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“Beware of the Wombats“
I’ve referred to Mrs. Wombat often in my newsletter over the years, but I’ve never told her story. To anyone, actually. Yes, Mrs. Wombat was a real person, and she gave me my first lesson in marketing – in the 4th grade. The woman who was supposed to teach that year was sick, and they brought in a substitute to cover for her. Her name was Mrs. Hasbrouck. Years later, I saw a picture of a wombat and thought, “That looks just like Mrs. Hasbrouck.”  She’s been Mrs. Wombat ever since.

She was a nice enough woman, until you asked a question or disagreed with her. She could become quite cranky when challenged, in the way that only women in their 80′s can get away with. She spent the entire day, every day, telling stories of her extensive travels and teaching English. Stories and English. Just that. And, as it turned out, the woman she was substituting for was sicker than anyone thought.

We had Mrs. Wombat for the entire year. You can imagine our glee. It was actually fun for the first two weeks. Then the stories started to repeat, and the English got more advanced. After the first month, we began to notice that you could almost hear the punctuation when she spoke.

As it turns out, Mrs. Wombat’s previous employment was as a post-doctorate level instructor of advanced theoretical grammar at Anal-Retentive U. Rumor has it that she was nominated for a Nobel prize in physics when the committee mistook her diagram of a multi-page sentence from an old German philosophy book for a working formula for cold fusion.

She wouldn’t have hesitated to cut off your participles, if you were careless enough to dangle them in public. She’d have charged e. e. cummings with capital murder. Mrs. Wombat was a stone-cold Grammar Cop.

The First Heresy
Her stories were fascinating, in a CIA World-Factbook kind of way. A cold listing of details and happenings, with all the romance and excitement of an almanac. She often told us of the book she was writing about her travels. She was always “Almost done. Just a little bit to fix yet.” She knew there was something missing, but she couldn’t quite figure out what it was. Mrs. Wombat’s darkest secret was that she failed, miserably, every communications course she ever took.   ….

If you’re going to write for the popular market, you need to understand your audience. That’s marketing, and Mrs. Wombat had the worst characteristics it is possible for a marketer to have. Her first mistake was that she was a perfectionist. A mindless, if expert, follower. Like most followers, she had no tolerance for those who thought or acted differently. She strictly observed the rules of grammar, true, but she never really understood its purpose.

Here’s a little preventative aspirin for your next session of Grammar Police brutality: the purpose of grammar is to help ensure clear communication. If grammar gets in the way of getting your point across, toss the rulebook out the window. And don’t let anyone make you feel bad about it.

Yes, grammar can get in the way. For some audiences, slang can be clearer than more “accepted” forms of speech. More commonly, a strict adherence to grammatical correctness and the expansive use of extended vocabulary can lead to awkward, if not incomprehensible, sentence structures, which can distract from the successful conveyance of your message.  Kind of like that last sentence.  This doesn’t mean you should be sloppy. Just be aware of what you’re doing. Message first, always.

Rule # One: Git ‘er Done
Almost 40 years later, I’m sure she’d still be working on that book. (I’m assuming she’s not still kicking around. She’d be roughly 128 years old.) Perfection is the second greatest enemy of success. (Doing nothing is the first, but it was a near thing. Inaction picked rock to Perfection’s scissors in the last round of the finals.) How many promising projects do you have sitting there that need “just a little more work,” but haven’t been touched in ages? Or that you keep polishing, hoping to make them “good enough?” (Mea maxima culpa…)

You can’t fix what never gets done. You can’t build on a project that’s 99% ready. If you write a book and it’s not perfect, so what? Get an editor and get it closer. But get it done. If you have to do it in parts, that’s fine. That’s what I have to do sometimes to get a project out and complete. (I have more ideas than time, and often change between projects more often than a teenaged girl changes shoes.)

Finish first. Polish second.

How do you know when it’s done?
Look at your sales letter. If the product delivers what the letter promises, it’s done enough to start selling. If not, either add enough to the product to make that happen, or subtract something from the sales letter. Haven’t written the sales letter yet? Excellent. Write a letter selling the product as it is right now. If you’ve got enough benefits to make it worth buying, snip the loose ends and get it out to market. You see, your prospects don’t have a set idea in mind of what you’re supposed to be offering. They don’t care if you can think of things that might make it better. They have a problem NOW, dammit, and they don’t want to wait until you’re 128 years old for a solution!

