Found only (as the name would suggest) in the City of Cincinnati, the Cincinnati Yellow Lamps are a distinctive but easily overlooked feature of the city's streetscape. Known officially as "Island Lights" and often colloquially referred to as "Turtle Lamps," the devices were installed to alert drivers to the presence of raised islands within the roadway.
The lamps are known for their distinctive shape and color; the yellow glass globe resembles a bell, fanciful helmet, or turtle shell (hence the nickname), and is adorned with a spun aluminum canopy that resembles a slightly-squished chocolate kiss.
Some residents and local authorities trace the lamps' origin to markers for streetcar platforms that were situated in the middle of roadways. This claim is bolstered by the fact that the yellow color matches the color branding of the last of Cincinnati's early 20th-century streetcar lines. However, photos of streetcar platforms show a different type of lamp, casting doubt on this assertion.
The current lamps can indicate any elevated median in a roadway within the city limits, including either a center island or a corner "pork chop" island associated with a channelized right turn lane.
The fragility, high replacement cost, and non-critical function of the Cincinnati Yellow Lamps leave them slated for obsolescence, with reports claiming that the city will no longer replace them when they fall or get damaged. However, after a lamp fell in August of 2014 and was salvaged by a local lamp enthusiast (thinking it was destined for the scrap heap) and turned into a floor lamp, the enthusiast community was surprised to find the fallen lamp replaced a few weeks later.
A "Cincinnati Yellow Lamps" Facebook group receives photos and other reports of existing and former lamp locations and has close to 300 followers. The group has also compiled a Google map of over 50 existing lamps and 15 former lamp locations found throughout the city.
Many years ago, museum conservator Clarke Bedford found himself alone with time to spare in his plain, mid-sized Maryland abode. From that day forward, Bedford began using all of his energy and heaps of unique objects and recycled metal to construct one of the world’s most hidden, out-of-place, and extravagantly designed art houses.
Known as “Vanadu,” Clarke Bedford’s peculiar art house is filled with a large collection of antiques, junk, and historical objects. Throughout the high-density cluster of sculptures and mosaics you’ll find a horned wooden owl, a black and white striped cone, a skull, a statue of John Locke, a German language globe stuffed inside a rusted horn, and a woman’s face covered in glass and colored fragments of junk.
Clarke Bedford also owns four fully functional art cars, made of everything from car parts to used washing machine pieces and moose antlers, which are typically placed on the curbside of the art house. The most famous car, the traveling Vanadu Ford, features vases and horns on the sides and graveyard spires on the roof, and it even has its own Facebook account. When he was working as a conservator for the Hirshhorn Museum, Bedford would drive one of the elaborate silver cars on his daily commute to work, and to this day the art cars remain one of Bedford's major sources of transportation.
Clarke Bedford’s named his art car and house “Vanadu” to honor the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose famous “Kubla Khan” poem emerged from an opium-induced dream about the ancient Chinese city of Xanadu, once under the rule of Mongol emperor Kublai Khan. In addition to "Vanadu," Bedford also calls his assemblage of recycled materials the Assemblage Cottage, pronounced with a French accent as “As-sem-blage Co-ttage.”
On April 26th, 1986, flaws and rushed tests at Chernobyl Plant No. 4 led to the worst nuclear power plant disaster in history. Now, thirty years later, the plant will finally be contained, covered by a massive concrete and steel dome designed to effectively quarantine the building for 100 years.
Just after the disaster, the Soviet Union had a slapdash cover built over the reactor, to limit further fallout damage. (The workers who put that together did so at great personal risk, and many of them died.) But over the decades, that structure has cracked and warped, leading to further leakage. This new structure, which is known as the New Safe Confinement, is the size of ten football fields, taller than the Statue of Liberty, and cost $1.6 billion, reports the BBC. According to its main sponsor, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, it’s strong enough to withstand a tornado, and has a corrosion-resistant ventilation system.
The NCS has been under construction since 2012. Working anywhere close to the plant is dangerous, so it was built about 1000 feet away. Over the past few weeks, it has been slowly edged over to its final resting place—according to Newser, it’s the largest man-made structure to ever be moved across land. The final positioning is set to happen tomorrow.
Beginning in early 2017, robotic cranes will begin dismantling the old, leaky cover, and faraway crews will suck up radioactive dust using remote-controlled vacuums. And those people who have refused to leave the Chernobyl exclusion zone will have an enormous new landmark to look at.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
The historic city of Brașov is overall a standout location within mountainous central Romania, built originally by Teutonic Knights and German settlers brought in by the King of Hungary to safeguard trade routes and develop the local economy. On top of the peculiar architecture that comes with that unique history, the town also features a big landmark in the form of the one of the smallest streets in Europe, and the world.
Strada Sforii—which translates roughly as "Rope Street"—was built in the 15th century to afford fire fighting brigades passage between the major thoroughfares at either end. Given its close proximity to Brașov's main square, Piața Sfatului, and the historically significant Gothic Lutheran church Biserica Neagră ("Black Church") found therein, Strada Sforii has gone from an urban planning hack to a popular tourist attraction.
Measuring 80 meters (260 feet) long and varying in width from 111-135 centimeters (44-53 inches), Strada Sforii is the third-narrowest street in Europe, after Spreuerhofstraße in Reutlingen, Germany (recognized by Guinness as the narrowest street in the world) and Parliament Street in Exeter, England. At its narrowest point, visitors can touch both walls on either side of the street.
A loop trail through the Muir of Dinnet National Natural Reserve will treat hikers not only to a tranquil exploration of the Aberdeenshire countryside, but also to a geological curiosity that has attracted interest—innocent and nefarious alike—for hundreds of years.
Burn O'Vat was formed approximately 14,000 to 12,000 years ago by meltwater from a retreating ice sheet. Known locally as "The Vat," this glacial pothole is thought to have formed when a rock became lodged in the river bed causing a torrent of water to spiral around and carve out the underlying granite bedrock.
Measuring 13 meters (42 feet) deep and 18 meters (59 feet) wide with a sediment bed estimated at up to 7 meters (23 feet), the bowl is accessed via a narrow stream passage that suddenly opens up into a natural amphitheater.
The Vat has been a popular visitor attraction since the Victorian era, probably due to it's location on Royal Deeside. Local legend has it that the Vat provided sanctuary to the famous Scottish outlaw by Rob Roy Macgregor. While this is mere myth, it has been established that it was used as a hideout from authorities by notorious bandit Patrick Gilroy Macgregor, a 17th-century cattle thief and general roustabout.
