Hugh?

With the exception of a few months here and there I have been living in Southern California for ten years. A whole decade -- my goodness. There's rarely a fortnight that goes by when I am not complimented by my English accent yet my British girlfriends kindly and mockingly inform me that my English accent has been lost to the wind. On my visit to England last summer I recognized for myself just how much of my accent and dialect I have lost, and how much 0f an American dialect has become part of my every day speech.

I taunt myself by the ease I use the filler "hugh" when talking to my daughter. As I see it, the filler word "hugh" can be used to indicate agreement, raise a question, or to show that you are listening to the speaker and occasionally used as a cue that you wish to make a comment or require a response from your listener. It's not really a word, more of an indiscriminate grunt -- indistinguishable to the English listener and inherently understood by the American.

Ironically, as a drama student during high school I was required to adopt an American accent for a short three or four minute script about two young American girls discussing what adventure they would partake in next. The last line, the line that everyone was to hear, the line that indicated to everyone that "this is the end of the scene. please now put your hands together and applaud us" was -- yes you guessed it, the last line. Literally the very last line was "hugh". It was my line and I failed at it miserable. I simply had no idea how or where to put the inflection and all that came out on performance night was a meek and weak little 'hugh.." as I walked off stage right.

These days I find myself, especially as I write in this blog, conflicted between writing with or without my English accent. Who is the audience I write for I ask myself. Well, essentially, that is me (and my adult children) which is why I have chosen to use the standard English I acquired during the first two decades of my life -- hence the tittle edit from "mommy blog" to "mummy blog".

So, if you stop by to read and catch up with the goings on of my cluttered mind expect to find English spellings and references with an immersion of American slang, idioms and expressions.