Pride

okay.

First order of business;
Will someone please tell me where this expansively flat and lulling American accent came from? Maybe this is a testament to Western arrogance but I never really questioned the odorless sound of my American voice until earlier this week. The question occurred to me while I was sitting in class, History 3770: The Modern Middle East. The sweet professor with the shaking hands and a beautiful sense of both narrative and time was speakung about the British occupation of Egypt during the late 19th century. And then my mind began to move. It swept through colonizations of countries to linguistics, surprisingly, until the two trains of thought married on the Atlantic shores of the New World.

If you type in British occupation of into your Google bar, location upon location fills up the trending list. That's really interesting.

Anyways whatever triggered in my brain triggered and I found myself forming a new question. We speak a language derived from Britain, the country with the deepest colonizing roots in American history. Currently the two countries have very different dialects. So, my dearest friends, where did this freaking American accent come from? Did it serve as a planned political negation of the rolling vowels of monarchy, or was it simply the watery distance that consequently bred a new form of the "English" language? Maybe it was immaculately concepted; a virgin birth that would spawn the Midwesterner, the Southern Bell, the Bostonian.

The used-to-be English from South Africa sound almost British. Not almost American.

Obviously I don't know. I'm sure the answer is waiting for me on Wikipedia right now, but at this point I'd rather let the it ferment for a while. The best wine takes time. The best answers are the ones that make chardonnay. Or are answered by a friend. Or something.
In your defense, Oh Fearless Reader, you are probably way beyond my measly intellectual chicken scratches at this point. You probably already covered this concept in your head, somewhere in between eighth grade algebra and ninth grade biology. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt. Feel free to fill my comment board with proof.

I've been excited and ashamed these last two years at the limits of my garnered knowledge and thought processes. Excited for the doors that are opening, the holes that are sewn up and patched. Ashamed because I thought I knew everything when I was 16, and 17, and 18 and 19.
My poor parents.

At this point I could move into a second order of business. I could relate back to Britain, colonization, and how that whole process has set the stage for the arrogance that I apply in my everyday life. Down to the subtle unquestioned dominance and proliferation of my American accent.
Or I could talk about Bob and his comment on the proliferation of capitalization in christian writing at chapel earlier this week. Too little adherence to grammar, too much obsession with highlighting the nature of God in every word used on a worship powerpoint. Though in all honesty I've been capitalizing in this blog post like an 18th century Brit capitalized on the world's natural resources via colonization.

But really my capitalization has been done in pure respect of the name and sovereign power of nation states. Britain, America, Egypt, Boston.
My dad became frustrated with me once when I failed to capitalize America on a white-board comment I made in our garage. His frustration was fascinating to me. "But why Dad, why?" I asked him as he re-wrote the little swoop into three dignified straight lines.
"Because, daughter, this is our country. We're proud to be Americans. That word represents us, and our pride." I'm paraphrasing him now, we had this conversation in the summer. Lend me a little slack. Because I know above many things my father is proud to be an American. Its right up there with proud to be a father of three crazy girls, and also proud to be a fervent driver of Ford vehicles. (F350, standard shifting.) I didn't push the conversation further, I wasn't particularly emotionally attached to a sentiment in either direction.
Later on I brought up the conversation with Joe. And that was that, until a while later when I received a postcard from Joe at my apartment back in Seattle. My dad's sentiments had struck him deeper than I thought, and in the letter he recapitulated and resumed the conversation. I looked for the letter just now to recount to you the words he used:
"I think your dad has a deeper connection with American than we understand. He has a relationship with it. They have confronted each other, and he has looked America in the eyes. Our generation doesn't have that kind of relationship with this country. At all."

I thought the point extremely prolific. A form of identity emerges and at once is at stake. My dad's identity is married into the word and this emotional adherence to capitalization emerges as a form of pride. Pride in one's existence and one's character. And thats not bad or good. I don't know what to feel, myself. Nationalism is this big scary machine that doesn't seem like it should feel real. But it's seeped into everything about me.
It's been betrothed to my identity on the Pacific Coast of an Old World. And because of this, it has influenced my opinions on most everything. (If I know it. If I don't know it.) It has influenced what I see, it has influenced what I believe, it has sunk into the sound of my voice.

And I haven't looked into the eyes of America.

Yet.