Compound Disinterest
Mrs. Wombat’s second problem is that she didn’t understand personal communication. At all. She assumed it was nothing more than data exchange. Bzzzzt! Nope. That’s what encyclopedias are for. If you’re going to communicate with people on any deeper level than they could get from Funk and Wagnall’s, you need to connect with them. That means talking about things they care about – right now – in terms they understand.

You already knew this, of course. The real question is, do other people know you know it?

Do your messages talk to them in their language, about their concerns? Do they feel a connection with you? Or a real desire for your product? Do you reach them where they live?You can tell by what they do after reading or listening to your message. If you draw an emotional response (and it isn’t pure hatred), you’re connecting.   If not, you’d better start working on it.

Spawn of the Dead
Mrs. Wombat wasn’t alone. There were thousands of her. There was probably one in your school. They spawned an army of Grammar Zombies – people who exist for the sake of rules they don’t understand. And they’re everywhere. In every field. Beware of these people. Avoid them at all costs. They will suck the life out of you, your products, and your pet turtle – if you let them. They’ll quibble over the tiniest things, and insist that you not only take them seriously, but that you come back from the Dark Side and follow the One True Path of Grammatical Goodness. They’ll see a misspelling in your ad for a book on restoring antique vehicles. They will assume, beyond all reason, that this is proof that you don’t know anything about car repair. (Really. Remember, these people are nuts.)

They’ll hammer you with silly comments like, “If you have typos in your work, no responsible person would buy from you.” (Yes, I’ve heard that. Often.) They’ll scream if you use a whole colon, when a semi-colon would do. (Okay. I made that one up. But it could happen.) They will micro-focus to the point that they miss everything that matters, to satisfy their need for universal conformity to arbitrary rules. Grammar isn’t the only weapon they’ll use. It could be their opinions on web design standards, or file formats, or operating systems. Whatever fuels their mania. And they don’t have to know what they’re talking about to behave this way.

The real experts at least have the benefit of Clue. They can, occasionally, be helpful despite themselves. Dog save us from the didactic newbie, who knows nothing and is determined to make sure that we know it too. Literally. Dog save us.  Cujo, come home!

Know The Enemy
I’m not suggesting that you assume that anyone offering criticism is a Grammar Zombie. Far from it. If people don’t point out ways you can improve, you usually won’t. And it’s a safe bet that you won’t see every possible problem that exists. If the criticism is valid, swallow your ego and fix the thing. Then say “Thank you, sir or ma’am, may I have another?”

Grammar Cops and Zombies don’t really offer criticism to help, although they often claim that’s their goal. They’re nitpicking to show they know more than you. This usually happens when you’re doing something they can’t – making a profit and making a difference.

Do not spend time on these people. Do not argue with them. Ignore them. I repeat: Ignore them. Do Not Debate With Them! If they can suck you into debate, that proves to them that their ideas are worthy of consideration. From there, it’s a small leap to believing that you’re only disagreeing with them out of ego. At that point, they will never let go. They have the potential to make you doubt yourself when you shouldn’t, to make you work when it’s not useful, and to steal your life if you let them.

I mean that literally.

More than one person has lost the will to live life their way by listening to these people and buying into their nonsense. They become convinced that they’re just not good enough to succeed, so they quit trying. At that point, you’re a Zombie. Your only purpose will be to create more Zombies. And, just like the George A. Romero flicks, you’ll only be able to survive by sucking the brains out of real, living people. (For the really attentive folks, no. There was no “in” missing in that last sentence.) There’s only one thing you have to remember to avoid this problem:    “Zombies suck.”

The Never-Ending Story
Mrs. Wombat’s Tale doesn’t end there. Not precisely. Every hero needs an anti-hero, and over 30 years later, I met him: the Anti-Wombat. At the time, I lived in town. The east side of the city of Erie, Pennsylvania, to be exact. A very mixed neighborhood, in every way you can imagine. I love it. There’s a store down the block that had posted pictures of people shoplifting. Pretty clear shots of “customers” putting stuff inside their jackets and moving for the door.  The thieves were suing the owner.

One day I head down the block to pick some stuff up from the store. I see this tall blonde guy in front of the place, with a camera-man, a $400 trench coat and a $75 hair cut. He’s trying to talk to the kids walking home from school. Have you ever stuck your finger in a stream when a school of minnows was swimming by? You know how those minnows make a wide and nearly perfect circle to avoid your finger?

Those kids reacted to this guy just like that. So, I get to the corner and head for the store and the guy stops me. “Do you know about the pictures inside, and do you have any opinions on them?” Opinions? I have a pocketful. Why no, I don’t mind sharing. He gets the okay to interview me and the camera-man starts recording.

