The Compliment

When I was in graduate school in Austin, Texas, my third year I was there, in 1984, I met a wonderful French friend from Pruzilly. Catherine B. and I became good friends and room mates, and are friends to this day. In  her group of friends there was a French guy from Macon, France. I remember his first name, Didier, but not his last name. Anyway, at a dinner outing with a group of French students, he decided to compliment me on my French accent, and assumed I was French. He was trying to figure out what part of France I was from. Well, I had to tell him I was not French, but Belgian, and Flemish at that. His enchantment with me plummeted immediately, and he became hostile, angry. He ignored me from then on. I did not care, I did not like him anyway. But I was rather surprised at his animosity because I turned out not to be French, I just spoke it well enough to fool a native. I thought that was pretty cool, but he did apparently not think so. It's a good thing my friend Catherine turned out to be such a cool friend, because the impression Didier left, with its prejudice overtones, was far from positive. The same year, a woman from Uruguay, a graduate student visiting friends of hers at the Spanish Department where I was getting a Master's degree in Spanish and Latin American Literature, paid me a compliment along the same lines. She thought I was a native from Columbia. A good compliment, because the Colombian accent is considered something of the bees knees in Latin American accents. Now, when I told this woman I was a native from Belgium, a Flemish native, and that I had only been speaking Spanish fluently for about four years, and only studied it for 7, she was truly impressed. She made me feel good, special even, and the rest of the dinner party agreed with her. Apparently, one compliment is not like another. Now a days, few people even notice I have a slight European accent when I speak English, so these two anecdotes of two very different compliments on my linguistic ability in two languages neither of which are my mother tongue, are somewhat remarkable, even if I say so myself.