I was at an IT seminar in London sometime in the 1970s — the subject of the seminar itself has dissolved, but that one afternoon hasn’t. It sits there in memory like a misplaced paperclip: small, metallic, inexplicably persistent.
During a coffee break, a German delegate — built like he unloaded lorries for a living — leaned over and asked me, with complete sincerity, “Should I say eeether, or eyether?”
Without thinking, I said, “You can say either.”
And then I laughed. Not at him — at the sentence. It had answered his question by refusing to answer it at all, a kind of linguistic sleight‑of‑hand that amused me more than it should have. English does this sometimes: it sets a trap, then springs it on the wrong person.
He did not laugh. He stiffened, suspicious. A large, serious man does not enjoy being laughed at by a stranger over a vowel, and for a moment it looked as though I had chosen the wrong vowel.
I was rescued by a colleague — an ex‑German teacher — who stepped in and explained the joke. Explained that either is one of English’s quiet booby traps, a word that pronounces itself two different ways depending on who’s holding it, and that I had just answered a pronunciation question with the word itself, which is either brilliant or useless.
The correct answer, I realised afterwards, was simply: “Both are acceptable.” Nobody laughs at that. Nobody nearly gets hit over that, either.
Later that same afternoon, I fell into conversation with two delegates who spoke with unmistakable Yorkshire accents. Not careful English. Not textbook English. Yorkshire — vowels and all, as if they’d grown up somewhere near Leeds. Only later did I learn they were Dutch, from somewhere near Rotterdam1.
I’ve wondered about it ever since. Yorkshire carries more Old Norse in it than most English — a residue of Viking settlement that never quite washed out. Dutch sits on the same Germanic branch, closer to that old root than standard Southern English ever was. Perhaps what I was hearing wasn’t two men who’d learned English well. It was two accents recognising each other across a millennium, meeting somewhere in the middle of a coffee break in London.
Two encounters, one afternoon: an accent that crossed a sea and arrived undamaged, and a language native to me that nearly got me thumped.