The hike to the Vat also affords glimpses at a variety of flora and fauna, along with some other examples of glacial morphology.
Each year, the Swedish city of Gävle celebrates the Christmas season by building a giant straw goat that pretty much begs to be lit on fire. We here at Atlas Obscura often enjoy placing friendly bets on when or if the goat will burn each year, but this year we won’t even get the chance, because the Gävle Goat has already burned, less than 24 hours after it was erected.
Since 1966, a giant goat has been built in Slottstorget square, an oversize version of the traditional Swedish yule goat, and in more years than not, it has been destroyed by vandals. The very first Gävle Goat was destroyed on New Year’s Eve in 1966, and ever since, burning the goat has taken on a mischievous sense of tradition. Usually the flammable goat is burned down, often by drunken arsonists, although even when the goat is set ablaze, the damage is usually contained to the goat itself, rarely getting out of hand.
The goat is traditionally constructed in late November or early December, and from that point on, it’s just a waiting game to see when vandals will strike. Various protections have been put in place and tried out over the years including adding a perimeter fence, covering the goat in coating of flame retardant, employing security cameras, and having the goat personally guarded by volunteers. But no matter how the city tries to preserve the goat, it usually manages to get set on fire.
In recent years, the goat survived through the entire season in 2014, then in 2015 the goat lasted until just after Christmas before it was burned down. This year, on the 50th anniversary of the Gävle Goat’s existence, it didn’t make it a day. This year’s goat was unveiled on Sunday, November 26th, and by Monday the 27th, it had burnt down. According to the Local, the perpetrators of the crime managed to evade detection from any of the cameras set up around the goat, getting up close to it while one of the guards was in the bathroom. The suspect(s) are still at large.
The Gävle Goat cost the city $249,900 to build, but went up in smoke in just minutes, as is the Gävle Goat’s way. There are no official plans to rebuild the goat this year, so we’ll all just have to wait until next year, and hope that our favorite Christmas goat lasts a little longer.
When U.S. astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin and Michael Collins set off from the Kennedy Space Center in 1969 to become the first men to set foot on the moon, they were in a Saturn-V-Rocket, better known as Apollo 11. The development of the rocket was led by Dr. Wernher von Braun, the brilliant engineer prodigy who was recruited by the German Army looking to exploit a loophole in the Treaty of Versailles which did not cover rocket technology. Von Braun was offered a position in the SS in 1940 by Heinrich Himmler. Von Braun knew it would be unwise to turn down Himmler given his power and influence within Hitler's government. Von Braun and many of his fellow rocket enthusiasts got their start in the Verein für Raumschiffahrt, or VfR (Society for Space Travel). It was his work with VfR that brought von Braun to the attention of the Army.
Wernher von Braun was appointed the technical director of the Heeresversuchsanstalt Peenemünde (Peenemünde Army Research Center), working on the development and production of several rockets, most famously, the A-4, later named the V-2, rocket which was used as the first long-range ballistic missile in history by Nazi Germany against the Allies.
The huge center—which included a network of streets, miles of train tracks, three ports, a small airport, several buildings, rocket launch stations and construction halls—was built starting in 1936 and finished within a year using slave workers from concentration camps.
In 1942 an A-4 (later called V-2) from Peenemünde was the first object built by humans to reach outer space, and the rocket factory became known as the “Cradle of Spaceflight.” But starting in 1944, the V-2 rockets assembled at Peenemünde were shipped out to be used in attacks against Great Britain, France, Belgium, and others.
As demand grew and more workers were needed to assemble the rockets, Peenemünde was given its own concentration camp of slave workers for production. A second camp was placed in the basement of one of the construction halls at Peenemünde. Around 5,000 workers were brought to the site, of which 171 were cremated in the nearby Greifswald crematory. Other corpses were buried in various places around the huge research site.
Around 20,000 people interned in the concentration camps connected to Peenemünde died while part of the production of the V-2. By the end of the war, around 3,200 rockets were launched killing more than 8,000 people, many of them civilians. It is the only weapon ever built to have caused more victims during construction than in action.
As the Russians came closer to Peenemünde and after some air strikes by the allied forces in 1943, the bulk of the production site was moved further into the country. Between February and March 1945, the site was evacuated and partly destroyed. Slave workers were marched elsewhere by the SS and many died before reaching their next destination. On March 4, 1945, Peenemünde was occupied by Soviet Troops. Most parts of the research site were still intact and were dismounted and brought to the USSR. The site was used as air force and navy base for Soviet and East German soldiers until 1990. Many of the Peenemünde engineers, scientists and managers surrendered to U.S. forces and were brought to America under Operation Paperclip to be exploited for their knowledge by the US Army. Von Braun, Eberhard Rees, Ernest Stuhlinger, Kurt Debus and many others worked for the US Army to build an improved version of the A-4/V-2 which became the IRBM Redstone missile, also used to launch the first US satellite and the first two sub-orbital Mercury missions. In 1960, most of the von Braun team transferred from the US Army to the newly created NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. They led the development of the Saturn family of rockets that powered the Apollo Program and the successful manned flights to the moon.
Today you can see some train tracks, parts of buildings, bunkers, launch stations and other ruins on the abandoned site. The former power plant is still intact and was in use up until 1990. It now houses a technical museum, the Peenemünde Historisch-Technisches Museum, devoted to the science, development and construction of the rockets at Peenemünde.
Right off the Strip in Las Vegas, Nevada, amidst luxury casinos and towering neon lights, lies something completely out of place. Although bodies of water in the Mojave Desert are hard to come by, Las Vegas holds a collection of over 200 full-sized boats in the middle of the dry land and towering glass skyscrapers that make up Vegas’ CityCenter plaza.
Nancy Rubins’ “Big Edge” sculpture combines over 200 aluminum canoes, kayaks, rowboats, and sailboats, each weighing between 60 and 125 pounds, into one flowering cluster of art. Built in 2009 and still standing today, Big Edge stands at a length of 75 feet and brightens up the day of every visitor to the CityCenter.
Described as a “bouquet” and a “big metal flower,” Big Edge is the epitome of Nancy Rubins’ sculpture art, which specializes in clustering airplane parts, water heaters, and other industrial consumer goods into blooming bundles. Big Edge has also been described as “gravity-defying,” as thousands of pounds of stainless steel are used to make the sculpture appear as if it’s hovering above the ground.
