The toe that I injured more than six weeks ago still hurts when flexed in some ordinary ways. I'm fairly sure that I broke the thing. According to what I've read, it may take up to a year to completely heal.

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Recently, two different people at different places on different days have asked me about my having a foreign accent. As far as I'm concerned, I have a very generic American accent. The Woman of Interest and I speculate that the lack of more precisely identifiable regionalization is what has people wondering about my being from elsewhere. That is to say that I cannot be placed from my speech as from the South, Northeast, Midwest, or whatever.

I don't think that I was ever much inclined to adopt regionalisms. For example, my mother had a very strong Arkansan accent when I was a child, my father has a Missouri twang, and from some time in my fourth year until some time in my seventh, my family lived in North Carolina; yet it was noted that neither my brother nor I developed southern accents. Much later, I became very consciously deliberate in selecting the characteristics of what amounts to my personal accent. I wasn't interested to appear to be from a particular place or of a particular social standing; I was interested in things such as clear enunciation and as respect for the language.

Tags: accent, idioprosoidia, illness and injury, speech

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