Did you cut my deck?

It's the things you don't think of.

I'm pretty fascinated by the language nuances you uncover when you're in a foreign country. The first month I was here, I started to speak like I was Canadian (or at least what my semi-conscious brain thought sounded Canadian) just because I was listening so intently to everyone's accent. I'm sure the Canadian-ness of my accent has actually reduced since then because I've gotten over my initial fascination.

Two of Rachel's work colleagues, a couple who are originally from Brisbane, are both linguists and their theory is that people adopt the accent of their country just enough to be understood by the people in that country. I'm sure there's some truth in this: if you ask an American is there are "any bears around" in an Australian accent, then they don't know what you mean. We say "beahs", whereas they say "bearrs". Sometimes it's just easier to fake that "rr" and be understood sooner. I definitely notice that when I'm in Aussie mode I get asked to repeat myself much more often.

But even after almost a year of this, it still didn't hit me right away why a Canadian at our table at a Magic tournament recently did a double take when I asked if my opponent wanted to "cut my deck". "What the...? Oh..."

(In Magic, you and your opponent both have a deck of cards that you use to play the game. You "duel" using the cards in each of your decks to play the game. One of the rituals at the start of the game is to take half the cards from the top of your opponent's deck and put them on the bottom of the pile, as a minimal protection against cheating.)

You see, when a Canadian says an "e", it leans out toward what we think of as an "a". Now, if you think about what we Australians must sound like to them, our "e"s snip off more like an "i". We sound to Canadians a little like how New Zealanders sound to us. I'm not going to spell out what my Canadian colleague thought I said, but I'm sure he was very confused for that second before he realised it was just my accent.

I dread to think what he would have made of the various other commonly-heard pre-Magic-game phrases such as: "Hang on, I'll just shuffle my deck" or "Would you mind not looking at my deck?" or just "Can I cut your deck?"

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This post was brought to you by Royal Decks Missisauga

(Since whenever I have email conversations with Bug about Magic decks, my Google-mail gives me ads about deckbuilding of the carpentry type. I guess their context-detectors need work.)