NOT HEARING THE ACCENT.

NOT HEARING THE ACCENT. I have difficulty getting an accent right because I don’t hear the differences. Early in our courtship, Mary Jane kept trying to convince me that there was a difference between how I pronounced the word “measure” and the way most people pronounced it. I was convinced that there was a difference when I got back a draft of a memo I had dictated about some proposed legislation, and the word “measure” was consistently spelled “major.” This was in 1972 because Mary Jane watched a debate among—as I remember— Democratic Presidential candidates Eugene McCarthy (Minnesota), Hubert Humphrey (Minnesota), and George McGovern (South Dakota). In the debate, they all discussed different proposed measures to deal with national problems. Mary Jane reported happily that: “They all talk the way you do.”