While searching for some background on my paternal roots, the family tree leads to Marie Antoinette and I’m not sure how I feel about that. My paternal grandmother, her sister, her brothers, and cousins were sent to America by their great grandmother’s finances and she must have had some sort of money backing her. She didn’t send the kids at the same time. They were sent in increments and sent here to create a new life and every one of them did. My father was in the first generation to be born a US citizen.
My first language was Magyar although I understood my mother’s English. Rumor has it that I’d speak with my father and Mom just knew that we were talking about her since she didn’t speak nor had any understanding of the language. I don’t remember it but my elders used to laugh about it basically because of my mother’s angry reactions. I guess she thought Dad and I had a conspiracy against her. Heck, I don’t know. I just remember laughing a lot when Dad was around.
When I became school age, I was no longer allowed to speak Hungarian. I also had to study the dictionary at home on top of my homework. I learned it well. I was also the winner of statewide spelling bees as a child. I recall one contest that I lost my honorable queen hood. I was asked to spell “sandwich.” I misspelled it as I spelled it out, “s-a-m-w-i-c-h.” One of the judges spoke to me about the misspelling and I’ll not ever forget the lesson. He said, “The reason you misspelled “sandwich” is due to how you’ve heard it. It is a common mispronunciation. Regretfully, both adults and children mispronounce it on a daily basis. Please take your seat.”
I could have died a thousand deaths. After the numerous spelling bee contests I had won, surely I had proven myself as being in full command of the English language, or so I was told. Heck, I spelled words that most adults had never heard used before.
I can’t help but wonder if Marie Antoinette experienced anything so absurd. Then again, with her reputation as it was during that era I think it’s safe to say that nobody cared if she mispronounced “s-a-m-w-i-c-h” even if she did. Her passions, intrigue, scandals, politics, and excessive mannerisms overruled the inability to spell sandwich. Her highness was always in trouble, it seems, and she is a heroine after my own heart with the spunk she had in her. Then again, during her adolescent life, her life and its course were dictated by other people and she became the Queen of France, moreover, she never learned to speak French. Of course, I’m not entirely fluent in French either but I at least studied it for a couple of semesters.
I’ll never have money from “the family lineage.” It’s trapped somewhere in the cultural thing meaning that what money Marie had went to the eldest male, so on and so forth. That’s all well and good, I guess, but I what I want to know is, do my wealthy male cousins know how to spell “sandwich?”
Inquiring minds want to know.
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