Beryl, who is described as "eating and staying in bed all day," wears a caftan and sits in bed propped up by pillows, whining in an indeterminate flat accent.
Under the layers acquired through much moving around in the world, there remained — like a canal still flowing in the oldest part of a city — the flat accent of the English Midlands.
It never occurs to him that in Kikongo, a language in which meaning hangs on intonation, bangala may mean "'precious and dear," but it also means the poisonwood tree -- a virulent local plant -- when spoken in the flat accent of an American zealot.
But in one important way this is not a typical Westchester play group: the happy chatter has the long, flat accent of Australia, with a sprinkle of New Zealand and Scotland.
It seems that the very French, oh so ooh-la-la Sophie is actually Kate, a Minnesotan born and bred, complete with flat accent and droning intonation.
A handsome, gray-haired man with a flat Boston accent, he was dressed, appropriately, in waders.
Shepherd, with a flat Midwestern accent masking his natural Southern one, turns seamlessly into Nick, the self-proclaimedly honest, not-quite-omniscient narrator, as he reads.
The bad part "would be the on-and-off flickers, because they'd be unpredictable," he says with a flat Chicago accent.
She is a solicitous woman who talks with a flat Midwestern accent, making jokes and telling herself while she works how awful she is.
The Frosheisers were not a military family; Chris, fifty-eight, a salesman's son from Chicago with a flat Midwestern accent, had joined the Army reserve in 1969, mainly to avoid going to Vietnam.
She is fifty-two and speaks with a flat Missouri accent; the day we met, she was wearing a red suit of a style that, in Washington, one associates with Republican women.
