I Take On A Foreign Accent

Being in Rome these past two weeks has really altered my person. I eat a lot of cheese, cheese which I cannot name. I've read a lot of Italian literature, which, as you might expect, is extremely depressing (nothing ever ends well for Italy, so why should they make it so in books?). I perused a haberdashery, a life long goal, and bought a 50 euro hat (1 euro=15000 Chinese yin, or 70 million tons of rice). I have also gained an accent.

It was Mircea, the Rufio-esque church friend with the Eastern Bloc nose, who first noticed it. I was talking to him in my national tongue, and he stopped me. He said he could not understand what I was saying. I tried again, switching to what little Italian I know. He stopped me again, and said that he could understand English fine; he couldn't understand my English, because I was speaking like a foreigner (not to be confused with Foreigner).

It's true. I find myself slipping down a slippery slope of linguistics, constantly rolling my r's, screwing up my grammar, and inserting frequent pauses, as if I'm translating from one language to another. In the back of my mind, I assume, the logic is that if I'm not able to speak Italian, the best way to appear non-American is to not be able to speak English.

And I say the back of my mind because it's all unconscious, like an internal mechanism meant to patronize the locals and separate myself from the college kids still here shopping. But if I can't control this, maybe one day I'll start speaking uncontrollable Italian.