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Communication is hard. Even if we’re all speaking English, language barriers can still
get in our way. It was this observation that led Irish playwright and humorist George Bernard
Shaw to remark that America and Britain were two nations separated by a common language.
So, Mr Toastmaster, Ladies & Gentlemen, today I’d like to share with you a few stories
from my life where just speaking English to fellow English speakers led to unforeseen
consequences. I moved to San Francisco in November of 2002.
I didn’t know anyone here and whilst my family and friends back in Britain thought
that I was very brave for moving all the way out here by myself I wasn’t scared at all.
Quite the contrary – I was thrilled! I was rejuvenated. Here was I, a stranger in a beautiful,
vibrant city, fulfilling a dream by moving to America. My first apartment was in the
Fillmore district, a neighbourhood that mixes old soul with new money, where the heady smoke
of Mediterranean hookahs mingles with the sweet scent of Argentinian gelato and it was
here, in Harry’s Bar on Fillmore, that I first realized that being a foreigner could
be used to my advantage. One of the things that I first noticed when
I moved here is that the majority of Americans thought, based on my accent, that I was from
Australia. Now, to most Brits, being mistaken for an Aussie is a terrible insult. I, of
course, rise above such things but it gave me an idea. The next time I got chatting to
someone in a bar, I’d challenge them to a simple game: if they could guess where I
was from, I would buy them a drink. But if they guessed incorrect, they would buy me
a drink. And so, the next time I went to Harry’s Bar on Fillmore, I played my game. And I won.
A lot. 37 times in a row, and it quickly became my favourite game as I would stagger from
bar to bar, collecting my winnings as I went. And, of course, should someone guess correctly
I could always pretend that I really was from Down Under.
But it hasn’t all been fun and games. The accent I have now is not the one with which
I started life. I was actually born in Glasgow, Scotland, a country whose accents are as thick
as its porridge. I was seven when my parents moved us 450 miles south to the town of Southend-on-Sea
in Essex, about 40 miles east of London. All of a sudden I was an outsider, I was a strange
boy in a strange country with no friends, a boy who couldn’t understand why he couldn’t
be understood. We all know that kids can be cruel and it was rare that I was spared from
the teasing and bullying of my classmates. I had only one practical escape – to change
my accent. And so it was that, “Ach Maw, am feer beelin,
thar affy mean! Whitma ginna dae?” became “Dearest Mother, I’m quite upset, they’re
awfully mean! Whatever shall I do?” My folks still think that it was a deliberate
act, a conscious effort on my part to become less different and thus less of a target.
I don’t remember it at all. I just know that somewhere between there and now I lost
practically all trace of my Scottish accent. And as happy and thankful as I am today for
the life that I have, a small piece of me regrets that.
But you don’t have to move 450 miles to find someone stymied by the Scots – you
don’t even have to leave Scotland. Take, for example, the crew of a small ferry that
I took during a recent trip to my homeland. This particular ferry runs twice a day from
the fishing town of Mallaig, on the west coast of Scotland, to the remote village of Inverie
on the north shore of Loch Nevis. Now it’s a small ferry, so there’s not much of a
crew: the captain, his first mate and the deckhand. The deckhand was a very friendly
young man and he spent much of the downtime during the 90-minute journey chatting with
the passengers. But despite being Glaswegian – from Glasgow – like myself, I couldn’t
understand most of what he said. Occasionally I would catch a reference to something familiar,
like a football team or the name of a street, but by and large I was relegated to nodding
and smiling and asking conversation-pausing questions like “How many fish do you think
there are out here?” And I was relieved to find that I wasn’t the only one: as the
boat slid up to the dock at the end of our journey the captain leaned over to me and
said, “I don’t about you, but I can’t understand a bloody thing he says!”
Communication is hard, even when we’re all speaking English. And I think that’s probably
why most of us are here at Toastmasters– not just to become better speakers, but to
become better communicators. Thank you.