(It’s relevant that, at the time, I was wearing black jeans and shirt, black cowboy boots, a

black leather duster and a black Stetson.) He starts off the interview with:

“So, Mr. Myers, do you live in the ‘hood?”

L o n g p a u s e . . .

I looked him up and down slowly and asked the obvious question:

“What is a middle-aged white yuppie doing asking a middle-aged white redneck if he lives ‘in the ‘hood?’”

After he finished stammering and the camera-man was done laughing, we re-did the interview.

I pointed out that there were a lot of people in the neighborhood who couldn’t afford cars, and how important that store was to them. The next closest was four blocks away. I talked about the fact that the employees all lived in the neighborhood. I remarked on how they all treated the customers with more respect than you ever got from a chain grocer. I commented on the tradition, as this is the oldest grocer in the city. I mentioned that the owner was a good neighbor, keeping his place clean and his prices low and watching out for the folks who lived nearby. I asked him what the alternatives were: Raise prices or go out of business? In short, I spent two minutes on the things that made that store important to the people who lived near it.

Yes, I laughed at him for the “in the ‘hood” remark. But the interview got picked up as far away as California, and it brought a crew from Good Morning America out to Seraphin’s Grocery the next week.

The reporter did okay.  He didn’t deserve it. I mean, this guy is supposed to be a professional communicator, and he asks something that stoopid?   The Anti-Wombat. All style, no substance, and totally inappropriate use of slang to boot.  Completely clueless. The story got picked up because it was news. There are millions of people in this country who live in neighborhoods just like that, and millions of store owners facing the same challenges. That’s stuff that people care about. That brings up a perspective you might find useful:

If your product solves a problem, your salesletter is news.

The lessons?

• Your market is a community, with their own concerns and language. Talk to them in their language, not yours.
• If you’re going to speak your market’s language, be authentic. Talk to their concerns, don’t try to make yourself one of them by mimicking them. That’s just insulting. Even the little kids knew, that guy didn’t belong “in the ‘hood.”
•  Make life better for your customers, and they’ll tell the world about you.

There are lots of lessons that can be drawn from these two stories, but I’ve rambled on long enough.

If you only take two things from this, it should be these two:

• Do not waste time debating with Grammar Cops (or Zombies). No matter what their grammar of choice might be.
• If your product solves a problem for someone, your sales letter is news.  People want to hear that kind of news.

Enjoy!
Paul Myers

Comments? mail me at paul@talkbiz.com

Find this handy? http://www.Buy-Paul-a-Beer.com

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Some folks worry about grammar or perfect presentation. Unless you’re really bad, that’s silly.

Imagine for a moment that you have one line to deliver. Just 12 simple words. You’re on the grandest stage ever walked by man. You have the largest audience there ever was, with literally hundreds of millions of people watching, cheering you on. There will be no second performance, and no-one will ever play your role again. Just that one line, this one time. And you blow it. How would you feel?

Here’s the line, as it was delivered: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”  Mrs Wombat would have cringed, and then rapped Commander Armstrong across the knuckles with her ruler. Stated that way, ‘man’ and ‘mankind’ mean the same thing. The sentence doesn’t make sense. It was supposed to be “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” But does it matter?

The only people who ever think about that today are grammar zombies and the people who hunt them. To the rest of the world, it’s as memorable as any line ever delivered. And for good reason: They care about the spirit of the thing, not the grammar. If you want people to remember your message, you don’t have to be perfect. You do have to have spirit.

Do you think Neil Armstrong will go down in history for the most famous botched line ever? Do you think he spends his days worrying and his night sleepless over having omitted a critical word from his introduction to immortality?

Hell no. He didn’t just put himself out there. He put himself waaay out there. His leap was a leap of faith, taken on behalf of every human being on the planet. To paraphrase a famous redneck: “He got ‘er done.” That’s what counts.

There have been a lot of great speeches in the history of this country. One of the most famous was given on August 28th, 1963, by the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. He was set to end the speech on a lower, more cautious note. For whatever reason, he didn’t feel it was right for the time, or perhaps not as good as it might have been. We’ll probably never know for sure why he hesitated.

When she heard him getting ready to send the audience home, Mahalia Jackson, one of the greatest gospel singers of all time, encouraged him from the background. “Tell them about your dream, Martin. Tell them about the dream!” So, he went on. He told us about his dream. And he changed the world. Dr. King was only 34. He never made it to 40.

