"You look 'armless!"

Foreign Accent Syndrome might sound like something someone on the writing staff of "Seinfeld" made up, but it is a real thing, defined as "a speech disorder that causes a sudden change to speech so that a native speaker is perceived to speak with a “foreign” accent." The most frequent cause is not watching too many British shows on PBS, but, rather, damage to the brain from a stroke or TBI (traumatic brain injury). 

Some years ago (12, to be exact) a woman named Karen Butler had dental surgery, and when she came out from under the sedation, she had picked up a pronounced foreign accent. She wasn't fooling around; it was FAS, apparently from  an injury to the part of the brain that controls speech.

Now Ms Butler was born in Illinois and moved out to Oregon with her family as a baby, and she had never been to Europe at all, but suddenly she sounded English/Irish/slightly European. Just from having a couple of teeth removed.

And this is far different from cases like that of entertainer Madonna, who belied her Michigan roots by spending a week in England and suddenly trying to talk like Helen Mirren. 

"I just went to sleep and I woke up and my mouth was all sore and swollen, and I talked funny.  And the dentist said, 'You'll talk normal when the swelling goes down,' " Butler reported.

When the swelling went away, the foreign affect in her speech did not. Neurologist Ted Lowenkopf, director of the Providence Stroke Center in Portland, told her it was indeed FAS.

Most people who see this picture can "hear" Ricky in their mind, speaking with his accent!

Foreign Accent Syndrome was first reported in the 1940s. You may have heard of a Norwegian woman who was hit by German shrapnel in World War II and later developed a pronounced German accent. Most cruelly, she was was ostracized by friends and family as a result.

Strokes and other forms of brain trauma usually cause major brain damage that leave truly staggering speech problems, but Lowenkopf says with FAS, only a small part of the brain, that which concerns vocal patterns and intonations, is affected.

Doctors told Ms Butler she may have suffered a small stroke while she was under anesthesia, but only a brain scan would say that for sure, and her insurance wouldn't cover one.

I used to enjoy going to new grocery stores and asking for a certain item by using a French accent just to see the reaction of the clerks whom I asked. Most often, they would raise their voice while saying "Aisle 5, sir!" in the apparent belief that if I were foreign, I was also partly hard of hearing.

I hear fine. Just enjoying my life here.