“There’s no use comparing them—it’s swings and roundabouts.”

I blinked, a gear in my mind snagging. “It’s … what?”

“Swings and roundabouts,” Sarah repeated, enunciating more, like I hadn’t heard her properly the first time. I continued to stare at her. “Like apples and oranges,” she added.

The gearbox fell apart. What is she talking about? I essayed to understand for several minutes, disoriented. Apples and oranges are both fruits, but a swing is a toy and a roundabout is a road. The essence of the idiom seemed entirely lost.

Finally, she said, “They’re both on a playground, why is this so hard to understand?”

They’re both WHERE?

That’s how I learned that in British English the playground merry-go-round is called a roundabout.

***

How I speak is a record of where I’ve lived, whom I’ve known, and, more recently, where I want myself to be. As a Canadian living in Michigan, I held on to some regionalisms, like toque and washroom, though my pronunciations changed: my long sorry and round about dissolved unbidden, though I avoided, for the most part, claiming the nasally Michigan a of words like calendar. My accent, already vague, became indistinguishably North American.

The regional differences between Ontario and Michigan were slight. I never said something that was incomprehensible to my friends from the US, and likewise I mostly understood their regionalisms. (I did once falter at coke as a generic term for sugary carbonated beverages.)

Moving to Scotland was another story. Here, entire phrases can pass through my ears without clear meaning. The dynamics at play are far different than those in Michigan: Canadian English is far more similar to US English than UK English, and many people in Scotland speak in a blend of Scots and English. I’m better situated in the North-East than anywhere else in the country, since my grandparents maintained many aspects of Doric—the local Scots dialect—throughout their decades living in Canada. Still, I’m constantly learning new words, syntaxes, and pronunciations.

My accent betrays me as a foreigner, though few people are brave enough to guess where from. I’ve heard anecdotally that Europeans will ask those with a North American accent if they’re Canadian, because the Canadians will be offended if they’re assumed to be American and the Americans will be flattered by the error. I don’t know whether that’s true, whether the few “Are you from Canada, then?”s I’ve received were sincere. I wish I did sound Canadian, though distinctions between North American accents barely register to British ears.

My assimilation in Michigan was incidental and largely unwanted. Not so here. On occasion, my speech is a barrier to understanding: vowel merges have led multiple people to mistake my tale about seeing the ferry with spotting a fairy or my ponderings about Frodo and Merry as Frodo and Mary. I still slip up and say pants (here the term for underwear) rather than trousers or fail to expect pop (soda, coke, etc.) when offered juice. I’m constantly asking for a ride, forgetting its vulgar local connotations, when I should request a lift. I believe I have some responsibility to speak more accessibly in my context—to replace apartment with flat and sidewalk with pavement and zucchini with courgette. I even aim to shift some pronunciations: when I remember, my “Very Berry” tea is no longer an exact rhyme.

Local syntax, too, has seeped into my language. I’ll text “That’s me home” to say “I’m home,” or respond “I haven’t any” when I would once have said “I don’t have any.” These changes are less intentional, flowing from the phrases I hear in day-to-day life. By metrics unknown even to me, I have picked out structures to appropriate and others to leave foreign; I don’t use “amn’t I” (“aren’t I”) but have seized onto “Come round mine” (“Come over to my apartment”).

I’m glad for the assimilation, forced and accidental alike. I see myself here in the long term, and I ought to communicate accordingly. I suspect there will always be things to catch me by surprise—I recently engaged in a minor standoff over the meaning of frown (to me, a downturned mouth; to Brits, a furrowed brow)—and I hope I can keep supplying jarring North Americanisms in exchange (yesterday it was “teeter totter”). I still haven’t found myself saying “swings and roundabouts,” but I know that day might yet come.

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