There’s a lesson in that story for anyone who has something to say they believe is important: Say it the best way you can. Say it with the will to move the mountains in your readers’ hearts.

You don’t have to be perfect, just true to your message. But say it. You never know if you’ll get another chance.

The odds are that the things you’re hesitating over aren’t quite as historically significant as being the first to walk on the moon, or attacking the underpinnings of a broad social injustice. But they’re probably just as important to you and your family.

That’s why you’re nervous. That’s normal. Just keep in mind that you get a second chance. And a third. In fact, you get as many chances as it takes until you get it right. And you don’t have the entire world watching and judging your every move.

So you’re not perfect. So you screw up sometimes. Did you think you wouldn’t? Do you think anyone, anywhere, ever achieved anything useful without mistakes along the way? Congratulations. You’re tied for first place. Just you and 7 billion other humans.

People who’ve gotten good at something, even really, really good at it, still make mistakes. They’re not afraid of those mistakes because they know the consequences and how to deal with them. You only tend to let fear of mistakes stop you when you don’t know the road at all. It’s like traveling to somewhere you’ve never been and worrying about ending up in the wrong place. If it’s a long trip, the odds are good you’ll get lost at least once. Getting lost is the result of a mistake. And how do you fix it? You consult a map, or retrace your steps, or you stop and ask for directions. Whatever you need to do to get back on the right track.

The way most people handle fear of not being good enough is very much like someone getting lost or hitting a detour and deciding they’re stuck wherever they are. They’re not where they want to be, but still they don’t move. Would that make any sense at all?

Do whatever research you need to decide on a destination, and then to figure out some general directions. Then get started. Make adjustments as you go along. If you get lost, use that as an excuse to meet new people. If you hit a detour, take in the scenery. That makes it a lot easier to enjoy the ride.

That last part assumes you don’t know what you’re doing. A much more common problem is people underestimating the value of their own skills and knowledge.

That’s easy to do. You learn things, for the most part, in bits and pieces. None of them are usually all that big in themselves. One small step after another. Before you know it, you’ve lost sight of how far you’ve come.

King’s march took a lot more than one small step, and Armstrong didn’t make it to the moon in one giant leap. But they knew they had what it took to keep advancing. They may not have believed they were “good enough,” but somehow they were, and they got there anyway.

So can you. Just make a map and get moving. You’re already good enough. Now go do something about it.

Here are a few little guidebooks that might help you figure out how to get from where you are to where you want to be.

“20 Page Empires” : A simple guide to building an online business with short reports you can create in very little time. It also outlines some alternative types of products you might never have considered, and that could be more suitable for your personal style.

I get incredible feedback from customers of this one. It’s helped a lot of people who’ve struggled to finally get something done and selling.

http://talkbiz.com/empires/

“Creating Killer Content”: My course on writing. The focus is on what it takes to create powerful content that gets results.

http://talkbiz.com/killercontent/

The Power Creativity System:  Everyone is a genius. This will help you tap into real solutions that work in the real world. Warning: This course will make you think. You might find you have trouble sleeping after reading parts of it. I promise, you’ll enjoy that.

http://talkbiz.com/genius/

If you know someone you feel might benefit from this issue, feel free to pass it along. Just send them the whole thing, so they can sign up if they like it.

Paul Myers

English language lovers and purists tend to be very prescriptive when it comes to grammar. They shouldn’t always be because our language is in constant evolution as it devises more efficient structures.   Many native English speakers convert nouns and proper nouns into verbs (by changing the position of the noun in a sentence) and like the fact English gives them the freedom to ‘verb’ nouns and ‘noun’ verbs and feel it allows them to communicate more efficiently. According to Steven Pinker, verbing nouns makes our language more sophisticated.

There are hundreds of nouns and acronyms covering a wide variety of professions, hobbies and sports that have become verbs: access, ambulance, arrow, author, bed, beverage, breakfast, blunt-object, bunt, chip, club, fly, garage, gift, ground, gun, impact, input, knife, lance, parent, polymerase chain reaction (PCR),  rat, ring, spear, tree, torch, torpedo,

