Our little girl came home from her first day of school full of questions. One of them was about why a couple of the kids in class ‘talked funny’.

I said that people from different parts of the country pronounce things differently and sometimes use different words.

“So they have an accent, right?” my daughter said. “They talk funny?”

“Everybody talks in different ways,” I tried to explain. “To them, we are the ones who sound like we talk strangely.”

Her eyes grew wide. “Oh, no,” she whispered. “You mean they hear funny too?”