A former neighbor of mine, whose grandparents came to the US fleeing the Mexican Revolution in the 1920s, is from a small Texas town. He has a bit of a Texas drawl.

A Tejano neighbor of mine has traced his ancestry back to a Converso conquistador in Monterey, Mexico (bit of a contradiction there, but so it goes..) . He has a standard Midwestern/American accent.

In Guatemala, I was once identified as speaking “Border Spanish.” When I taught school in Texas, Hispanic students born in the US ) whose first language was probably English) sometimes reacted to my Spanish by saying I “spoke Chinese,” which meant that I spoke too fast. (You work in Maracaibo and other places, you learn to speak fast.)

Regarding your not being able to identify the Louisiana accent, I don’t know what to say. I would have to hear it. I identify a Cajun accent as being a somewhat French accent, which I first heard on offshore rigs in the Gulf. A plumber did some work on my place whom I thought was from Louisiana. It turned out that his father was French Canadian raised in New Hampshire, but had moved to Montreal, where the plumber spent his childhood. He told me had been mistaken many times for being from Louisiana.

At the same time, I have worked with Cajuns who haven’t had much French in their accents- from standard American to Southern.

New Orleans is another case. The first time I heard someone from New Orleans, I thought he was from Brooklyn. Others from the Bayou City have sounded more Southern to me.
Louisiana is a mish-mash.

You keep coming back for more. I’m not the one with the personality problem.

“I wasn’t the one offering self-aggrandizing insults directed at categories of people. I contented myself with insulting one person who deserved it.”

You’d make quite the little hall monitor Artie. Certainly have the personality for it.

” ‘When I lived in Houston, I used to occasionally talk to guys in the oil business in Louisiana. Not executives, but field managers and the like. They were tough to understand.’

Was it the Cajun accent?
When I worked in Trinidad, I had no trouble understanding most Trinis. However, when I drove on country roads, I had trouble understanding some of the people I picked up hitching. I needed to remind myself that like myself, they were native English speakers.”

I don’t know what it was precisely. It was a very rounded, and to my ears incomplete pronunciation, that sounded mumbled, as if they had a mouth full of something.

Another interesting accent – if it can be classified as such – that I came across, was something you “might can” call Tex-Mex; or better, Hispanic Texan. It was a vaguely broadened and usually somewhat slowly delivered, Texas style drawl … just varying by a few noticeable degrees.

I have no idea if these few guys I encountered were descendants of the Hispanic Texians of the 1830s, or whether their families had simply been American long enough to have acclimated fully, but they had the full rig. Boots, truck, hat, manner, and drawl.

Archives are a wonderful thing. Other examples of this interview-format exist.

A big problem with all archives, be it recordings of Those Who Knew and Those Who Were There … or one’s own burgeoning website-archive – is knowing/documenting whether anybody is paying attention. Is there a benefit?

On a website, we have many ways to try to ‘up our act’. Some of them are sophisticate, complex, and a large load (on multiple levels). Some of them are simple. KISS is a great touch-stone.

If we are going to tinker with Tags, and improments to Categories, we can make the effort more Scientific by anticipating the need & importance of, and including the means to know & record what is working, and what isn’t.

This broadly translates to Server Logs. There is a large body of Guru Grade server stuff. But because most people are not webserver-gurus, there are also products that tone down the techno-orgy.

The trick is to find plugins, or otherwise employ methods to know whether a new way of presenting Tags etc on a post encourages more readers to click on them, and go look at an index of other posts dealing with the same topic.

Comments are important. Comments on archived posts are catalytic. To be able to know that this is happening (or not) turns a scatter-gun approach into engineering, even science.

Ordinary adults who’ve heard recordings of their own voice understand that what they think they hear as they speak isn’t what others are hearing. Evidently, you didn’t get the memo.

Now, that said, I wish you well and I hope you manage to extract that bug you’ve got up your ass; whoever put it there.

I wasn’t the one offering self-aggrandizing insults directed at categories of people. I contented myself with insulting one person who deserved it.

There are lumpers and splitters among the generators of taxonomies. This map identifies two notable Southern dialects, with some localized exceptions.

https://aschmann.net/AmEng/#LargeMap5Right