Although Rubins claims that Big Edge has no explicit meaning, its “boats on dry land” concept does draw attention to the troubling difficulties of building a verdant, lush metropolis in the center of an arid desert.
A mother and son, both bedecked in flowing space-age capes, frolic along the beach. "What year is it now? I forgot," says the little boy. "Here, I'll show you," his mother responds. She writes "1999 AD" in the sand.
This short film, produced in 1967 by the Philco-Ford Corporation, a maker of battery-powered tech, imagines the distant future of the year 1999. Amid all the mid-century-modern set dressing, they actually got a lot of things right. In this "society of tomorrow," we can see precursors to personal computers, email, FaceTime, podcasts (complete with the 2x speed feature), online shopping, 3D imaging and more.
But, clearly, this isn't what 1999 was like. The computer technology is all very analog, not to mention the fact that the social aspects are woefully unprogressive. For example, Karen the "wife, mother, and part-time homemaker" spends her days shopping on her computer, after which the bill is sent to her husband's office computer.
It just goes to show how inept we are at imagining the future. We'll just have to wait and see what 2049 will be like.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
A hoarse, yelping bark rang out from the wooded hillside. Then again. The unearthly calls, sounding somewhere between fox and cat, continued in a steady sequence, carrying through the forest’s mossy tree trunks and damp leaf litter, growing louder as they approached. Then, abruptly, the woods fell silent.
“I knew he must be close when the call stopped,” explains French wildlife photographer Laurent Geslin, recounting the moment in January 2011 when he first laid eyes on a wild Eurasian lynx. “I knew that he must have seen me.” Geslin, who has spent the past six years pursuing this elusive beast through Switzerland’s Jura Mountains, was confident that the cat, though shy, would be curious. All he had to do was keep quiet and watch.
“I checked every tree and every branch,” Geslin recalls. “And then I checked again.” He explains how a lynx's lightly marked grey-brown coat blends so perfectly into the dappled backdrop of rock, leaf and shadow that it can disappear in plain view. This time, however, his diligence paid off. One final binocular sweep in the fading light at last revealed those telltale cat contours, materializing from the abstract backdrop like an optical illusion. “He was about 25 meters away, sitting on his backside, looking very calmly at me.” Geslin’s voice still betrays the excitement. “It was a great sensation.”
Since then, Geslin has notched up about 30 precious sightings, ranging from distant glimpses to, on one memorable occasion, a mother leading her three cubs to feed within meters of his hide. This total might seem a modest return for six years of searching—six years of pursuing every clue, staking out every hideaway, and sitting in hides for 96 hours at a stretch. But few people anywhere have enjoyed such success.
Having spent years photographing big cats around the world, Geslin was amazed to find how little was known about the one living on his own doorstep. His book, Lynx: regards croisés (“different perspectives”), published in France in 2014, is the first full photographic study of this species in the wild, and testament to his extraordinary dedication and perseverance.
Just a few decades ago, such a project would have been impossible. The lynx had not been seen in Switzerland since 1904. Once common across much of Europe, it had also disappeared from France, Germany, and many other former strongholds. By 1940, the continent’s entire population had fallen to an estimated 700 animals, confined largely to the wildest reaches of Scandinavia. This sorry tale mirrored that of the lynx’s fellow large carnivores, the wolf, wolverine, and brown bear. All had declined dramatically in Europe, victims both of ruthless persecution— either for sport or because, as hunters of wild game and occasional livestock killers, they were viewed as competition—and the relentless destruction of their natural habitats.
In the 1970s, however, scientists began a pioneering project to reintroduce the lynx to Switzerland, focusing their efforts on the Alps and, a little farther north, the Jura Mountains. Some 30 animals from the Carpathians were, over time, introduced to the Jura, founding a population that has since grown to 130 and spread unassisted into neighboring France. It is these animals that Geslin has been studying, working closely with Swiss-based carnivore conservation group KORA.
The lynx reintroduction project forms part of a larger “rewilding” initiative, of which KORA is a leading proponent. By returning Europe’s native large mammals to the landscapes they once roamed, scientists hope to recreate something of the natural environment that carpeted Europe before humankind began felling forests. Predators, according to the basic laws of ecology, are essential to the healthy functioning of any natural habitat. Remove them and prey species soon proliferate, leaving the environment in much worse condition for everything else that depends on it. “In the nineteenth century the Jura forests were strongly over-exploited and all large mammals, including wild ungulates, became virtually extinct,” explains Urs Breitenmoser, KORA co-founder. Then in the 20th century, without predators around, wild ungulate populations—including red and roe deer and wild boar—rebounded. So much so that their numbers are unsustainable and regularly cause significant ecological damage. Many other regions around Europe are suffering similar effects from burgeoning deer population.
The classic example of how bringing back predators can turn things around is Yellowstone National Park—where, in the 1990s, wolves were reintroduced after 70 years of absence. Elk numbers have since fallen to sustainable levels, allowing overgrazed vegetation to recover, beavers to return, wetlands to develop and ground-nesting birds to thrive. Not all the complexities of this “trophic cascade” are fully understood, but ecologists generally agree that wolves have transformed Yellowstone’s ecology, restoring the park’s ecosystems in a way they had not dreamed possible.
But central Europe is not Yellowstone. How, one might reasonably ask, can we bring back large predatory mammals that long ago proved incompatible with people to a region that has only become more populous since the animals disappeared? If there was no room for these predators before, surely there is even less of it now.
The answer lies in the nature of the animal itself. The Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) is a formidable predator. Though not technically a big cat—it doesn’t sit alongside lions and tigers in the genus Panthera—males can nonetheless top 30 kg (65 lbs), almost twice the weight of the superficially similar Canadian lynx (Lynx canadensis). This gives it considerable predatory punch, allowing it to subsist not—like other lynxes—on rabbits and hares, but on hoofed mammals such as roe deer. What’s more, this is an animal of almost preternatural stealth. Wherever it occurs, it nearly always remains well out of sight.
Reintroducing the lynx, therefore, is a very different proposition from bringing back wolves and bears—schemes that have met stiff opposition across Europe. Though large enough to have a significant influence on ecology, the cat will slip silently into the woods the moment it is released, never to be seen again, except by the most dedicated. It is thus what scientists call a “soft” predator, representing no perceived threat to the public and so prompting none of the fuss generated by the likes of wolves. “For most people,” explains Geslin. “This cat is like a ghost.”
