I was an Army brat and we moved around a lot. New kids get picked on. One way to stop being the new kid is to start sounding exactly like everyone else when you talk. So, as a small child, I learned to pick up the dialect of the people around me very quickly. At age 63, it's a long standing habit which I have a terrible time controling. When I meet someone who has an interesting dialect I always explain to them right away that if I speak to them for very long I'm going to start sounding like them, tell them why I do it and ask them to please not be angry with me because I'm truly NOT mocking them.

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Not exactly, I was a high-functioning autistic kid but learning disabilities "didn't exist" in those days so I had a lot of teacher telling me "You just aren't trying" when I knew darn well that I WAS trying. Some things just didn't make sense to me and most teachers just wrote me off as a bad kid instead of helping me learn. So my grades weren't good but I was usually able to avoid bullies by becoming just another "invisible" kid who they never noticed. In later years I was able to figure out that I had some sort of learning disability but never knew what it was until about a year ago when a friend suggested I take the AQ test online. http://aq.server8.org/ So, finally, at age 62, I found out that I am autistic. It's not that I feel good about being autistic, it's that, finally, after all these years, I know it wasn't my fault. I was trying, I wasn't a bad kid, I did have a problem and, doggone-it, I wasn't lying to them. So there. :)