We were watching a show called The Best Thing I Ever Ate, which is a great show by the way, this one happened to be about snacks. The way that the show works is that they pick a celebrity chef to tell where they go for their best dish based on the theme. Then they send cameras, and sometimes the chef, to the restaurant to watch the preparation of the dish. With this one particular dish they were showing the preparation and giving the basic ingredients, then they got to the part where adding the cheese and suddenly they decided that they needed to use the Spanish word for cheese, queso, rather than calling it cheese. I don't know why they think what they are talking about is better when you throw in a couple of words from the origin of the food. This happened to be a taco. Nothing else about it was Mexican, how do I know? The dish was a fusion dish where they took Mongolian BBQ beef and put it in a tortilla with an Asian slaw topped with queso, as they put it. Why was it necessary? More marketing I guess...
Which leads us to the rest of the problem that I have. We were watching another episode a few days ago had a chef the has a Mexican heritage. It was funny how she went through the whole interview without any kind of accent. Then when she was in the restaurant eating and describing the food she had a really thick accent. What was the point? We know she has a Mexican heritage! And she is only 1 example of this kind of thing. Maybe I should start throwing in a Scottish background just for fun. Watch an early episode of Paula Dean, then follow it with a recent one. She went from saying y'all once or twice a show to saying it every other sentence!
I understand that people from certain areas have a different accent than I do. That is part of what makes them different. But what I don't understand, or like, is when someone purposely turns the accent on or off to attract attention or to fit in. Be yourself no matter what that is or what it sounds like.
Funny thing, I kind of do this now but it used to bug me too. I don't think I change to a whole new accent, but if there is a word that is spanish that I used to pronounce "like a gringo". I feel silly to not pronounce it correctly. But then who really determines which one is correct?
ReplyDeleteFor example, my parents recorded one of those Hallmark gift books for my kid. It was a Cars movie version. One of the cars is "latino" and his name is Ramone. So, my dad, talking like a gringo on the recording says: Ray-moan. But in spanish they would pronounce it: Rah-moan. So if I was reading that book, I guess it would sound silly if I'm reading like a gringo and then all of a sudden change the accent to pronounce the spanish name. That's what used to bug me before, but know it makes sense to me. I would feel like I'm doing the word an injustice to purposely pronounce it "wrong".
In the situation that I was referring to she went for most of her 5 minute talk about the food she had no accent. Then suddenly she had a rather thick accent.
ReplyDeleteI get pronouncing a word from your heritage correctly. What I don't get is that when that is a trigger to suddenly have a thick accent as if English is your second language.