, work, nothing. You can only call me from a pay phone and we can’t talk for more than three minutes.' He paused. Vladimir imagined him reading this from a little scrap of paper. Suddenly Baobab said, under his breath: 'Tree, nine-thirty, tomorrow.' 'The two of us can never meet in person,' he was saying loudly now. 'We will keep in touch only by phone. If you check into a hotel, make sure you pay cash. Never pay by credit card. Once more: Tree, nine-thirty, tomorrow.' Tree. Their Tree? The Tree? And nine-thirty? Did he mean in the morning? It was hard to imagine Baobab up at that unholy hour. 'Rule Five: I want you to keep moving at all times, or at least try to keep moving. Which brings us to…' But just as Rule Six was about to come over the transom, there was a tussle for the phone and Roberta came on the line in her favorite Bowery harlot voice, the kind that smelled like gin nine hundred miles away. 'Vladimir, dear, hi!' Well, at least someone was enjoying Vladimir’s downfall. 'Say, I was thinking, do you have any ties with the Russian underworld, honey?' Vladimir thought of hanging up, but the way things were going even Roberta’s voice was a distinctly human one. He thought of Mr. Rybakov’s son, the Groundhog. 'Prava,' he muttered, unable to articulate any further. An uptown train rumbled beneath him to underscore the underlying shakiness of his life. Two blocks downtown, a screaming professional was being tossed back and forth between two joyful muggers. 'Prava, how very now!' Roberta said. 'Laszlo’s thinking of opening up an Academy of Acting and the Plastic Arts there. Did you know that there are thirty thousand Americans in Prava? At least a half dozen certified Hemingways among them, wouldn’t you agree?' 'Thank you for your concern, Roberta. It’s touching. But right now I have other… There are problems. Besides, getting to Prava… What can I do?… There’s an old Russian sailor… An old lunatic… He needs to be naturalized.' There was a long pause at this point and Vladimir realized that in his haste he wasn’t making much sense. 'It’s a long story…' he began, 'but essentially… I need to… Oh God, what’s wrong with me?' 'Talk to me, you big bear!' Roberta encouraged him. 'Essentially, if I get this old lunatic his citizenship, he’ll set me up with his son in Prava.' 'Okay, then,' Roberta said. 'I definitely can’t get him his citizenship.' 'No,' Vladimir concurred. 'No, you can’t.' What was he doing talking to a sixteen-year-old? 'But,' Roberta said, 'I can get him the next best thing…

Remember to not just rely on one source. Combine all sides of the equation so you can go to sleep with this info and wake up saying, “Yeah, this stuff right here, that’s good stuff.” Why I am thinking of a New England accent typing this I have no clue, but I thought I’d add in this useless detail.

What an impact! Wrapped together in strips of piecrust... ... the two distinct layers of stuffing each amplify the deliciousness of the other! The top layer is a chicken mousse! Tender, juicy cooked chicken... ... put through a food processor with heavy cream and seasonings until it was a silky-smooth puree! Its thick yet gentle savory flavor, accented with a touch of sweetness, slides across the tongue like satin! And the bottom layer is a beef meat loaf! Its flavors are perfectly paired with both the creamy chicken mousse and the demi-glace. What a frighteningly defined dish!" "Okay, but he used convenience store food for all that?! There's no way it could be that delicious..." "Oh, but it is. His skill elevated the ingredients to new heights." "Um, i-it really wasn't all that much. All I did was, well... To give the chicken mousse a more luxuriant texture, I carefully mixed in some egg whites beaten into a stiff meringue... And then added a little mushroom paste (Duxelles) to boost its richness. Canned mushrooms have a mild funk to them, so to get rid of that smell, I minced and sautéed them until nearly all their moisture was gone. I also reduced some red wine as far as I could, leaving behind just its umami components, and added that to the demi-glace. It isn't the best, but I had only cheap ingredients to work with. What about that isn't "all that much"?! "The main common ingredients he used were a precooked hamburger patty, chicken salad and a frozen piecrust. They're prepackaged foods anyone can buy, designed to be tasty right out of the box. In other words... They're average foods with completely average flavors! Use them as they are and you'll never pass this trial! Out of all of them, he singled out the ones that could stand up to haute cuisine cooking... ... and melded them together into a harmonious whole that brought out their best qualities while eliminating anything inferior! It's a level of quality only someone of Eishi Tsukasa's skill could reach!