But while the animal slips under the radar of most of its human neighbors, the foresters are beginning to notice a difference, with roe deer populations thinning out and forests showing signs of regeneration. It is not simply that lynx keep deer numbers down. After all, there are only so many deer a handful of lynxes can catch and eat. It is also that the herbivores’ behavior changes when a predator is around. They gather in smaller numbers and, ever alert to possible attack, become more mobile, less inclined to linger in feeding areas. Just the scent of a lynx’s territorial markings on a trailside tree trunk can be enough to keep them on the move. Park rangers, Geslin reports, wish more of the cats could be introduced. “They tell me that since we’ve had lynx they never have any problems.”
For the cat, however, problems remain. Livestock farmers are rather less welcoming than conservationists. It is true: lynxes can, and occasionally do, take sheep. However, studies have shown that the cats much prefer wild prey. As forest ambush predators, they are not adapted to hunting in the open. Only in Norway, where sheep roam forested areas unmanaged, have significant losses been recorded. Elsewhere, including in Switzerland, predation has had negligible impact. Further studies have shown that appropriate management measures—for example, grazing sheep away from forest edges—make a big difference. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) is among the conservation organizations promoting new livestock management strategies in the Alps, including the use of specially trained guard dogs and protective fences, that help reduce conflicts between lynx and livestock herders.
Hunters, unfortunately, are harder to convince. They see the cats as competition, arguing that roe deer and chamois—a goat-like antelope native to mountainous areas of Europe—have become much harder to hunt now that lynxes keep them more wary. Breitenmoser points out that Swiss law protects not only lynx but also the right of hunters to harvest wildlife. “Unfortunately such situations regularly lead to conflicts,” he explains, “including illegal killings.” The female with cubs that Geslin observed and photographed fell victim to a hunter’s rifle just one month later. Another reintroduction program in the Vosges, just south of the Jura, has failed, with the last individuals killed by hunters. “No lynx population in Europe will survive,” warns Breitenmoser, “if hunters actively oppose it.”
Scientists also worry about the dangers of inbreeding. The reintroduced lynxes have not dispersed as far as was hoped. Penned in by roads and development, they have tended to stick to the areas into which they were first introduced. Given the very small number of lynxes from which today’s population is descended, this has raised the threat of inbreeding and a prospect of genetic problems for future populations. While things are better in the Jura than in some other reintroduced lynx populations, the problem will need to be addressed in the long term by increasing connectivity between isolated populations: “Links for the Lynx,” as WWF calls it.
Nonetheless, KORA deems the program a success. From those first 1970s releases, there are some 130 lynx in the Jura today. The effort has now been extended to other areas of the country and lynxes have expanded their range, naturally, into France. Recently, KORA has also relocated individual lynxes into both Austria and Italy, and a further relocation into Germany is in the pipeline. “Lynx have demonstrated that they can live well in a human-dominated environment, such as the Jura,” confirms Breitenmoser. “So the argument that they can no longer survive in our modern world has mostly disappeared.”
Meanwhile, lynx numbers elsewhere in Europe continue to rise. The overall population is now estimated at around 9,000, with the largest concentrations in Finland and the Carpathians. This population is made up of 11 key groups, spread across 23 countries. Only five of the groups are native—indicating the success of reintroduction efforts. The Lynx UK Trust now hopes to reintroduce the cat to Britain, where it was last seen in AD700, and where the environment is in serious need of a predator to control its rampant deer populations. Surveys indicate 91% public support for the idea, with trials proposed for 2017.
The lynx’s future depends upon cross-border cooperation. No single country in central Europe can support a viable population alone. A critical factor to date has been the EU Biodiversity Directive, which compels all member states to protect and restore populations of rare species. Only with this cooperation, Breitenmoser believes, can the scattered populations become better connected, allowing a flow of lynxes over a broad enough area, and reduce inbreeding. “We need the distribution to be broader,” he explains, “but the local abundance to be more limited.”
Meanwhile, the lynx’s enemies must still be won over. This will take education, overturning traditional antagonism towards predators, and convincing the public at large of how the cats benefit the environment for everybody, including hunters. It’s a long process and not something KORA and other conservation bodies can accomplish without political support.
Out in the forest, Geslin’s mission continues. Tramping the trails daily in search of tracks and kills, checking his camera traps and setting up his hides, he is learning ever more about this most private of cats. When KORA researchers take to the field—to monitor the lynxes, study their movements through radio telemetry or even capture one for a GPS collar or translocation elsewhere—he is always close by with his camera to record the action.
These are the memorable days—examining a sedated cat or photographing a relocated individual bounding away into its new home. Most of the time, however, things are not so easy. “Days become weeks and weeks become months,” Geslin says. “But then I hear a strange call or notice a slight movement and all the waiting vanishes.” The rewards make the long, lonely vigil worthwhile. “After all,” he confirms, “you just cannot beat a lynx.”
In Marshalltown, Iowa, a small city northeast of Des Moines, carpenters remodeling a church’s youth room recently found a surprise: an elaborate system of pulleys hidden in the walls.
Many years ago, it turned out, the church had two giant doors that could be raised or lowered to expand that sanctuary below. The church’s historian, Myriam Bryant, told local news channel WHO TV: “When I was going here the doors did go up and down in the sanctuary became double almost in size…We used them for extra people who came for our holidays and sometimes they’re was a very large funeral with many prominent people.”
At some point, though, new walls were built around the doors, and the whole system was forgotten. When the construction crew pulled out the walls in the attic youth room, they did not expect to find giant wheels, steel beams, and ropes connecting them.
From the youth room, it’s not possible to see the doors, but they’re still there—hidden in the walls of the church, on the floor below.
There is a pair of seven-foot legs hanging around Halifax, Massachusetts, seemingly with nowhere to go. They belong to a man of stone who clearly favored fancy boots, but why is he just standing there—cut in half like that—on the side of the road? And who is this poor half-a-man?
Before he lost his top half, the man of stone was a 14-foot tall Myles Standish, military commander of the Mayflower. After retiring from an active career protecting and serving the Pilgrims, Standish spent his retirement years up the road from Halifax in the town of Duxbury. Over there, about ten miles east, there is a grave memorial and a 116-foot stone tower built in his honor.
On top of the tower is a 14-foot granite statue, the second Standish statue the tower has held. The first one went up along with the tower in 1872, but being on the highest hill in town it turned from a memorial tower into a lightning rod. In 1922, poor Myles was struck and his top half was destroyed.
