No. He has to fake an American accent because you are a Canadian, and Canadians feel Americans are more authorative. In fact, if you say zed he will probably have to pretend he doesn’t understand you.

B) Is there some reason you’ve been given new names

Yes. It’s an attempt to fool the customers into thinking they can understand English.

III) How are the names made up, anyways?

I don’t know. If they were to ask me for suggestions, though, I would suggest they pick names they know how to pronounce.

Eleatic, I’d be happy to discuss the choices I’ve made about blogging with you — you could email me at wolfangel - at - gmail - dot - com. I used Typepad and found it incredibly limiting and disliked it. I’ve heard they’ve changed since, but I don’t know. I don’t like the commenting function on blogger, though there are hacks around it. I’m using Wordpress, which is open source software. My host has something that will automatically install it for me (or my old one did, I’m not so sure about this new one). Usually they will do it for you if there’s not a program. It depends what you’re looking for and why.

Getting rid of your accent is about the hardest thing to do — I have spent *years* trying to get French t/p/k, but I still have the English ones. My father, who spends more time speaking French than English, still has a heavy English accent. My grandparents moved to England close to 70 years ago — and they still have German accents.

So I guess my point is that I’m not trying to insult people by commenting on accents, I just think that comprehension of second language learners (and in your second language) is a neat topic.

My city is not so much hard to spell as my last name. And I always forget what word stands for f in the spell-out code (foxtrot, which I can remember since I don’t need it at the moemnt), and so I get stuck trying to say “effffff, not esssss”, and thinking up words like phone.

The other fun is that my name has both a G and a J in it, and in French, the letter G is pronounced ‘jay’ and the letter J is pronounced ‘gee’ (though the j sound is different), and you go round and round trying to figure out which ‘gee’ you’re talking about when you’re spelling something.

I hate my name.

My accent in French is so bad as to be incomprehensible to all but the most sharp-eared and patient French-teachers. (Yes, I took the absolute minimum amount of French necessary to graduate from both HS and College. Fortunately it doesn’t take much French to read math papers because all the words are cognates.)

My accent in Polish is supposedly not bad. Not that this is useful because I can not speak Polish — rather I know a small handful of words and phrases picked up from my grandparents and from a few days in Warsaw and Krakow in 1999. Most importantly: kawa z mlekiem y cukier (coffee with milk and sugar). And: sernik (cheesecake).

Oh, and that’s a hint as to why I so often need to say “ess zee see zee” (Yes, I was being coy before, but it’s not like it’s that big a secret.). No one hears that string correctly. The replacement of zee with zed would be so wonderful.

When I called support for my cable modem in the (relatively) early morning, once, I got tech support in Newfoundland. I caught bits of the accent, so I asked. I think for a lot of support lines, when you call makes more difference than where you call from, in terms of where you’re connected.

There’s a strong regional accent where I grew up, and people often are surprised to learn that I grew up there because I’ve shed most of the accent. It comes back when I talk to people who have it, though. In addition, I picked up some sentence-syntax quirks from my time in Pennsylvania-German territory.

I suppose the sz should have clued me in, but it didn’t. And no one has ever thought I spoke Polish. (Many people have thought I didn’t speak English.)

Cougar: that’s a pretty normal mode of conversation for two fluent people who have different first languages.