Wisconsin’s tainted me.

I’m sure it’s done the same to you, one way or another. Maybe your pizza standards have severely plummeted while your cheese intake has skyrocketed. Maybe you’ve begun using the words “bubbler” or “soda,” or drinking heavily with your parents.

If that’s the extent of your contamination, be thankful.

Freshman year, my Chicago-based friends and I were astonished to discover a measly hour-and-a-half drive north leads to the home of a vastly foreign accent, focused on extremely pronounced vowels. I’m not proud to say so, but we judged people’s intelligence based on whether or not they had Wisconsin accents. We even made a habit of mocking the dialect, carrying on lengthy conversations about “baygs,” “bagg-els,” and the “Greeeen Baaaay Paaaayckers.”

Alas, the joke’s on me: Four years later, I now have a Wisconsin accent of my own.

Like a prepubescent boy with a cracking voice, I’ve heard myself say things that made me blush and vow never to speak again. “Frankly,” “ya know,” and “linebacker” are just a few words I’ve had to bar from my vocabulary. This regional language, and essential voice change in my case, embarrasses me to no end.

I’m not sure why, though. Everyone’s got an accent and a story to go with it. My roommate, Hannah, is proud to hail from Philadelphia, where everyone says “arringe” instead of “orange” and “hoagie” instead of “sandwich.” But in the Midwest, these phrases and pronunciations are worth at least 10 seconds of mockery apiece.

My grade school principal was an Irish immigrant who moved to New York as a child and eventually landed in our Chicago suburb. Fifty-some years later, she still led our assemblies with nasally, mile-a-minute speeches, like a female Archie Bunker.

Hers, at least, was an interesting backstory of working-class resilience and cultivation. At Marquette, I’m just one straw in the fishbowl: a white girl who came straight from her house in the Chicago suburbs to a white-walled dorm in Milwaukee and somehow ended up talking like a local.

If I dreamed of staying in Milwaukee till my death, this might be fabulous. However, I’ve got other plans.

So did Milwaukee-area native Shane Welch when he founded Sixpoint Brewery in Brooklyn, NY.

Welch apprenticed at the old Angelic Brewery in Madison and for ten years since, has brewed 200 styles of beer in a converted 800-square foot Brooklyn garage. Sixpoint beers are now sold at famous eateries all across New York. Last week, Welch brought his work home to Wisconsin.

“This literally defines grassroots,” he told OnMilwaukee. “Starting with just an idea and passion in your basement, then moving to a pressure cooker like New York and making it work, and then finally coming home to share it with … your native state.”

I’ve never thought of Wisconsin as my home, but it’s been an exceptional one. This city’s legacy of segregation and this state’s politics since last winter haven’t exactly made me beam with pride, but if I tighten my scope it’s easy to see that some of the kindest — and yes, most intelligent — people I’ve known were born and bred in Wisconsin.

On the surface, it’s not pretty when my Wisconsin accent taints my “normal” speech. But if Marquette has taught me anything, it’s that exteriors don’t add up to mean half as much as the things they conceal.

Adopting a new accent is proof that I’ve been here, making small talk with liquor store clerks and waiting at bus stops in blizzards with strangers. It’s proof that stories were written here and they can be told when I go back to my “real” home or build a new one in another state.

Welch put it best: “I am happy to be one of Wisconsin’s proud exports — and imports.”