Golden Rule #1: Each delegated task must be both time-consuming and well-defined. If you’re running around like a chicken with its head cut off and assign your VA to do that for you, it doesn’t improve the order of the universe. Golden Rule #2: On a lighter note, have some fun with it. Have someone in Bangalore or Shanghai send e-mails to friends as your personal concierge to set lunch dates or similar basics. Harass your boss with odd phone calls in strong accents from unknown numbers. Being effective doesn’t mean being serious all the time. It’s fun being in control for a change. Get a bit of repression off your chest so it doesn’t turn into a complex later.

Rex Stout, creator of orchid-loving detective Nero Wolfe, achieved a new wave of popularity on this amusing series. Axis shortwave broadcasts were monitored by a staff of linguists at the CBS listening station; what were considered the most outrageous lies were then typed into a weekly log of about 30,000 words. Stout would read this, select up to 150 items he found most interesting, and give them to Sue Taylor White (who had given up a job writing soap operas to do war work) for researching. The most entertaining lies, as well as those lending themselves to what Time called Stout’s “lunch-counter sarcasm,” were used on the air. The lies were read rapid-fire by an announcer, often in mock German or Japanese accents, and were just as quickly countered by Stout. When it was claimed that all the best American baseball players were German, Stout’s reply was typical: “They’ve got the facts, no getting away from it. Take the six leading batters in the major leagues—Williams, Gordon, Wright, Reiser, Lombardi, Medwick. Some bunch of Germans. Also the great German prizefighter, Joe Louis.

Oh, she says gravely, when a bell chimes or a phone rings, we simply take the opportunity to switch off and abandon all our plans and emotions - all our thoughts about other people and ourselves. Abandon all our human perceptions? I ask indignantly. In that case, what’s left for us? No, she says with a shake of the head, I only mean our conception of the world. I like the way she pronounces the word ‘conception’ in her Dutch accent, as if it were hot and she might burn her lips on it. I wish I could speak a foreign language as fluently as you do, I tell her. Please say ‘conception’ again. Explain it to me. What’s the difference between my perceptions and my conceptions? Resolutely, she makes for a cafe beneath some plane trees whose leaves are casting decorative shadows on the white tablecloths. She sits down and regards me sceptically, as if gauging whether I’m bright enough to merit an answer. Most of the time, she says, we form an opinion about things without really perceiving them. She points to an elderly woman waddling across the square laden down with plastic bags. For instance, she goes on, I look at that woman and I think, How bow-legged she is, and that skirt! A ghastly colour and far too short for her. No one should wear short skirts at that age. Are my own legs still good enough for short skirts? I used to have a blue skirt myself. Where is it, I wonder? I wish I was wearing that blue skirt myself. Where is it, I wonder? I wish I was wearing that blue skirt right now. But if I looked like that woman there... She props her head on her hands and regard me with a twinkle in her eye. I laugh. I haven’t really ‘perceived’ the woman, she says, I’ve merely pondered on skirts and legs and the ageing process. I’m a prisoner of my own ideas - my conceptions, in other words. See what I mean? I say yes, but I’d say yes to a whole host of things when she looks at me that way. A waitress of Franka’s age takes our order. She’s wearing a white crocheted sweater over her enormous breasts and a white apron tightly knotted around her prominent little tummy. Her platform-soled sandals, which are reminiscent of hoofs, give her a clumsy, foal-like appearance. Now it’s your turn, says Antje. French teenager, I say. Probably bullied into passing up an apprenticeship and working in her parents’ cafe. Dreams of being a beautician. No, Antje protests, that won’t do. You must say what’s really going through your head. I hesitate. Come on, do. I sigh. Please, she says. OK, but I take no responsibility for my thoughts. Deal! Sexy little mam’selle, I say. Great boobs, probably an easy lay, wouldn’t refuse a few francs for a new sweater. She’d be bound to feel good and holler Maintenant, viens! That song of Jane Birkin’s, haven’t heard it for years. I wonder what Jane Birkin’s doing these days. She used to be the woman of my dreams. Still, I’m sure that girl doesn’t like German men, and besides, I could easily be her father, I’ve got a daughter her age. I wonder what my daughter’s doing at this moment... I dry up. Phew, I say. Sorry, that was my head, not me. Antje nods contentedly. She leans back so her plaits dangle over the back of the chair. Nothing torments us worse than our heads, she says, closing her eyes. You’ve got to hand it to the Buddhists, they’ve got the knack of switching off. It’s simply wonderful.

