Heard James Lileks call into the Hugh Hewit show last evening. Two guys I feel like friends with. Lileks sounds about like I had imagined, not like Kevin._____ or Jesse Ventura, or Garrison Keillor. No scandanavian lilt, no Minnasoda, just another friendly guy.

The day before I heard a clip of Glenn Reynolds on NPR. I had wondered if he had a Southern accent. Yes, but it's one of those genteel "impordant" accent. I think of Southern sccents as a continuum ranging from Cletuz from the Simpsons, to Billie Carter, then Jimmy, so on until you get to Midwest standard, with an occasional Ya'll thrown in. I'm aware that southern accents are more complex than that, with identifiable variants in the Carolinas (Andy Griffith), Georgia, Tennesse, Kentucky,Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas. But I'm not sophisticated enough to have them pinned down.

Utah has its own accents, inherited from British and Scandanavian immigrants. My dad had a distinct tendency to convert words like horse and lord to harse and lard.
As a little kid, I remember a reciprocal shifting of words like car to cor. My dad's grandparents were from Northern England, and I imagine that's where this accent came from.

I lived in Springville, near Provo, until I was nine. We then moved to Ames, Iowa where my Dad studied for his masters degree in Animal Nutrition. Then we moved to Gurnee, Illinois when I was twelve. I came back to Utah to attend college at BYU, and stayed here. One of my sisters still lives in Waukegan, Illinois and has acquired Chicago/Milwaukee accent most noticeable when she says "daller" for "dollar." My younger brother settled in Sydney, Ohio. I have an older sister who lives in Provo and an older brother who lives in Mesa, Arizona.

When I hear myself on tape, I'm struck by my hard r and mumbling, but I can't say I have a distinctive accent. Neither do my two boys, but I wouldn't expect them to, their mother being from Libertville, Illinois via Edina, Minnesota.

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