Bdelygmia (del-ig’-mi-a): Expressing hatred and abhorrence of a person, word, or deed.
I hated people who spoke English with a Canadian accent. There is an insidious motive behind it. We all know regional accents are learned and signify solidarity with agendas requiring unity.
My name is Bill Jeffers and I spent my adult life as a CIA agent stationed in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The station was located in the basement of a Tim Horton’s near the University of Toronto, a hotbed of Pro-Canadian activism. For example, most students drank a shot of maple syrup daily and would dress as Mounties on the weekend when they went ice-skating, mostly with their intramural hockey teams with names like “The North Americans,” “The Invaders,” and “Canada First.”
Part of our mission was to recruit native speakers of Canadian to learn to affect an American accent and model it along the border, and slowly Americanize the border residents’ speech, and eventually, teach them to ridicule the Canadian accent and build a movement assuring American hegemony along a 3000-mile language corridor, if you will, between the US and Canada, dominated by the American accent. It would be Canadian in name only.
In order for me to operate and infiltrate effectively, I had to affect a Canadian accent. It was difficult at first to give up my American accent—so much that I loved and all that was decent in the world—is expressed by that accent in all its manifestations from “you all” to “U-Haul.” I was becoming Canadian.
I started eating poutine, nanaimo bars, Montreal smoked meat, peameal bacon, and many more Canadian foods. I felt these dishes moving through my bloodstream, “Canadianizing” me as I digested. My craving for poutine washed down by two or three Molsons was driving me me into the arms of the Canadians. My colleagues back at the station didn’t suspect a thing. I struggled to talk American when I was there. I reached a point where talking American was just too difficult, since I went full Canadian. My colleagues didn’t mind, seeing the accent as a part of the job.
My Canadian accent was like an infection that had killed my American identity—I hated it, but it was part of my job to be Canadian and gain Canadians’ trust as I introduced them to my American-speaking operatives so they could infiltrate their communities and Americanize them.
When looked in the mirror I hated the Canadian I saw. But once you’ve become Canadian, as I found out, there’s no going back. I knew my mission would fail. The Canadian ethos was like a beaver trap crushing my soul, squeezing the New York out of me.
Then, I met a Canadian woman named Tess. We got very close. Then, one night after too many Black Velvet sours, I told her my secret. She laughed and told me I was as Canadian as they come. “Have you ever considered working for the Canadian government?” She asked. “What would I do?” I asked. She told me she didn’t know, but we could talk to “somebody” tomorrow. the woman I loved was a Canadian agent. She worked for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. I loved her. I could not be redeemed.
I resigned from CIA. I went to work south of the border for the Canadian government “Canadianizing” Americans. My base of operations is Buffalo, NY. There are many easy marks there—I start with a bottle of Molson and go from there. After two or three Molsons, they turn: they start saying “aboot” instead of about. We go out to my car and I teach them the Canadian national anthem and give them 100 Canadian dollars. After ten or twelve sessions they turn completely Canadian.
As a traitor, I still hate my Canadian accent, but at the same time, I don’t hate Tess. We’re having poutine again for dinner tonight. Her love assuages my self loathing. How aboot that Yank?
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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