When you meet someone at a time when you are still basically unfamiliar with the country he or she finds from, you are unable to make all those subtle distinctions you unconsciously rely on at home - accent, pronunciation, mode of dress, physical bearing - to give you what is often vital information about a new acquaintance.

In the early seventies a fog of grievance settled over the land. Never have Americans hated authorities like they did after the Vietnam War turned sour; after Watergate taught us the incorrigible venality of our elected leaders. Big government seemed omnipotent and yet incompetent; it possessed the world’s greatest military machine but it couldn’t do anything right. In the long list of groups it aimed to serve, We the People always seemed to come last. This snarling mood of disillusionment was the characteristic sensibility of the decade: the “wellsprings of trust” had been “poisoned,” two self-designated populist authors wrote back in 1972.1 They are still poisoned today. The whole country was mad as hell, to use a favorite catchphrase, and the discontent seemed to go in every direction at once. It was economic, it was political; it was racial, it was cultural; it was liberal, it was conservative. Americans despised the CIA and also the Soviet Union. We cheered for Clint Eastwood as a rule-breaking cop who blasted lowlifes even when the lawyers told him to stop … and then we cheered for Burt Reynolds as a “bandit” in a black Trans Am, the roads behind him littered with the smoking remains of the Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia highway patrols. Responding to the new sensibility, our politicians tried to impress us with their humility. They courted us with soft southern accents, with tales of peanut farms and pork rinds. They posed as defenders of the people, the forgotten man, the silent majority, the great overtaxed middle, the “normal” Americans suffering the contempt of shadowy TV network elites.

having a friend in the Met was enough of a payment. That, and he kept nagging her to start competing — said she kicked like a horse, and that once she had her grapple game on point, she could probably go pro.  Jamie knew having a pro fighter coming out of a gym was a great way to bring in new business, as well as get another taste of the big time. But she wasn’t interested in that. She just needed to know how to handle herself. And she did. Though it didn’t hurt to stay sharp, and Cake was one of the few people she could stand to be around for prolonged periods. ‘We’ve still got six minutes,’ she said, looking at the clock on the wall herself. Her accent had all but gone now, but anyone with a keen ear would know she wasn’t a British native.  And the blonde hair and blue eyes, along with her second name, would be enough to tip off anyone with any sense to her Scandinavian heritage.  ‘You earned it,’ Cake said, heading for the office. ‘And plus, I don’t think my arms could take anymore.’ He chuckled, his broad shoulders bouncing as he stepped off the raised matt and onto the rubber-tiled floor.  Jamie cast a glance over at the heavy-bag in the corner, thought maybe she could get some more hits in. But her shin was starting to throb. Maybe she should ice it. Probably a good idea. She pulled the sparring gloves off and unstrapped the kick-guards, wincing a little as they came away from her ankle.  Yeah, she’d definitely need to ice it.  The smell of coffee beckoned her towards the office and she followed her nose, entering to see Cake standing over a hotplate, a stove-top coffee maker steaming away on it.  He was a simple man, easy to talk to. Everyone wanted something. Except Cake. All he wanted was for people to treat him with respect. And Jamie did. He would always go on about it. People don’t have