The bottom half, these very fancy-booted legs, were cast aside and disappeared for decades. It wasn’t until the 1990s that they were discovered 20 miles away in Quincy, left in a quarry without a body or head to keep them company.
It took a few years to recast a new statue, but one finally made it up the tower in 1930. The only piece from the original is his extended arm. Those old legs—they were given to Halifax where Standish also had some farm property. They’re waiting patiently for a fitting memorial of their own, or at least a spare head and torso if they can find one.
Last Tuesday, around 9 a.m., an apartment-dweller in Pretoria, South Africa went into the bathroom and found a surprise. An enormous cobra, several feet long and the width of a human forearm, was poking his hooded head out of the toilet.
OK, fine. The resident did what you do in such situations—called the snake catcher, Barry Greenshields, who arrived promptly. Greenshields, who has years of wrangling experience, was impressed by the snake. In a video posted on News24, he lifts it with snake prongs, whistling, "How long is this thing!" It rises endlessly out of the bowl, as if charmed.
But his best efforts couldn't dislodge it—it seemed to be clinging to something. The snake, now angry, disappeared into the toilet, and Greenshields went knocking around different apartment doors, trying to find his quarry.
No dice. When he left the building that day, he advised residents to keep their toilet lids closed. Later, he returned to put cameras in the pipes, to track it.
Now, a full week later, the terror-stricken residents are fed up. "People are talking about taking matters into their own hands now," one anonymous person told News24. Some have suggested pouring disinfectant or hot water into the toilets.
The snake has kept a low profile since its first appearance. Greenshields thinks it may have grown sluggish due to a lack of food, and may stay coiled down in a pipe somewhere until it gets hungry. Or maybe he just knew he wasn't wanted: "I hope he has left through the pipes," Greenshields says.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
Many a hunter has taken one of their big catches—a 12-point buck, for example, or maybe a moose—to a taxidermist, but not so long ago, you may have also considered taking a different animal: your beloved, recently-deceased horse.
Stuffed horses might not be as common as they used to be (many a general saw their war horses fit for stuffing), yet you can still find them, living on in perpetuity in a collector's home or perched in a museum, staring at you, waiting to be stared back at.
Take movie cowboy Roy Rogers, who had both his horse Trigger, who died in 1965, and Dale Evans’ horse Buttermilk, stuffed for display. Trigger was positioned rearing, the way he used to with Rogers aboard, his front legs gently pawing the air. Buttermilk was mounted in a more serene pose, with all four hooves on the ground. When the Roy Rogers museum in Branson, Missouri, closed, the horse sold at auction for $266,000, USA Today reported. The high bidder was Patrick Gottsch, who owns the cable channel RFD-TV. He bought Rogers' stuffed German shepherd, Bullet, too.
Dig a little deeper, and, even within the already-uncanny world of stuffed animals, you'll find that taxidermied horses occupy an even stranger category. They're not hunting trophies, of course, but domestic animals, which means people don't usually see their first horse just because someone preserved one. And they are very big, meaning that stuffing one is no small matter, unlike a Victorian's favorite hound or kitten. (Sometimes, though, people do have just the horse's head and shoulders mounted.) What's not so surprising, then, is that when they're displayed, the horses attract attention.
On Chincoteague Island in Virginia, for example, famous equine residents Misty and her daughter, Stormy, are on display in the Beebe Ranch museum, there to commemorate the inspiration for Marguerite Henry's novel that helped make the island and its ponies famous, 1947's Misty of Chincoteague. Today, visitors come for both the herds of wild ponies on nearby Assateague, as well as the stuffed ones in the museum.
Most stuffed horses, though, are of the battle-hardened variety, warhorses cherished for their survival skills, their loyalty, or merely just for good luck.
Take Comanche, the horse who was reputed to be the last survivor of the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. Comanche is currently displayed at the University of Kansas' Natural History Museum. His body is saddled and bridled, and he appears to look off into the distance. Another cavalry horse, Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson’s Little Sorrel, is at the Virginia Military Institute. After the war, he spent years touring around, especially throughout the South. Little Sorrel is untacked, and poses with a defiant tilt to his chin. His saddle is in a case nearby. (Robert E. Lee’s horse, Traveller, was preserved as a skeleton, but is now buried.)
Civil War Union general Phil Sheridan’s horse, Rienzi, stands in a case at the Smithsonian, in the National Museum of American History. (The Smithsonian also has a horse hoof that belonged to a heroic fire horse who galloped to a fire on a bloody stump, having lost his foot in an accident on the way.) In 1864, Sheridan, aboard Rienzi, galloped 15 miles from Cedar Creek to Winchester, Virginia, rallying his troops and helping repulse Confederate soldiers.
Thomas Buchanan wrote a poem about the ride: "Be it said, in letters both bold and bright/Here is the steed that saved the day/By carrying Sheridan into the fight/From Winchester--twenty miles away!" After the war, Sheridan kept Rienzi, who was later renamed Winchester. The horse grazed peacefully through his old age, died in 1878, and then Sheridan had him mounted.
At Mount Vernon, a diorama features a George Washington mannequin aboard a taxidermied horse, a substitute for Blueskin, Washington's favorite warhorse, and the big gray who is seen in portrait in many Washington scenes at Valley Forge, including Arnold Friberg's 1975 painting of the general kneeling in the snow, Blueskin at his side. The taxidermist told the Washington Post in 2008 that the substitute horse was in fact an Amish workhorse who died with his thick winter coat, found after he'd put out a call looking for a recently-dead white horse.
The Blueskin stand-in reveals that, original or not, taxidermy allows us to see nature in a specific way. Or, as the academic John Herron has written, "As a blend of natural science and environmental representation, taxidermy situates the natural world within a human context, and through these posed animals we can make connections between biological processes and our understanding of the human ideal."
Or maybe we just want stuffed creatures there for their novelty.
Consider General, a horse that is not very famous, save for one thing: General is said to be the one of the heaviest horses that ever lived, according to the West Virginia State Farm museum, where General stands, stuffed and on display. He weighed 2,850 pounds, and is positioned today not in a case but in a little corral, looking out at visitors, his own kind of celebrity.
Motorists driving on Highway 14 south of Santa Fe might be surprised to spot a patch of monumental origami objects that appear as suddenly and inexplicably as they disappear. Those who chose to investigate the dirt road that affords access to this peculiar vision with quickly be greeted by a substantial leaf sculpture, beautiful and green and exquisitely detailed, welcoming them to Origami in the Garden.
