A Beguiling Explanation of Beguiling Accents

Almost everyone you ask will be partial to some accet. Often called the accent advantage. You here, and perhpas even partake in stories of people going home with somebody they would otherwise pass over because of their sexy 'foreign accent'.

Now think of the Lottery, people buy lottery tickets all the time, even though they have odds of 'a billion to one' and stuff. Dan Gilbert explains this as our vey human inability to accurately calculate the odds. Namely, the news always shows us newsbites of lottery winners, we hear about lottory winners all the time and almost never about the millions and millions of lottery losers.

As Dan Gilbert points out, if they dedicated the same 30 seconds to each lottory loser as they did the winner for just one weeks lottery, we would have to sit through 11 and a half years of losers in 30 second portions before seeing 1 winner (provided there was a winner last week).

Because winners are disproportionately represented, we have a disproportionate expectation of winning. (apparantly 15% of baby boomers financial plans, involve winning the lottery. And by that I mean, they expect to win the lottory! 15%!).

Now my beguiling yet unresearched theory on why we find accents 'attractive'. Firstly, the proportion of Australians who find the New Zealand accent 'sexy' (rather than the more common 'ridiculous') is on par with foot fetishists. That is it is by and large accidental. So the attractiveness of an accent I'm suggesting is correlated with the 'exoticness' of the culture.

Queenslanders and New Zealanders are not as exotic to an Australian as the French, Italian, Portugese and Japanese people.

Now think of how we predominantly get exposed to these 'exotic' cultures, even one as unexotic as 'American'. That's right - TV and Movies. What is characteristic of TV and Movies? They have casts of stars. Winners. Beautiful people.

Even with foreign movies, advertising campaigns etc. They cast attractive people, generally slightly to much more attractive than the norm. Watch an erotic french movie, and leave that as your only insight into French culture, you are going to think France is a romantic, erotic nation populated by incredible lovers.

Go to France you will be immediately confronted by surprisingly vast samples of what is known regionally as the 'dirty frenchman' and not as in, perverse and kinky. But just plain dirty. Fat, sweaty, run down, smoking prodigiously and whiping there hands on their shirts before asking you for change, or infrequently mugging you.

Because we are far more exposed to sexy attractive people speaking an exotic cultures language, we begin thinking they are representative of their culture. We then make the classic error of mistaking correlation with causation. Correlation is that 'foreign movie actors tend to speak with an accent AND be sexy.' Causation is 'foreign movie actors ARE sexy BECAUSE they tend to speak with a foreign accent.'

Then bingo bango, with this thought in your head you walk into a nightclub and meet an incredibly amazingly average girl or guy with a French accent and due to deeply encrusted associations in your mind think 'wow, what a sexy accent!'

Your eyes switch off, and you see them with your ears, interpreting them as Monica Belluchi or Robert Carlyle or something.

There, that's my beguiling theory. Don't know how scientific it is.