For you, I would bring down the stars, wreath their fire around your neck like diamonds, and watch them pulse to the beat of your heart For you, I would capture the candlelight in the palm of my hand Give my breath to give it life A whisper, 'My love' So that it may grow Bright and hot And burn me For you, I would drink the salted oceans Until their depths Were swallowed into the depth of me How deep it is, this life This love, for you I cannot touch bottom I never will For you, I would mine the stony earth Until it relinquished The secrets of time Cracks in the stone wrinkles of the Earth As she turns her face to another new day And so I wish to live Every one of mine With you For you, I would be myself At long last I would live in my skin And breathe my words in my own voice Tinged with the accent Of a child calling to a car that will never stop And in the fading echo Nothing remains but the truth of me that is the love of you I have loved you with both Hands tied behind my back Bound with pen and ink Paper and words Sealed with someone else's name until this moment in which I am nothing but a man who loves a woman. There is nothing left to say Except to give all of my heart For you

At any rate, it was this same less-than-gainly driver who made an announcement to the passengers. “Wal haow yew like thet?” rang his dark New England accent. “Engine problems, folks. Saounds like the manifold.” (I hadn’t a clue as to what a manifold

In a subsequent study, this time in New York City, Pager and her colleagues fielded teams of White, Black, and Latinx testers to apply for real entry-level jobs. The testers were articulate, clean-cut, college-educated young men between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-six, similar in height, physical attractiveness, verbal skill, and interactional style and demeanor. The Latinx testers were US citizens of Puerto Rican descent and spoke without a Spanish accent. The testers were trained to present themselves in similar ways to potential employers as high school graduates with steady work experience in entry-level jobs. They applied for jobs in restaurants and retail sales, as warehouse workers, couriers, telemarketers, stockers, movers, customer service representatives, and other similar jobs available to someone with a high school degree and little previous experience. In applications to 171 employers, the White testers received a positive response (interview or job offer) 31 percent of the time, the Latinx testers received a positive response 25.2 percent of the time, and the Black testers, 15.2 percent of the time. Stated differently, the Black applicant had to search twice as long as the equally qualified White applicant before receiving a callback or a job offer.22

When someone doesn’t have a recognizable accent, they’re usually from where you’re from.

Word has been spread to our accomplices within the city, London has armed the villagers and all are waiting for our signal.” Koranis stooped to hoist up a canvas bag, which he dropped on the rickety table before us. “The rockets,” he said, pulling a long, slender tube from the bag. “The King of Sarterad had to send all the way to Alidovia for these--they only arrived yesterday. Prop them up facing skyward, light the wick at the bottom and we have our signal.” He tossed the strange tube he held to Steldor, then removed two more from the bag for Galen and Temerson. “Set them off as planned, in the designated areas of the city, and be ready,” Cannan ordered. “I’ll certainly have to be,” said a new voice--one with an accent. We all leaped backward to face the cellar stairs, where we could hear methodical footsteps descending. Knives had appeared in the hands of the men around me; they were small, but they would be effective. The Cokyrian commander emerged into the torchlight, calm and unarmed. “Oh, good Lord,” King Adrik breathed, but everyone else stood silently, rigidly, their eyes assessing the enemy. Addressing the captain, Narian declared, “This stops now.” Cannan clenched his jaw and I slipped behind Steldor, hoping he could protect me. Maybe if I hid…but there was nowhere to conceal myself. I certainly had a knack for stumbling into the most compromising and dangerous of situations. I hadn’t been involved in this at all, but was sure to be sentenced for it now. Taking a breath, I forced myself to step into the open. After all, I had wanted to be here. And if I had to die, I stood in good company. “What is it you think you know?” Steldor demanded, but Narian ignored him, speaking only to Cannan. “You have the ability to be the voice of reason here. Don’t let these men walk to their deaths.” “Should I have them die by execution instead?” the captain ground out, but Narian did not flinch, continuing to stare at him, steely conviction in his eyes. “I’m alone, Cannan. I’ve been following your movements and the movements of your men since Shaselle was caught with that dagger, and I haven’t said a word to the High Priestess, to my comrades, not even to Alera. I’m giving you a chance to walk away, to live. Don’t be a fool--take it.” Cannan tucked his knife into the shaft of his boot, then cast his eyes over Steldor, Galen, Adrik and Koranis. All resolutely met his gaze. “I don’t see fear in this room, Narian,” he said, shaking his head. “Do what you must, as will we.

