weird. Never heard of it. My wife worked in public radio, journalism. It was always referred to as Midwestern accent in school, etc, with regards to news/tv dialect.
Thanks for the info bit. I learned something new.
what does a butter knife look like?
I was hosting an event, and a guest asked for a butter knife. I reached in my drawer and produced what I was raised to call a butter knife and she decried that it was not a butter knife. Lacking any other such thing, she had to make due with what I gave her.
Very much so. It's a lilting, almost sing-song accent. I really like it. There are dozens of very different English accents, too - Cockney, Liverpool, RP (the one you probably think of as English), West Country, Birmingham, Geordie, etc., all very different to one another.
I know what you mean, though. In the US I can differentiate "general Southern" and "New York" if they're pronounced, but little else, though I understand there are far more. I can't distinguish US and Canadian accents from each other - is that typical?
A few years ago, when visiting Sweden for work, I spent time with my Swedish and English coworkers. I taught them the meaning of "riding shotgun" and "calling shotgun."
Do our non-Americans here know why "knock up" is funny to Americans? Do you know the terms Shag and shotgun? Do our non-Southerners here know the Shag? (I bet few Southerners even know the Shag, nowadays.)
Over the years many American newsreaders have actually been Canadian, because a general Canadian city accent tends to come off sounding Middle American. One example would be John Roberts of Fox News who, when I was a teenager, was a VJ on Canada's music TV station "Much Music" and known as J.D. Roberts. The Canadian accents that are portrayed in media are a general mish-mash of rural Canadian and East Coast Canada manners of speech.
On Welsh: Actress Eve Myles (Doctor Who, Torchwood, Merlin, Broadchurch) is one who I think has a beautiful example of a Welsh accent.