by Jennifer Bunn

Created on: August 27, 2008

I lived in Texas for nearly four years, and by the time I left I could say "ya'll" with the best of them, but living there taught me that there is English, and then there is English Texas-style, delivered with a slow, long-as-a-Texas-rattlesnake drawl.

I am a Canadian, which brought forth many wondering comments from the natives, comments that invariably had to do with how I coped with snow all year 'round, and how we ever accomplished anything when it was dark all the time. I let these comments slide like water off a duck's back. It seemed that, to many Texans, Canada was on par with the North Pole. I welcomed the chance to educate my new friends and neighbors about my country of which I am so proud, even if our money apparently resembles something from a child's board game.

What caused me some difficulty was the language barrier that sometimes existed, with comic results at times. I remember being at work one night as a nurse in a small rural hospital in the Texas panhandle when a distraught young man came into the emergency room. One of the nurses I was working with admitted the patient, then returned to the nursing station to inform me what was wrong with the young man in question. Imagine my surpise and horror when informed by my fellow colleague that he had "a bowl on his penis". My imagination ran wild, picturing the young man with the bowl on his unmentionable. What kind of bowl could it be? A salad bowl? A cereal bowl? How big was this bowl in question, and why could he not just remove it? How did it get there? My colleague and I went around and around this issue until I finally asked her to SPELL the word in question. In exasperation, she said, "He has a B-O-I-L on his penis and it hurts!" I haven't laughed as hard as I did that night. My friend did too, when she finally realized that I was imagining the poor young man with a soup bowl dangling from his privates.

I once put an ad in the paper to sell a used couch, as we had purchased a new one. After two weeks went by with no reply to my ad, I asked my neighbor why it was that no one would want to buy my couch. After all, it was in good condition and had hardly been used. My neighbor stared at me blankly and said, "What's a couch?" I stared at her as if she had gone temporarily insane and asked her what the piece of furniture was called that she sat on while watching television. She replied, "You mean the sofa?" She said that the reason no one had answered my ad is because no one had any idea just what exactly I was selling.

I quickly learned to make people spell if I could not understand what they were telling me. I'm quite sure that the entire town thought I was crazy. (You know, the crazy lady from Canada? The one that likes to spell so much?)

You say "potato"...I say "Spell it!"

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