February 11: Actress Edith Evanson visits Marilyn’s Brentwood home to work on the Swedish accent Marilyn is to use for her disguise as a maid in Something’s Got to Give, an identity Marilyn’s character adopts when returning home to her husband, who presumes she has died in an air crash. “Everything was dark, heavy and depressing. It had a creepy feeling about it but I thought nothing of it because she talked of her plans for decorating and especially landscaping,” Evanson told biographer Keith Badman. Marilyn pleaded with the actress to join her on a flight that day to New York, but Evanson had family responsibilities.

You take bits off crickets and they grow new parts,” Edwards explains in his cheery New Zealand accent. “My interest in this alpine work is that you find creatures growing in habitats where you wouldn’t expect anything to be.

me,’ the boy said. ‘They are new scratches,’ a voice with a heavy German accent said from the other side of the entrance

Her voice was deep and raspy, though not the whiskey voice given to madams in the movies. She had a trace of an accent, not Southern but New Orleans, that slow way of talking associated with downtown, an accent that sounds like Manhattan in a tropical heat wave.

You can always tell a rich New York girl from a poor one. And you can tell a rich Boston girl from a poor one. After all, that’s what accents and manners are there for. But to the native New Yorker, the midwestern girls all looked and sounded the same. Sure, the

I’m sorry, but you didn’t make me promise not to worry.” With a big sigh, Jenna said, “Okay, but after this, you have to promise that, too.” “Deal,” Sara said, smirking. After seeing how much and how violently Jenna had been sick not all that many hours ago, Easy was sympathetic to Sara’s worrying.“I’ll clean up this stuff and give you all some privacy,” he said, reaching for the tray. “Thanks for getting dinner for us, Easy,” Jenna said. She looked at him with such gratitude and affection that it both set off a warm pressure in his chest and made him self-conscious—because he was acutely aware that Sara was observing them. She had to know that something was going on. Given how little he thought of himself sometimes, it wasn’t a big leap to imagine others would think the same. Just because Sara had seemed appreciative that he’d helped Jenna didn’t mean she’d approve of anything more. “You know, you set off a milk-shake-making party,” Becca said. Sara laughed. “Yeah. Shane made us shakes, then we took them over to the gym, and Nick was all jealous he didn’t have one.” Grinning, Becca rolled her eyes. “Which was hilarious because he didn’t even know they owned a blender.” Easy stood. “Well, I guess I’m glad I could provide such a valuable service.” He winked and looked at Jenna. “Need anything else while I’m downstairs?” Smiling, she shook her head. “Don’t think so, but thanks.” Easy made his way out of the room and back down to the Rixeys’, where he found all the guys in front of the big flat-screen TV—Nick and Marz kicking back in the recliners, Beckett and Shane sprawled on one couch, and Jeremy and Charlie on the other, with Eileen between them. It was dark in the room except for the flickering light of the screen. A round of greetings rose to meet him. “Sexual Chocolate!” Marz yelled over the others. Easy couldn’t help but smile as his gaze settled on the television, where the classic Eddie Murphy movie Coming to America was playing. One of Easy’s all-time favorites. He placed the tray on the counter, then turned and held his hands out. “Good morning, my neighbors!” he said, mimicking one of the prince’s lines. Right on cue, Marz said in a thick New York accent, “Hey, fuck you!” Easy could quote this movie all day. “Yes, yes! Fuck you, too!” The guys all chuckled, and Easy leaned his butt against the arm of the couch next to Jeremy and got sucked into the movie. Jeremy and Charlie made room for him, and it felt damn good to be with the guys. Not working, not stressed, not under fire. Just kicking back and shooting the shit.

