As we drove today through a stretch of minor highway in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, it could have been a stretch in Connecticut, Indiana, or even Orlando if there had been palm trees. It looked like anywhere in the United States, and I have been all over. Insurance companies, veterinarians, auto repair shops, dentists, and fast food restaurants, all interchangeable with bits of road I’ve ridden through in New Jersey, Massachusetts, Florida, Texas, Indiana, and Cincinnati.

The thing that makes a region most distinctive is often not its architecture, though. It’s the accent.

People think they know the Delaware County accent from the TV show “Mare of Easttown” with Kate Winslet, an excellent English actress who absolutely nailed the Delco accent.

However, though my kid and I grew up in Delaware County, we don’t speak with a Delco accent.

That’s because we are actually from the Main Line. The Main Line is not Delco. It is a patch of affluent old money, winding lanes and big dark trees that rejects the county and township boundaries it crosses. The Main Line accent was a watered down version of the Northeastern Elite accent, though it has dwindled into something even more generic in my lifetime, but it still isn’t Delco.

I often have conversations with Philadelphia natives who ask me suddenly, “Where are you from?” I tell them I was born in Philadelphia and have lived in Philadelphia half of my life, but they find it hard to believe, and they’re right. They really, really want to nail down which area of Philly I’m from, because I can’t be from anywhere they recognize. If I say “Delco,” that wouldn’t be right either.

And “Main Line” would be absurd. We didn’t have money. We weren’t gentry.

But the voice I hear in my head when I am thinking is my mother’s voice. It is assured, confident, and absolutely Transatlantic elite.

She once accused me of sounding like my father’s family. He was from Wynnewood, also on the Main Line, but his family had a cheerful, nasal accent that was obviously not correct, according to my mother.

It is all pretentious nonsense, of course, but the last remnants of her educated, forceful, arrogant family accent that I still possess are what make people suddenly demand of me, “Where are you from? No, where are you from, really?”

And what they mean is, “Who the hell do you think you are?”