ABSTRACT
When I was in my first semester at graduate school, the faculty member with whom I had moved from Australia to work said to me, “You say ‘A is different to B.’” He was intrigued. I wanted to know where I had written this comparison; and whether I was wrong in making it: he was, after all, the big deal linguist who I had crossed the world to work with. But, of course, he was commenting on the linguistic structure of the comparison; I, of course, couldn’t even hear what was intriguing. This moment was my first experience of being linguistically othered, but the othering was at least affectionate. It was disorienting, but it was mostly harmless. But what would I have heard if my skin had been brown, if I had written like I wasn’t a mother-tongue English speaker? How would my other nationality have been erased, replaced with the status of “not-American”?