Lady Emily’s maid had come to her many years ago as Amélie Conque, but the assimilative genius of the English language, Mr Leslie’s determination not to truckle to foreigners in the matter of pronunciation, and Mr Gudgeon’s deep-rooted conviction of the purity of his own French accent had all united to form the name Conk. By this name she had been known with terror and dislike by Lady Emily’s children, with love and disrespect by her grandchildren. Whether Conk had softened with years or the new generation were more confident than the old, we cannot say. Probably both. Conk

When we applied for citizenship, I rounded the hard edges of my accent and that was one tangible way in which I had changed. We heard nothing for a year. We grew thin. We understood how little we were worth, how small our claim in the world. We had no money after our application fee, and nowhere to go. Then, we received the summons for our interview, the final background check, the examination, the approval. At the ceremony, they screened a video filled with eagles and artillery and all of us recited a pledge. We sang our new anthem and once it was done it was said we were American. The newest batch of Americans

And she felt a real sense of loss. Even though she knew she had never had an accent. It was the birthmark, which in its density had lent color even to her voice. She didn't miss the birthmark, but she missed her Norwegian heritage, like learning of new relatives, only to discover they have just died.

Every single person on this planet has a relationship with God. ========== The Gospel according to Mark (Pillar New Testament Commentary) (Edwards Jr., James R.) - Your Highlight on Location 1267-1267 | Added on Friday, February 13, 2015 7:09:31 AM what happens when a man with an unclean spirit meets the One anointed with God’s Spirit. ========== The Gospel according to Mark (Pillar New Testament Commentary) (Edwards Jr., James R.) - Your Highlight on Location 1268-1268 | Added on Friday, February 13, 2015 7:09:56 AM Mark shows that Jesus teaches with unique authority, unlike and indeed surpassing that of the scribes ========== The Gospel according to Mark (Pillar New Testament Commentary) (Edwards Jr., James R.) - Your Highlight on Location 1269-1269 | Added on Friday, February 13, 2015 7:10:08 AM The second part is an account of an exorcism (vv. 23-26). ========== The Gospel according to Mark (Pillar New Testament Commentary) (Edwards Jr., James R.) - Your Highlight on Location 1270-1271 | Added on Friday, February 13, 2015 7:11:18 AM The combined stories demonstrate that Jesus’ word is deed. ========== The Gospel according to Mark (Pillar New Testament Commentary) (Edwards Jr., James R.) - Your Highlight on Location 1293-1294 | Added on Friday, February 13, 2015 7:16:33 AM Jewish synagogues, according to rabbinic nomenclature, were “assembly halls” or auditoriums where the Torah was read and expounded. ========== The Gospel according to Mark (Pillar New Testament Commentary) (Edwards Jr., James R.) - Your Highlight on Location 1329-1330 | Added on Friday, February 13, 2015 10:00:12 AM Every instance of exousia therefore reflects either directly or indirectly the authority of Jesus. ========== The Gospel according to Mark (Pillar New Testament Commentary) (Edwards Jr., James R.) - Your Highlight on Location 1331-1332 | Added on Friday, February 13, 2015 10:00:39 AM his authority over the highest authorities in both the temporal realm, as represented by the scribes, and the supernatural authorities, as represented by the demon in l:23ff. ========== The Gospel according to Mark (Pillar New Testament Commentary) (Edwards Jr., James R.) - Your Highlight on Location 1332-1334 | Added on Friday, February 13, 2015 10:01:04 AM The scribes derive their authority from the “tradition of the elders” (7:8-13) — the fathers of Judaism, we might say; whereas Jesus receives his authority directly from the Father in heaven (1:11). ========== The Gospel according to Mark (Pillar New Testament Commentary) (Edwards Jr., James R.) - Your Highlight on Location 1334-1335 | Added on Friday, February 13, 2015 10:01:12 AM contingent on the authority of the Torah and hence a mediated authority; ========== The Gospel according to Mark (Pillar New Testament Commentary) (Edwards Jr., James R.) - Your Highlight on Location 1335-1335 | Added on Friday, February 13, 2015 10:01:20 AM Jesus appeals to an immediate and superior authority resident in himself that he received at his baptism. ========== The Gospel according to Mark (Pillar New Testament Commentary) (Edwards Jr., James R.) - Your Highlight on Location 1337-1338 | Added on Friday, February 13, 2015 10:01:49 AM Jesus’ teaching is qualitatively different, “not as the teachers of the law.” ========== The Gospel according to Mark (Pillar New Testament Commentary) (Edwards Jr., James R.) - Your Highlight on Location 1346-1346 | Added on Friday, February 13, 2015 10:03:40 AM does not recount the content of the teaching. The accent falls rather on Jesus the teacher. ========== The Gospel according to Mark (Pillar New Testament Commentary) (Edwards Jr., James R.) - Your Highlight on Location 1349-1350 | Added on Friday, February 13, 2015 10:04:30 AM In the Gospel of Mark the person of Jesus is more important than the subject of his teaching. If we want to know what the gospel or teaching of Jesus consists of, we are directed to its embodiment in Jesus the teacher. ========== The Gospel