Created by artists Kevin and Jennifer Box, Origami in the Garden is a collection of sculptures that capture the texture, fragility, and impermanence of small paper objects in outsized metal forms. The juxtaposition of the light, crumpled shapes with the heavy, solid materials is as compelling as the contrast between these crisp human constructions with their dusty desert environs.
Origami cranes, boats, animals, and paper airplanes are just a few of the sculptures on display. A large Rock-Paper-Scissors sculpture hangs above the visitors center welcome desk, cleverly evoking childhood games with friends. The visitors center also features metal sheets that look like "unfolded" papers to show where the folds would be in actual origami, demonstrating that the artist actually understands origami and collaborated with some of the top origami artists in the world, but wanted to realize the art form in a larger and more permanent way.
Elda is not far from Valencia, and has long been in the business of shoemaking. The quality is high, the designs advanced, and the Footwear Museum (Museo del Calzado) celebrates the rich history of shoe production in this part of Spain.
The museum is in a downtown purpose-built building, with collections of both cobbler hand tools and vintage machinery that combine to give visitors a look at the technological developments of shoemaking. There is an extensive range of mass-produced and prototype models, as well as many award-winning designs.
There are shoes of famous people—including Rafael Nadal and the late, great Spanish golfer Severiano Ballesteros—some fascinating miniatures, and what they claim to be the world’s largest shoe (the jury may be out on that one). There is also an ethnological collection, including a unique 19th century spiked shoe for de-husking chestnuts.
Leather work and cobblery began in Elda in the middle of the 18th century, and a hundred years later the craft consolidated from small manufacturers into a full-fledged industry. By the end of the 19th century Elda had several large shoe factories, some employing over 400 workers. Through the 20th century manufacturing continued apace, eventually expanding to markets outside of Spain.
All this is traced at the Museo del Calzado, where you can also find material for the more research-oriented shoe-lover. With an archive of documents relating to shoe making history and an extensive collection of shoe-related advertising, you might come away with an idea for your own line of shoes.
In April 1918, as American doughboys faced down the Germans in France, California’s schoolchildren were enlisted to open a new Western Front. “We have enemies here at home more destructive, perhaps, than some of the enemies our boys are fighting in the trenches,” state horticulture commissioner George H. Hecke warned in an impassioned call-up for “School Soldiers.” He exhorted children to do their part for Uncle Sam by organizing “a company of soldiers in your class or in your school” and marching out to destroy their foe: “the squirrel army.”
This children’s crusade was part of Squirrel Week, a seven-day frenzy in which California tried to kill off its ground squirrels. The state’s farmers and ranchers had long struggled to decimate the critters (also known as Otospermophilusbeecheyi), which were seen as pests and a source of pestilence, particularly the bubonic plague. The burrowing foragers—not to be confused with tree squirrels—devoured an estimated $30 million worth of crops annually, about $480 million in current dollars.
Squirrel Week was the state’s first attempt at mass eradication. The anti-rodent campaign was announced in March 1918 at a meeting of the state’s horticultural commissioners as they lunched on grain-fed gophers. (“Liberal portions of beef were served to those who did not like gopher meat,” reported the San Francisco Chronicle.)
California set aside $40,000 from its emergency wartime funds for the campaign, which included an anti-squirrel publicity blitz: the state printed up 34,000 posters and distributed 500,000 leaflets.
What made Squirrel Week unique was its reliance on kids to succeed where adults had failed. Hecke’s call to arms appeared in a pamphlet titled “Kill the Squirrels,” which sought to stir patriotic youngsters to sprinkle rodenticide outside squirrel burrows. In the pamphlet’s opening illustration, a young woman holding a pail of poison barley invites eager kids to get to work.
“Children, we must kill the squirrels to save food,” she smiles. “But use poisons carefully.” The pamphlet included a recipe for strychnine-laced grain as well as suggestions for other extermination methods, such as shooting, drowning, and poison gas.
Just in case civic duty wasn’t motivation enough, there were also rewards: $50 ($800 today) to each of the elementary and high schools whose pupils killed the most squirrels, and $30 and $20 to the runners-up.
California’s war on squirrels was framed as an extension of United States’ declaration of war on Germany a year earlier. Part of this was practical: Future president Herbert Hoover, then the United States Food Administrator, offered his “hearty approval” of the effort to save “vast quantities of food which might otherwise be used for support of our armies abroad.”
But it also made for great propaganda. In the corners of the “Kill the Squirrels” cartoon, two members of the squirrel army stood at attention, wearing Pickelhauben—the distinctive spiked helmets of the German army. Another Squirrel Week poster showed a Teutonic squirrel family wearing spiked helmets and Iron Crosses. The father squirrel sported an oddly upturned mustache—just like Kaiser Wilhelm’s.
An article about Squirrel Week in the Lompoc Journal took the martial theme and ran with it, hailing the “growing army” amassing “casualties” in “initial engagements” against the enemy. “All the killing devices of modern warfare will be used in the effort to annihilate the squirrel army, including gas,” it continued. “Don’t wait to be drafted.”
The campaign also enlisted the help of Four-Minute Men—volunteers who delivered short speeches to rally public support for the war effort. Anti-squirrel talking points were issued so they might convince farmers and ranchers to go out and kill the “little ally of the [K]aiser”:
The BEST squirrel is the dead squirrel.
The Hotel California board bill for ground squirrels in 1917 […] was $30,000,000—yet unpaid.
The squirrel does not recognize daylight saving. He uses it all.
He preys on our crops in countless hordes. He fills the ranks of the killed in true military fashion.
Why hesitate? We can get ‘em. How? Poison ‘em, gas ‘em, drown em’, shoot ‘em, trap ‘em, submarine ‘em.
Are you not willing then to give your whole-hearted support to this state-wide movement to KILL THE SQUIRREL?
Children were asked to verify their kills by bringing in squirrel tails to their schools. Some impatient exterminators delivered their trophies directly to Commissioner Hecke even before Squirrel Week kicked off, causing a “pronounced odor” in his office. He requested that children not send him any more tails, and instructed his county commissioners to bury all tails after tallying them.
By the time Squirrel Week ended on May 4, children across the state had turned in 104,509 tails, though this was thought to represent a fraction of the total casualties. Even after the contest ended, the Commission of Horticulture reported that kids’ enthusiasm for killing squirrels continued for “an indefinite period.” During an anti-squirrel campaign in Lassen County later in the year, one girl brought in 3,780 tails; a boy brought in 3,770.
