"All you Americans who've seen Northampton, raise your hands, please."
Hand duly raised! We lived there for 4 years and often visit as DH's family lives nearby - were there yesterday AM in fact. Northamptonians could always spot my accent tho'! But as you say, not much experience of 'Mercans in the flesh. And also there's an aspect of not wanting to offend Canadians.
As well as Delapre Abbey (which is where the Record Office was previously), there is an Eleanor Cross nearby - one of the resting places of the coffin of Eleanor of Castile on its way to London in 1290. There were 12 in total, one of which was at Charing Cross in London (hence the name).
Don't melt today, it's horribly hot & sticky!
Not an American in Northampton, but an Australian in Boston. This sort of thing happens to me all the time though. Along the lines of:
American: Wow! You really are from Brooklyn.
Me: I'm really NOT from Brooklyn - in fact I've never been there.
I'm trying to imagine all of those American accents mixed with Pittsburghese... I wish you had one of those nifty gadgets as well!
What I want to know is: what is a hampton? There's a Southampton, a Northampton and a Wolverhampton roughly between them, but what connects them? One supposes it will turn out to be an anomaly, but curious none the less. Indeed, we know there is an Essex, a Wessex, a Sussex and even a Middlesex, but no Nossex. There is mystery to be found in UK town names.
should have said UK place names
Big-city Texan by way of four years outside of Philadelphia, living in a tourist- and student-heavy English city (York) where there are a reasonable number of Americans, and I still get the "you're a what?"
Second-best such moment was sitting down to a formal dinner at Braesnose College, Oxford, where the young man sitting opposite said I sounded like a CBC presenter.
Best (for sheer flight from reality) was drinking a pint in a York pub and having an older man insist I was Irish.
But really, I'm luckier than most -- one of my cohort is from Chicago, and the locals claim her accent is impenetrable...
I once called United Airlines from France, and i was very surprised that "press 1 for english" had patched me all the way through to the states. But in the twenty minutes of talking to this woman, i was SURE she was american. there was no obvious regionalism, just very american english. Until she said, I can give you the number, but i'm not allowed to transfer you directly to someone in the states.
And then i asked where she was, and it turned out IRELAND.
And what i've learned since then is that a LOT of irish-english sounds a lot like american-english. (not dublin, obviously) So maybe with your slightly mixed american accent, they're expecting you to be from Galway.
No one would want to come from a place called No-ssex, would they? So they probably ran away first chance they got and never went back, until somebody realised the only way to keep the staff was to rename it.
As a Scottish friend of mine pointed out, most English place names are just silly. I come from a town called Bury St Edmunds, which makes it hard to disagree.
To English people East Anglian accents can sound Australian and slightly Welsh ones can sound American. We've got so many different accents that we can't place each other let alone Americans.
re the above person. I've met so many Irish who sound American.
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