1. I don’t want to consens (give consensus to ) on something the boss won’t agree to.
2. She went Paris Hilton shopping and Paris Hiltoned an astronomical amount of merchandise.
3. He was ambulanced (take by ambulance) to the emergency room.
4. Thieves accessed (gain access) the bank accounts.
5. The neighbor’s dog treed (chase so it climbs a tree) our kitten.
6. Hugh Heffner has bedded (have sex with) hundreds of women.
7. Would you garage (put in the garage) the car before it rains?
8. He has a milk allergy and doesn’t want the pizza cheesed. (put cheese on)
9. How many were impacted ( affect) by the blackout?
10. The women who were incested (a victim of incest) were given new identities.
11. They’ll NFA (no further action) the proposal if you send it.
12. Couples who parent (become parents) too many children should pay more tax.
13. The victims were funeralized (funeral) on the weekend.
14. Her husband broomed (sweep with a broom) the steps.
15. She weirded /weirdoed (act weird, act like a weirdo) herself past the authorities.
16. This Friday will be bookended (to come before and after, or at both sides of ) by two oil spill reports from British Petroleum.
17. Ron Paul felt that certain behavior could not be legitimated (legitimate for legitimize).
18. They’re shoeing (put shoes on) their son.
19. An arrow may be flighted (fletch) with feathers.
20. Sects incentivize (insensitive) their followers to mainstream society.
21. The author was AKAing (also known as) (as) David Wolfe.

You can also form a possessive by using ‘of ’ e.g “The mummies of the Egyptian Museum” or “the Egyptian Museum’s mummies.” These are normal possessives.

The confusion arises when both ways of making possessives at the same time are used: ‘Wasn’t that a good idea of Mr. Happy’ becomes ‘Wasn’t that a good idea of Mr. Happy’s’?

Here you have an ‘of’ plus an apostrophe plus an ‘s’. This is a double possessive and if you haven’t noticed or heard it before, it sounds strange and incorrect because it seems to overwork the notion of possessiveness.

Double Possessives / Post Genitives (of followed by a possessive case)

The double possessive has been around since the fifteenth century, is widely accepted, and many use it. It’s extremely helpful, for instance, in distinguishing between ‘a picture of my boyfriend” (in which we see your boyfriend) and ‘a picture of my boyfriend’s’ (a picture my boyfriend owns). Many purists believe double possessives should be relegated to informal and semiformal writing only.

He’s a friend of my sister or He’s a friend of my sister’s
He’s a friend of mine
He’s a fan of hers or He’s a fan of her
He’s a friend of Jim’s and mine or He’s a friend of Jim and of mine.
He’s a friend of Jim’s and mine
This friend of Jim’s and mine or This friend of Jim and mine.

Generally, a double possessive refers to sth human e.g a friend of Jim’s.

For an inanimate (not alive) object such as ‘Germany’ or the Egyptian Museum or an Orchestra” we don’t normally use a double possessive. According to *The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage, for a double possessive to be acceptable, the object of the preposition “of” has to be “definite and human.”

He’s a friend of Germany. NOT He’s a friend of Germany’s
He’s a supporter of the Orchestra. NOT He’s a supporter of the Orchestra’s.

*See The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage edited by R.W. Burchfield. Clarendon Press: Oxford, England. 1996.

Respectively is slightly formal, seldom necessary, requires interpretation /mental gymnastics, and often causes confusion because it forces the reader to go back and match up what belongs to what.  On the other hand, it does allow a writer to give a lot of information without having to write several short sentences.  The writer or speaker saves words but at the expense of those who need more time to understand theirs.  Most sentences are more easily understood without ‘respectively’ so avoid it.

AND for those who use it:  if you put a comma after ‘respectively’ , you need one before it too. However, only use a comma if it provides clarity. In most cases, the sentence will be perfectly clear without commas. Respectively is not set apart from the other information in the sentence when it appears as the last word and therefore, there is no need for a comma.

2nd definition: As relating to each; particularly; as each belongs to each; as each refers to each in order; as, let each person respectively perform their duty. The impressions from the objects or the senses do mingle respectively every one with its kind. –Bacon.
In German ‘ beziehungsweise’  is heard and used much more often  than ‘respectively’ is in English. German students frequently want to use respectively and most of the time, it’s better to leave it out. There is also the German word ‘respektive’ — which means basically the same thing as ‘beziehungsweise’, but creates more of a problem as a “false friend” with the inevitable result that it often ends up being mistranslated as ‘respectively’.

You should go to the hospital, [beziehungsweise] a good naturopath.
Er war ein guter Bekannter, bzw. Freund von mir = He was an acquaintaince /old acquaintaince,  actually a friend.
In the above sentences, which seems to be a common usage of ‘beziehungsweise’ in German , ‘or’ / or rather’ / actually would make better sense in English.

