Headscratchers / Timeline-191

• While it's understandable enough that Clarence Potter might have picked up a Yankee accent while attending university in the United States, it's fairly incomprehensible that he hung onto it through the entire series. During the Settling Accounts tetralogy, it's repeatedly pointed out that his accent makes him the object of suspicion from his own side; at least once he finds himself thinking it could get him killed. He picked up the Yankee accent over four years, to fit in while in school. Is it really so impossible for him to pick up or recover a Southern accent in the more than 30 years he spends in the Confederacy afterwards, so he'll fit in better there?
  • He is an intelligence officer so it would make sense for him to be able to imitate/switch accents easily. But unless his parents were also Yankees^note Not implausible; Connecticut had the highest percentage of 'copperheads', or Confederate sympathizers, in the Union, many of whom ran the Union blockades to deliver supplies from Britain and from sympathetic Northerners. A population of New England expatriates settling down in a successful Confederacy isn't out of the question. and he heard the accent at home from birth, it's unlikely that his Yankee accent would predominate.