How to Speak Utahrn

Although I've lived in Utah for almost half of my life, I still think of myself as an Oregonian in certain ways. Such as: I still speak like one. I grew up never thinking of Oregon as having an accent of any kind, but Jeremy likes to point out a few northwest peculiarities [not peculiar to me, I must clarify]. According to him, Oregonians put a twangy a in words of the ants family. I guess it comes out a little like "aynts." So a sentence like, "The ants from France wore pants to the dance," ends up sounding [to him] like, "The aynts from Fraynce wore paynts to the daynce."

I've also held on to some words and phrases. We have an ongoing debate over the use of high waters vs. floods to describe pants [or paynts] of the awkwardly short variety. Out of habit, I call them high waters. My argument, which I feel legitimate, is that someone from Oregon should be able to differentiate between high water and a flood.

Now it's not like Jeremy has much room to critique how us Oregonians speak. Utah has its fair share of verbal humdingers. I am raising 4 Utahns, which came abruptly to my attention one day while I worked on spelling with Aiden. I read his spelling list while he wrote the words. We came to the word sure and I watched him write shore. Feeling a little puzzled, I tried again. "No, the word is shoor." He said, "That's what I wrote." So I tried another approach. "It's shur [almost neglecting the vowel sound completely]." And he wrote it correctly. Oh, the dismay!

From time to time I do slip into some characteristically Utahn pronunciations. For example, I have caught myself saying fur instead of for and feel rather horrified. [Just as long as I don't fill horrified.] Maybe it's inevitable. After all, in another couple years I'll have lived in Utah longer than I lived in Oregon. But at least so far, supposebly I still haven't warshed my hands in the crick or put my house up for sell!