There is simply nothing funny about being sick. Whether it's a cold or COVID or cancer, there is a personal level of misery involved that each sufferer experiences. Some afflictions are more serious than others, to be sure: more dangerous, more crippling, more debilitating. But even if it's just a bug that has no name and makes you feel lousy for a few days, all you care about is enduring it and coming out the other side. And people, by and large, are sympathetic to your plight, as we've all been there to one extent or another.
Equally unamusing are the side effects of the condition or the treatments associated with it. Just like the underlying cause, they can be severe or just merely annoying. But even if it's just a minor cough or a hitch in your step, you can generally count on deference and a kind word from those around you who know that sooner or later they will be in your proverbial shoes.
Unless your situation results in FAS.
As reported in the British Medical Journal, a man in his fifties was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He underwent treatment, but eventually succumbed to the disease after 20 months. Nothing funny about that at all. With one small exception: somewhere along the line, whether as a result of the disease, the treatment or some other unexplained factor, he developed an "uncontrollable Irish accent" despite never having been to Ireland nor having immediate relatives from the country. "His accent was uncontrollable, present in all settings and gradually became persistent," the report said. Seems that he was one of just 100 or so reported cases of FAS, or Foreign Accent Syndrome.
While researchers aren't sure what the cause is, they surmise that it's due to some kind of injury or condition that is brought on either by trauma or treatment that affects the brain. However, it doesn't even have to be a major event to be a trigger: in at least one case it was brought on by a series of migraines, another by dental surgery, and two more recent cases may have even been caused by COVID. Whatever the root cause, the manifestation of the condition is in timing, intonation and tongue placement, which together results in altered speech which sounds, well, foreign. In and of itself it's not dangerous, other than the mental anguish that comes with friends and family around you telling you to knock it off.
FAS was first reported in 1907 by a French neurologist who detailed a Parisian man who developed an Alsatian accent after a stroke. Since then it has popped up irregularly in speakers of different nationalities whose native speech took on a foreign lilt. The most famous case was in 1941 when a Norwegian woman was hit by shrapnel during World War II; she developed a German accent and was ostracized as a result. Since then there have been cases where sufferers have shifted in all directions, from American English accents to British, Japanese to Korean, and Spanish to Hungarian.
Linguists and researchers who have studied the syndrome note that sufferers have imperfect accents, and the shift is more in the perception of listeners as to how they sound vs. actual native speakers of another language. It's as though they are affecting an accent, a distinction without a difference for those afflicted. Said one English speaking woman who began speaking with a French accent after a stroke in 1999. "While I have nothing against the French, this is not for me. It does nothing for my street credibility with my three sons." Or another English speaker who began to sound like she was from some Eastern European country, and resorted to carrying a note from a doctor describing her condition after she got fed up with people explaining to her how the buses worked in her town.
FAS is a real thing, but it's only an accent: it changes your pronunciation, not your vocabulary or behavior. So if your American friend's "schedule" starts to slide towards the British "shed-u-ale," they could be a sufferer. If, on the other hand, they give up their two cents to ask for a tuppence worth, or ask for their beer to be warm, they're just taking the piss out of you.
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Marc Wollin of Bedford sounds fluent in American English, he thinks. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
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