I hate how Canadians pronounce 'sorry'

I don't think America is the center of the universe...I just think we pronounce the english language overall better than others up to and including the english themselves.

Not in all cases...southern dialects as well as Boston, Minnesota and some New York (Bronx, Queens) accents are horrible and mispronounce a lot...but the standard mid-western accent pronounces almost everything correctly.

I think what you consider to be Midwestern accents are just mild accents that may be hard to see as different especially if you live in or are from that region.

When you speak the English language and attempt to sound as if you have no accent it will come very close to what you perceive the Midwestern accent to be. I still hear a small accent from people in the Midwestern when I hear them speak that differs from the way the cast of friends and newscasters speak.

The accent of the Midwest is not as hard as the other accents of the US but it is still there just slightly. If I had to pick an accent that sounded the most accent-less I would indeed choose the Midwest but I would also say newscasters and actors in general do a better job on average of sounding without an accent then the average Midwesterner. There are still words when spoken by a Midwesterner that seem to have more of a twang or harder nasal or R sound then I see as the more ideal way of pronouncing the word. I would not go so far as to say the television industry models their way of speaking on the Midwest.

People from Detroit seem to think the have a perfect accent-less way of speaking but as outsiders we can see that it is far from the truth. Everyone thinks their way of saying things is the most correct way but without a governing body saying which is correct and which is not I think it is fair to say there is no region without an accent and to assume one region is the base of a language and everything else is a deviation of such would be incorrect and a bit arrogant.

Now if you compare the standard TV accents which seem to be almost no existent to the originators of the English language you will see a huge difference. Is it correct to think the English have an accent? I don't know. To me it sounds like an accent yet they are the creators of the language? Yes there are very many sub accents of England but they all seem to deviate around a similar sound, the same as Australian, New Zealand and South African (and some parts of India). They all sound very similar but when compared to North American English it is very different almost not even close. When we look at phonetic spelling you might say we sound more correct. Yet that is still based on the basic sounds that we understand differently from the British and their colonies. Who is correct? We all are based on what we understand (Except Ebonics, that is less of an accent and simply poor grammar.)

Now let us look at when you sing. It seems almost magical that most accents are dropped or servery reduced. Would you think Bono were Irish is you only ever heard him sing? This is another can of worms and completely off topic but it gets you thinking doesn't it?

I think you, like most America detractors from other countries, are basing your belief about the general intelligence of the average American by whom we choose to put in the public eye. i.e., on television. Yes, we have had a few dumb politicians, but who hasn't? And who did we vote in? A dumb Sarah Palin or a much more intellegent Joe Biden? You posted 2 examples...Bush and Palin. Wanna bet I can come up with two public examples of Canadian idiocy? America is constantly putting the most idiotic among us on television, basically because we like to laugh at the bottom-feeders on the intellegence ladder that exist in out own country. That doesn't mean that they are in the majority, far from it. It just means that we take those dumb-asses and put them in the limelight to get a chuckle out of them. A by-product of doing this is that people from outside the U.S. get the impressions that that is how everyone in our country is. Well, far from it.

The majority of Americans are well versed in how other countries work, are quite well educated and well read. It's just that the most vocal and noticable of us are the unintellegent ones. Not the majority.

Won't conform to the metric system because of arrogance? It couldn't at all be because we are comfortable with the imperial system and all of us understand it? If anything, our usage of the imperial system is one way of showing our intelligence since it is a more complex system than metric. Everything is in factors of 10 with metric, there are no such round numbers in the imperial system. 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard, 5,280 feet in a mile. The fact that we can calculate such numbers in our heads as easily as you calculate your factors of 10 shows more complex thinking on our parts than yours. Not to mention, that we do "conform" to metric in terms of we use it in our scietific research as we do understand that it is the accepted system of measurment for everyone else, so when we calculate using the imperial system, we generally translate that to metric for everyone outside the U.S., but the average layman in America prefers to use imperial because that is what we know and that is what we are familiar with. Why is it such a problem for us to use the system we prefer within the confines of our own country? You are just throwing a fit because we won't do things your way.