She felt slightly better as she turned to head back, empty mug in hand, when one of the Americans leant in and drawled in a beautiful southern accent: ‘Don’t worry about him. Everyone from New Jersey’s a complete asshole.

What the Bible does say should be heeded carefully, but any ethic that intends to be biblical will seek to get the accents in the right place, not overemphasizing peripheral issues. (Would that the passion presently being expended in the church over the question of homosexuality were devoted instead to urging the wealthy to share with the poor! Some of the most urgent champions of “biblical morality” on sexual matters become strangely equivocal when the discussion turns to the New Testament’s teachings about possessions.)

The New Testament itself is written that way: the risen Christ coming back at dawn to the Sea of Tiberias, Jesus with the mystery of life and death upon him, standing there on the beach saying, “Have you any fish?” (John 21:5). Have you any fish, for Christ’s sweet sake! Precisely that. The Christ and the chowder. The Messiah and the mackerel. The Word and the flesh. The first voice and the second voice. It is what the great text is all about, of course, this mystery, this tension and scandal; and the text itself, with this antiphony of voices, is its own illustration. Somebody has to do the vacuuming. Somebody has to keep the accounts and put out the cat. And we are grateful for these things to the second voice, which is also of course our own voice, puny and inexhaustible as Faulkner said. It is a human voice. It is the only voice the universe has for speaking of itself and to itself. It is a voice with its own message, its own mystery, and it is important to be told that it was not the Baptist, it was Jesus—not that one standing over there bony and strident in the Jordan, but this one with the queer north-country accent, full of grace and truth. Behold, the Baptist said, that is the lamb of God. Not this one, but that one. We need to know.

In Brothers: Black and Poor (1988), the story of twelve African American men in a housing project on Chicago’s South Side, one of main characters, Half Man Carter, has a prized record collection that includes “Mama Sang a Song,” by Walter Brennan. In the early 1960s, Brennan became a recording star, narrating brief stories like “Old Shep” and “Tribute to a Dog,” and producing several popular albums, which have had an extended life on CDs and the web, where many of his songs can be downloaded. In A World of Miracles (1960), to the accompaniment of orchestra and choir, he recites the stories of Noah, the Ten Commandments, and the Resurrection, transforming his familiar way of speaking into a solemn, yet friendly New England accented prophetic voice.

To learn a new language is not easy. For one thing, you will always speak with an accent. . . . But for your children it will be their native tongue!