The state considered Squirrel Week a great success: Crop yields reportedly bounced back in areas cleared of ground squirrels. But total victory remained elusive. Nearly a century later, ground squirrels and are still considered prolific, expensive pests.
The militaristic edge of the squirrel war of 1918 hasn’t entirely faded: A contemporary University of California web page about the damage caused by ground squirrels features an image of a squirrel wearing a helmet and taking aim with a bazooka. All is not quiet on this Western Front.
The weirdest thing about Harry’s Harbor Bazaar, in Hamburg, isn’t the maze of musty shelves holding African masks and voodoo dolls, homoerotic New Guinean figurines, or century-old shrunken heads. The weirdest thing is how familiar it all feels, how it knocks on the brain with a set of bone knuckles, like a memory from the uncomfortable past.
Harry’s has been established in Hamburg since 1954, when Harry Rosenberg converted his modest stamp-and-coin shop into a museum of exotic things handed down from an old sailors’ pub.
The collection has changed ownership and location several times, most recently in 2013—right now it floats in a converted crane ship in Hamburg’s Harbor City. It opens every weekend for visitors to wander the aisles built into the hull. The items have no information cards, because in too many cases no one can say where they’re from.
Not just laughing wooden masks but painted shields and spears; red-faced grinning devils; buck-toothed carvings of men; headless figures of women, depicted with giant phalluses; one brass and one wooden statue of the same naked, swaying Hindu goddess; fetish faces made of colored beads and palm-frond hair; and stuffed jungle creatures—including a lifelike chimpanzee with a hat of magenta feathers—loom out at you like figures from a clichéd but terrible dream.
The ship lists while you walk around. The aisles smell like moldy rope and old wood. About a quarter-century ago, Tom Waits discovered Harry's when playing a concert in Hamburg, and the collection inspired a song on his Black Rider album, “Lucky Day (Overture)."
The vision of exoticism on display at Harry’s is so fusty it’s almost offensive; a visitor too sensitive to whiffs of Orientalism will hyperventilate. But the real shame is the muteness of the shelves. How did everything get here? The honest story of a single item might fill a chapter in a book. At last count the full inventory held more than 350,000 pieces, most of them in a separate warehouse, which makes the chorus of silence at Harry’s far more terrible than all the laughing masks.
When Lindsay Lohan appeared on camera in October speaking in some kind of pan-European accent, she was subjected to the same form of mockery that generations of American college students who study abroad have experienced. I myself, after attending college in Montreal, returned to the US saying things like “to-more-owe” and “sore-y” and “aboat.” (Not “aboot.”)
The reaction of Americans to a fellow American who, upon returning from extended trips abroad, speaks with an altered accent, can be harsh. “People often don't react well when someone comes back with an accent, like they're putting on airs or trying to be somebody else,” says Jennifer Nycz, a specialist in sociolinguists and phonetic and phonological variation at Georgetown.
But how conscious is this change in speech, really? How much is a natural shift in the way one speaks, and how much is a concerted effort to change one’s accent?
Dialect or accent acquisition is not the most well-studied linguistic field, but for her dissertation, Nycz extensively studied Canadians who had moved to New York for subtle changes in their speech, trying to figure out how, how much, and why people change their accents. Having grown up in New Jersey and moved many times, the ways people change their speech has become a pet project for her.
It is not especially easy to consciously change an accent. Even for, say, newscasters, who are trained to change some of the most telling regionalisms in their accents, a close listen can usually pick out the subtler or less stereotyped regionalisms that remain unchanged. But for people who move around, or who spend a significant amount of time talking to people who speak in a different accent or dialect from their own, patterns of speech and pronunciation can prove strangely fluid. (Accent refers simply to the pronunciation of words; dialect can include changes in vocabulary or sentence structure. Changing “about” to “aboat” is accent, but adding “eh?” to the ends of sentences is dialect.)
What Nycz discovered is that accent acquisition is tremendously complex and hard to predict. “It's not always obvious, but we all make these little shifts depending on who we're talking to, what we're talking about, the way we feel about what we're talking about, and any number of other things,” she says. At a very basic level, research indicates that we tend to like people more when they mirror us in certain ways: posture, facial expression, and accent. The idea is that someone who is more like you is a friendlier entity. And it can be one factor that triggers someone who is spending a lot of time in a different dialect zone to slightly change the way they speak.
One of the most important variables in how quickly a person can acquire a new accent is their age. Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a linguist named Arvilla Payne studied families who had recently moved to King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia best known today for having a gigantic mall. King of Prussia natives speak with a Philadelphia accent, one of the weirdest and best-studied accents in North America. (It’s well-studied largely because the godfather of modern linguistics, a guy named Bill Labov, worked at the University of Pennsylvania. Also, because it’s weird.)
Payne studied two elements of the Philadelphia accent. One is well-known, and is referred to as “oh-fronting.” When Philadelphians say words like, well, “hoagie,” that “oh” sound is made with the tongue further forward in the mouth, hence “fronting.” It comes out sounding sort of like “eh-oh.” That’s a classic; if you know a single thing about the Philadelphia accent, it’ll be oh-fronting. Payne found out that children who had recently moved to King of Prussia did indeed use those fronted “oh” sounds, indicating that they’re adopting some of the local accent.
“But there are other changes which are much more complicated,” says Nycz. “Philly has this very intense short ‘a’ system, which involves the sound ‘agh’ in words like ‘cat.’” Sometimes Philadelphians will pronounce that “agh” sound in the same way as someone from Ohio or Nevada or wherever else, but other times it’ll be more complex and sort of Midwest-y, sounding like “ey-yeah.” The rules for when to use which short “a” sound are really difficult to parse: sometimes the sound will change based on what kind of consonant comes after it, but there are also plenty of exceptions. In other words, unlike oh-fronting, this is a non-stereotyped and difficult to reproduce accent quirk. You basically have to be born into it.
Payne found that the King of Prussia kids who had come from elsewhere were not reproducing the short “a” in the same way that a native Philadelphian would. Some of the kids would use it some of the time, but would use it for words a Philadelphian wouldn’t. Some of the kids just didn’t have this feature at all.
What this indicates is that accent acquisition is messy. It’s not just a matter of wholesale adoption. People in a new accent area have to, on some level, understand the changes in order to acquire them, which indicates some sort of agency in the whole process.
