Why can't the English?

"There even are places where English completely disappears. In America, they haven't used it for years." -- Alan Jay Lerner, from My Fair Lady

Though I often fall in love with things I don't and can never have, a regional accent isn't one of them. I am the proud owner of a bona-fide Brooklyn accent, and though it tends to fade when I'm away from my family for long stretches of time, it never completely vanishes. It's so much a part of me that it took me 3/4ths of my life to realize it even existed.

The New Yawk dye-uh-leckt is so mundane in my neighborhood that I didn't know I possessed it until I was seventeen, when I went shopping in the mall at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. I was perusing racks of sneakers and a sales associate came over to help me out. We started chatting, then she asked what part of New York City I was from.

"How'd you know I'm from New York City?"
"Well, you have an accent."
"No I don't!"
"I'm afraid you do."

Sure, I'm a New Yorker, but it never occurred to me that I actually sounded like one. The New York accent was reserved for Barbra Streisand, Fran Drescher, gangsters, and the cast of My Cousin Vinny, not a Catholic school girl of above-average intelligence!

I thought that saleswoman was absolutely insane until I started college at the melting pot of the Ivy League and discovered that everyone could spot that I was a city native after only a few words. (Well, other native New Yorkers couldn't tell, but that's expected.) Three years later, my closest college friends told me that they had written me off as unintelligent when we first met because of my accent, and were honestly surprised when they realized that I was a skilled writer and competent engineer!

And though (or, perhaps, because) I speak with the most unabashedly uneducated-sounding dialect imaginable, I'm completely obsessed with the elegance of the British accent. Who knows, maybe I watched too much Heckle and Jeckle as a kid and enjoy British TV shows starring dashing Americans a little too much now, but to me there's something intriguing about the contrast between British English and Brooklyn English. I tried to write a short story about my feelings on the matter when I was a senior in high school, but failed miserably. You know why? My inner monologue speaks in Brooklynese, therefore I can never make my British characters sound as graceful as they should.

Take tonight, for instance. I was standing around eating hors d' oeuvres after a seminar, and paused to note that the piece of chicken in my hand was prepared strangely. The British man standing next to me seemed to think along the same lines.

My remark: Did they put the bone back in after they cooked the thing?
His remark: It is a bit dodgy, don't you reckon?

I wouldn't trade my r-dropping, dipthong-riddled, dental, nasal pronunciations for anything, but oh, to be able to speak, write, and think with such poise!