Ah fond memories, still can't understand it though.

sounds like it might be related to gawky (the awkward bit)

can't place it in respect to outsized...yet...so I am somewhat flummoxed

I come from the Otley area of Wharfedale and you can still draw a line on the map by the place names and see where the Danish language stopped and the Anglos started

2 miles north of the river is HUBY - 'by' is town so 'Hugh's town'
2 miles south you cross the river and it all goes Saxon 'ley' or field clearing - otley, ilkley, guiseley etc
And scattered among are the old celtic british /welsh names - Otley Chevin is a big sharp topped hill and the Welsh/Britannic Celtic language has Chevwyn meaning a ridge.
At the airport 2 miles east, there are 'Dons' which is the Britannic/Celtic name for a hill.
Rawdon, Yeadon, Baildon - all villages on the top of hills - and then south to Doncaster/Wimbledon etc
The east riding is full of references to the norse god thor - Thormanby is the classic. Can't beat WETWANG though

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wetwang

ps my great granddad and his welsh wife who was a Bevan emigrated to Yorkshire from Ocle Pychard, Herefordshire in the 1870's and my grandma's dad was a fugitive sheep thief from dublin - so I am not a purebred Tyke

I grew up in London, but never really had much more of an accent than, say, Eddie Izzard does. In fact, I used to get teased by some kids for having a 'posh' accent, despite coming from Cahmden Tahn.

Whenever I go back now, my accent goes immediately into some weird Eastenders Mockney Dick Van Dyke thing that I can't control. No idea why.

Weird....

Despite the British horror over US English, it sounds as thought there might actually be more variance between some of the UK regional accents than that between a "mild" English accent and a Midwestern US dialect.

Sorry don't know, but you've made me think of a word used in my Mum's family, I have no idea how it's spelled and I wonder if it comes from my grandfather's time in India: "aller-keefic" meaning not bothered about 2 alternatives, eg "Do you want tea or coffee?" "I'm allerkeefic"

I suspect you're right. I lived in a small village in England growing up - 7 miles in one direction was Stoke on Trent, 4 miles in the other direction was a market town (Leek) - I could tell the differnce in the accents between the 2 places.

One aspect that I have not seen commented on, is the similarities, the areas of the accents that make me feel more at home.

One example is 'France', I say it much closer to an average American than I do to many British English speakers.

I say it with a short 'a', like the 'a' in at, rather than like the 'o' in other. (tough this could get complicated as some Americans do seem to say other more like ather)

I like to correct people who say I have a British accent - no such thing

you can have a Scottish/Welsh/English/Northern Irish accent then sub divide it into regions..but a British accent ?

Some of American English is straight from the various immigrants - wifey is from Milwaukee where a huge % were German. When she says 'house' there is a very long drawn out 's' at the end and an 'owww' in the middle and it sounds just like hausssss - arny talk. 2 houses are how-sesss

Also American pronunciations sound like people have learned English from a book which many of them did

I get A-lan because they learn the sound 'A' and then apply it anywhere in a word 'A-dolf Hitler' an 'Ay-ccident' 'Mayny people don't know that'.
...and jaym not jam - it's not so much an accent, it's English learned from a book by a Polish guy reading by candle light who has learned the alphabet live from an English speaker but that's it. I will be the same when i learn more Spanish this winter from a book.
Where there is an extra vowel, that is an accent from Ireland especially ( my may-et not mate) - but a few hundred years ago, the Irish and Scots and Welsh were not English speakers so their 'accents' are really their best 'take' on pronunciation when they were learning English, much like an Indian (from India) might use a W instead of V and much like a Yorkshireman who's native tongue was Danish four hundred years after the Saxon invasion of Southern England and the invention of English, has an accent more like Danish or East Friesian than Southern English. I had an East Friesian girlfriend and sitting down and talking with her family was like listening to Yorkshire Tyke. I had an intensive 3 week one-on -one German course 10 hours per day and was told that Yorkshire people can 'do' German easily as their vowels are already 'hard' like German. The German instructor couldnt find 'taluv' in her English dictionary and asked me what it meant as they said it to her in every shop !

Go to google translator and translate 'thank you' from english to danish - it will return 'tak' -yorkies still talk danish.

My father used to say that very word. He larded his conversation with a lot of Arabic, German & Italian phrases (picked up in the army, 1939-1947.) Also Scottish & Gaelic since he seved in a highland regiment. I usually couldn't understand what the f#$% he was talking about. That was my excuse, anyway.

That word, I'm not sure if it is German (alles-something?) or Arabic in origin...

Ah that's interesting, sounds like it's an army word then.

After our posting in Germany we used the phrase mox nix, a bastardization of macht nichts-makes no difference. Trouble is if someone wasn't in the military there, it doesn't mean anything to them.

Indeed, I believe the US equivalent is Tony, which was named after subscribers to Time Out New York.

I think the longer term etymology of "tony" is from the French word "ton" as used in the late eighteenth century & early 19th century in England; "the ton" were the wealthy, fashionable, influential classes. Jane Austen uses the word several times in her novels.

Here's one early instance of "tony" from the Oxford English Dictionary;
"1886 Pall Mall G. 24 Sept. 5/1 Nevern-square, with its comfortable and, as the Americans have it, ‘tony’ residences."

One thing that I will never understand is this ---- when a person from U.K. first starts to live here in the U.S. when they discover that people over here just keep asking them to repeat themselves because they can't understand certain prunoninations of many of the words in the sentence ------ why the British person still continues to talk like they did in U.K. surely they can easily get into the habit of pronouncing all there words the way American's do then they will have no problems,
When I first started to live in the U.S. 32 YEARS AGO within the first year all my words were pronounced the way American's pronounce them, it was not hard at all,and It quickly became a habit, and everyone over here could understand me perfectly, and everytime I returned home to my native England everyone there could understand me perfectly, so what does that tell you, who speaks the more correct English? It's nice I suppose to try and keep you British accent but at the cost of sounding like a compleat idiot over here?