Other studies, however, indicate the opposite. When examining the speech of Canadians who had moved to New York, Nycz set out what’s known as a “minimal pairs task.” Essentially, Nycz would have her subjects read many pairs of similar words, and tell her whether those words sounded the same or different. Further, she asked the Canadians whether New Yorkers would think those words sounded different.
The key difference between Canadian English and New York City English that Nycz used is called the cot-caught merger. In Canada, as well as in California, those two vowel sounds are the same, something like “ah.” But in New York City, those words sound very different: “cot” has a flat “ah” sound, but “caught” has a rounder sound, more like “awwuh.” (This is the source of the New York “cawwwfee” stereotype.) The Canadian “ah” sound is somewhere in between the New Yorker’s “ah” and “awwuh.”
She got a wide range of responses to her minimal pairs task; some Canadian New Yorkers could pick out the difference between a Canadian’s “cot-caught” pronunciation from a New Yorker’s, and some couldn’t. Some got some of them right but not others. Some got nothing right.
Nycz also did some careful phonetic measurements to find out exactly how much their cot-caught speech had changed since moving to New York. Previous work, she says, had come to the conclusion that mergers like cot-caught aren’t really ever split, but her work found otherwise: some of those Canadians she measured had begun to make some distinctions between the words that New Yorkers would pronounce with an “ah” and those they’d pronounce with an “awwuh.”
What’s weird is that she then compared how the Canadians did on the minimal pairs task with the results of the phonetic measurements. In other words: does someone with more knowledge of the differences between the New York and Canadian accents more or less likely to have adopted the New York accent?
She found no correlation at all between those two tasks. Her research indicates that what we know about an accent has no relationship at all to whether or not we adopt it. That implies that accent acquisition is pretty much an unconscious thing, something out of our control.
There are other factors that influence how we pick up a new accent. Nycz found that the subject of conversation can have a huge effect on which accent shows up. In her research, she found that when Canadians were talking about Canada, they had a more Canadian-like speech pattern, but when talking about New York, they had more New York-ish variants. That’s simple enough, but it can get even more complicated based on the way a person feels about that subject.
One of Nycz’s subjects was a Canadian from a small town in one of Canada’s sparsely populated prairie provinces. Her accent didn’t follow those patterns, at least not at first: when talking about her hometown, she used distinctly New York pronunciations. When talking about New York, same thing: New York pronunciations.
The only time she used notably Canadian speech was when talking not about her hometown, but about Toronto, where she’d lived for a few years. Further interviewing indicated that she didn’t much like her hometown, couldn’t wait to get out. But she loved Toronto.
Even though you’d expect an accent from the prairies to be stronger than an accent from huge, multicultural Toronto, this subject changed her accent depending on how she felt about each conversational topic. Not a fan of her hometown, not wanting to be associated with it, she spoke in a way that people from that town did not speak. But for Toronto and New York, places she loved, she used the local dialect from each. Perhaps speaking like a local indicates your emotions about that place. You love New York? You consider yourself a New Yorker? You’ll speak like a New Yorker.
Lindsay Lohan told the Daily Mail that her odd new accent is a product of her attempts to learn multiple languages. “It's a mixture of most of the languages I can understand or am trying to learn,” she said. “I've been learning different languages since I was a child. I'm fluent in English and French, can understand Russian and am learning Turkish, Italian and Arabic.”
What Lohan is saying is that her efforts to learn new languages have actually affected the way she speaks English, her native tongue. Is that possible or likely?
Turns out, maybe! In the mid-1990s, a linguist named James Flege attempted to answer that same question. He studied fluent bilingual speakers of French and English: both native English speakers now fluent in French, and native French speakers now fluent in English. One of his most important discoveries comes from measurements of a very wonky linguistic metric called “voice onset time,” or VOT. (Nycz, before she explained VOT to me, excitedly described it as “very fun.”)
VOT is what decides the differences between a few pairs of consonants, namely “p” and “b,” “t” and “d,” and “k” and “g.” Those consonants are extremely similar; your mouth is doing basically the exact same thing in order to create each of those pairs. To make each of those consonants, a speaker has to build up air in the mouth and then suddenly release it. (The release of air is called “aspiration” in linguistics.)
In those pairs, you can measure the exact length of time between when a speaker releases that air and the moment the vocal cords vibrate for the vowel to follow. That amount of time is extremely short, but also very telling. Someone who only speaks English will pronounce “bah” with basically no VOT at all: the release of air from the “b” sound happens at the same time the vocal cords begin vibrating for the “ah” sound. But for “pah,” there’s a tiny tiny gap, maybe 40 milliseconds between the release of the air from the “p” sound until the vocal cords vibrate.
But for someone who speaks only French, well, it’s all very different. A French speaker will actually begin vibrating their vocal cords before they expel the air to make a “b” sound, rather than at the same time. A monolingual French speaker’s “p” sound is made more like an English speaker’s “b” sound, with the air and the vibration happening at the same time. This incredibly subtle and basically inaudible difference means that a French speaker’s pronunciation of “place” will sound like an English speaker’s “blace.”
What Flege found was that by learning another language fluently, the bilingual speakers ended up with VOTs somewhere in the middle between what a monolingual French and monolingual English speaker would have. But he found that effect in both the learned language and the native language. In other words, learning a new language does, even if in a very subtle way, have an effect on the way you speak your native language.
Of course, whether this applies to Lindsay Lohan is anyone’s guess. “These are highly experienced bilingual speakers he was looking at,” says Nycz. “Whether it applies to Lindsay Lohan taking a language class? ...Possibly?”
I had a few questions that Nycz couldn’t really answer. How long does it take an acquired accent to wear off, once a speaker is back home amongst that speaker’s native dialect? “That’s hard to study for stupid practical reasons,” says Nycz. Finding people before they leave, measuring the people they speak to both abroad and at home, and systematically measuring someone’s speech after they return is a very tricky proposition, one potentially laden with variables that could throw off the entire study. “I don’t know that we have systematic empirical data to speak to that,” she says.
Nycz wasn’t sure if the American attitude to an acquired non-American accent is different than it would be in other countries, but it’s not an easy question to answer. Someone who comes back from a study abroad semester in London might feel that speaking in the US with London-inflected speech contributes to the identity they want to put forth. Worldly, maybe. But the reactions can vary. Some Americans might be more interested in someone with a slight British lilt. Others might view that person as, you know, a falsity, an inauthentic poser. But that attitude isn’t necessarily reflected in the research. Adopting a new accent isn’t entirely, or even mostly, a conscious choice. It’s a natural impulse.
