Eric Adams sworn-in as New York City mayor in Times Square

[NNadir]

25. My wife is a vocal chameleon. She falls into whatever accent she hears.

When we moved to California just before we got married (in Lake Tahoe) she spoke perfect Californian in two weeks.

With her its not intentional; she just does it.

Anyway, whenever she spoke with her mother on the phone, it was like she never left Brooklyn/Staten Island. It always made me laugh and I'd speak to her in Brooklynese until the joke got old.

I enjoy speaking Brooklynese, and when I do, it always surprises people and always generates a laugh. I suspect the dialect, at least as spoken by the lower middle class to which my father belonged, is dying. One doesn't hear it as much as one used to do. I'm glad I remember how to speak it. Whenever I mispronounce a word - which I often do since my vocabulary was generated by reading more than speaking, I excuse myself by saying, "It's OK, I was born in Brooklyn." I can really mangle pronunciations.

(I can move between various accents in the English language readily, and the only one I can't do is Scots, although my father, whose father was a Scot - a Scot in Brooklyn, and who was buried in Brooklyn by the Black Watch who imported Scottish soil for the occasion - could do it very well, employing some contempt for his father, my grandfather, a violent drunk, who on reflection, probably suffered from WWI PTSD.)

My wife's grandparents lived in Brooklyn and over half a century never learned to speak a word of English other than "hello." In their neighborhood everyone spoke Italian. I understand there are still neighborhoods like that; my sister-in-law says Sheepshead Bay is Russian. That small borough is rich with cultures. That to me is marvelous.