Here's a page of some very cutesy cats that seem to be all the rage, at least according to a recent entry in Wired magazine's Japanese Schoolgirl Watch. On tonight's particular web foray, I was seeking animated gifs of Hello Kitty using the everhandy "whateveritisyourelookingfor.gif" search in Google Image search. Don't ask me why. There's something almost Buddhistic about that vanilla-cute cat with the vacant yet serene gaze.

Anyhow, I hit a few sites at which I noted that the made-up word "beary" was being used in statements such as, "I love you beary much." Now here's my ax, so get out the whetstone, 'cause I'm about to grind: I HATE when people rhyme "Beary" with "very". I'm an east coast boy by birth, but have spent most of my adult life in the midwest and the south, and a good deal of my childhood travels ranged between Mass. and N.J. So, I have a pretty good ear for accents, and I like to think I can speak in the plainest Tom Brokaw, Johnny Carson, Bob Dole midwestern way. Yet I think it's really true that the special computer program in the brain, by means of which you edit your pronunciation of everything you're about to say, does not function in inverse mode. That is, I don't think I have really completely trained my hearing to perceive a person's pronunciation of certain words or letter combinations as being correct, even though they are, and even though I have trained myself to speak them this way. That isn't to say that someone with a thick Boston accent (think Southie, working-class Irish...not Julia Child or Beacon Hill)...as correct.

But I do still find one aspect of American English to be a sure marker for regionality, in a broad sense: it's where you put your r's in a word. It explains to me why in a great swath of these United States "Beary" can be rhymed with "Berry" and, a fortiori, "Mary, Merry and Marry" are all considered to rhyme. In case anyone didn't know, THEY DON'T RHYME at all! It's not even close. We in the east say VEH-ree (very) and BEER-ree ("beary"). Do those even come close to rhyming?


Some other examples, correctly pronounced: MEER-ree (Mary), MEH-ree (merry), MAHR-ree (marry). It seems to my ear that the rest of the country blurs all three into one sound, sort of like a California valley girl pronunciation of "Murray." There's a lovely song by the late R&B singer Aaliyah, entitled "Erica Kane," in which she says over and over, "Erica, Erica, Erica Kane." I wince everytime I hear that song, because she says "Erica" the way my brain wants me to say it, the way that actually still sounds right to me. That is, EH-rica. And I wonder, didn't her dialect coaches show her the simple way to correct that pronunciation to the standard (midwestern) form? It's like a fellow from New York I worked with a few years ago, who would always talk about "STEH-roids," as in, "You wanna try some steroids?"

By now you will have realized that this properly self-edited east coast boy has trained himself to say "AIR-rica" in the first case, and "STEER-roids" in the second. Yet if altering my pronunciation was the worst act of disloyalty to the very soil of my motherland that I had committed in my adult life, I wouldn't be living in this backwater sitting in my skivvies at this ungodly hour typing this crap.

Another Friday. This morning I pissed off a customer so badly that I think I lost my company her business to our competitors. I was just in no mood to hear the same old ragging about quality and long waits and things being "blown off." So I defended myself and my partners, and managed to win...a Pyrrhic victory? That's the first time I've needed to use that in a sentence. Ok everybody, now you can pigeonhole me. He's really not too smart...not too smart, honey...you can do better. Look at him...his clothes, so ill-fitting and threadbare...no shine on the shoes, the same pants worn a second (a third?) time. The thinning hair trying to conceal the baldness of his pate, the pallid scalp useless except to reinforce the general impression of an aging wastrel, playing up the jowls, the chins, the paunch. Just look at him!