As you will notice, by user name, Telbort, is a bit odd (but not very). The reason I use it for this blog is that some Sydneysiders have struggled to understand my accent. An Australian Coffee shop chain called Gloria Jean’s take your order and type in your name in the till which appears on a screen so the person making the drinks can call it out when your coffee is ready. When I gave my name, Albert, the guy on the till looked at me as though I’d just called him a bad thing. I’m used to this. I’m not that old and most people see ”Albert” as an old person’s name. So I repeated it. He asked me to spell it. Still looked like I’d called him a bad name. Anyway, when my order was called it turned out they had made a regular flat white (this is what the Aussies call white coffee) for Telbort.
Of course, my accent isn’t so mangled as to turn “Albert” into “Telbort” for all Aussies, but I get asked to repeat myself a lot. Also, my wife was told by a guy in a phone shop that her accent was very English. She quite liked that. I just wondered what it meant to sound merely English (as opposed to *very* English), or what it meant to sound a little bit English (like Rene Zellweger’s in Bridget Jones say). Still not sure.
