Wonderful.

And this is probably my, I don't know, sixth or seventh conference actually wearing a boot.

Are you kidding me? Oh, my God.

The joke, the running joke is my frienders from other chapters will come up and look to see if I'm in a boot and go, oh, my gosh.

And I think last year was my first conference in many years.

Is it always

the battle yes yes yes I

we always like to just kind of start it I don't even remember how many years ago it started and so now it's whatever we have you know budgeted for our chapter funds we always like to kind of break it out but dallas did take one step up and do the extra hundred and hundred and here i was thinking yeah we're gonna do the extra five and i went dang it they got a leg up they got a leg up next year just watch out dallas

After all, accents are a part of who we are and where we come from.

One of the questions I often asked in my research was, "If you could wake up tomorrow morning with any English accent in the world, any accent, and that would be your accent, what would you like to wake up with?" They all said, "I would love to wake up tomorrow with native English accent." Later in the same interview, I always ask them about would they like to lose their accent, and once they started to think about losing...

I mean, I can still remember one Italian, um, s- she was a teacher of English.

"I am Italian.

I am proud of being Italian.

I do not want to lose my Italian identity." Um, and therefore, when it came to it, she, um, wanted to keep her Italian accent in her English.

How you accommodate will depend on who you are speaking to and whether the first language is similar to yours.

In some first languages, um, there is no wuh sound, so the vuh is used: north, south, east, west.