I miss the way Mom and Dad talked.
I miss the way my parents talked. I love accents. Colloquial pronunciations, phrases, and speech patterns seem to be disappearing. I believe that mass communication like radio and TV have played a part in watering down our familiar ways of speaking. When I was a kid in the 70’s, I watched The Brady Bunch and The Partridge family. The actors spoke as if they had no accent at all. Some of it rubbed off on my generation. Migration played a role in softening our accents as well. During my elementary school years, there was only one family that I knew that was from somewhere besides Charlotte. It was a place called New York City. The Carney’s were our next-door neighbors and they spoke very differently from us. When their nephew, Jerry, would visit from New York, it was like some exotic foreigner had come to town. We asked him about the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. We were astonished that Jerry had been to ...