Common Examples
1.    Jennifer and Francine take English and French respectively = Jennifer takes English and Francine takes French.
2.    Patents 22-52 and 53-73 refer to Clients 1 and 4, respectively = Patents 21-51 refer to Client 1 and Patents 53-73 refer to Client 4.
3.    Bob does 1 and Janet does 2, so Bob and Janet do 1 and 2 respectively.
4.    His brothers Jim and Jan are 20 and 17, respectively = Jim is 20 and Jan is 17.
5.    Please send the documents – references and diplomas – as originals and copies, respectively.
6.    Indefinite detention advocate Barak Obama, water board torturer George Bush Jr., and playboy Bill Clinton were represented by their vice presidents,  Joe Biden, chicken hawk Dick Cheney, and environmentalist Al Gore, respectively.
7.    Spain and Italy are currently first and second respectively in World Cup Soccer.
8.    Monopoly, Chess, and Blackjack are, respectively, the proposed activities for our next party.
9.    The pizza was divided among, Dad, Mom, Jack, and Jill respectively.
10.    The company collected cash and checks for various payments amounting to €400 and €1000 respectively.
11.    A and B have been sentenced to nine and two years’ imprisonment respectively.

New languages were initially dialects of a language and gradually developed separately. So, the boundary between language and dialect isn’t always clear. Some dialects sound like the original language and others sound like a completely different language. If you speak or understand a particular language, you might or might not be able to completely understand its dialects.

According to Victoria A. Fromkin (1923-2000), an internationally known linguistics expert; “it is not always easy to understand whether “the systematic differences” between two speech communities reflect two dialects or two languages … when dialects become mutually unintelligible- when the speakers of one dialect group can no longer understand the speaker of another dialect group- these dialects become different “languages”.

English began as a Germanic dialect called Anglo-Saxon that was brought to southern England by invaders from Germany. The Anglo-Saxon language in England evolved far differently than the Anglo-Saxon in Germany in part due to the influence of Norman French.  The English grammar and vocabulary that resulted eventually spread to different parts of the world.  British English (BrE) and American English (AmE) are dialects of English because some of their vocabulary and grammar and pronunciations and expressions are different. Although the United States has many more dialects than Canada, both dialects are similar despite different accents (pronunciations) and vocabulary and expressions, which also vary within regional areas and from state /province to state /province.

Accent
Everyone has an accent because an accent is a part of a dialect. If you’ve learned another language, you will carry some of the phonetic traits of your mother tongue over into the new language and speak it with an accent or foreign accent.

Accent refers to the way words are pronounced (by native speakers) and is associated with a country or an area or a social group or class. Accent also refers to how much stress or emphasis is given to syllables, consonants, and vowels. Accents add interest and uniqueness to our speech. Accents can be neutral or mild or slight or heavy or strong or thick.  A heavy accent is hard to understand and unpleasant to listen to.

Accent Approximations
Amy Walker is an American actress, singer, and dialect coach from Philadelphia. In this two plus-minute video she goes through an approximation of 21 accents. 

The ‘r’ in her California accent is too hard.  The British, French, German, Russian, South Carolina, Texas accents are stereotypical and average.  Her Seattle accent is okay.

Apparently, some of the Australian accents are a bit off and the Toronto accent sounds like someone from northern US, which is close enough because a Vancouver accent and a Seattle accent are pretty similar.  US pronunciation and American TV programs influence Canadian pronunciation.

The people who moved north (North Germanic) and stayed, spoke Danish, Faeroese, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish. The Proto Germanic speaking tribes that moved west (West Germanic) developed German (high and low), Dutch, Flemish, and Frisian.

Frisian is the most closely related language to English.  Frisian was formerly spoken from the province of North Holland in The Netherlands to Schleswig in northern Germany.

Frisian is now spoken only in three small areas, each with its own dialect. West Frisian is spoken in the province of Friesland in The Netherlands and is considered an official language by the Dutch government. East Frisian (Saterfreisen) is spoken in the Saterland, a municipality in the German state of Lower Saxony, west of Oldenburg. It is the smallest minority recognized by the German government. North Frisian is spoken along the North Sea coast of Germany and on the Frisian Islands. Written records in Old Frisian date from the end of the 13th century.

Many features of Old English (OE) look a lot like German because the roots of Old English are in Proto-Germanic, a subset of the Indo-European (IE) family of languages.  Like modern German, all the nouns in Old English, including inanimate objects, are neutral, feminine, or masculine. Old English has no Latin or French words, there are hundreds of strong (irregular) verbs, the word order is not fixed, and nouns change their form or endings when they are the subject or the object or if they are possessive.