As a kid growing up in the Chicago area, I confess I was spoiled in many ways.

Just think about the food, for starters. Not many places in the country, if not the world, can rival not only the quality, but also sheer variety of cuisine selections awaiting our palates on local restaurant menus.

And the regional favorites? Good luck beating the foursome of Italian beef, Chicago dogs, gyros and Chicago-style pizzas (Notice: Plural. As in more than one “Chicago-style.” If you know, you know.)

And sports? Walter Payton and the Bears of the 1980s gave way to Michael Jordan and the Bulls of the ’90s. Not too shabby.

Culture? Music? Architecture? Check. Check. And check.

As one of the best follows on TikTok, Sherman Dilla Thomas puts it: “Everything dope about America comes from Chicago.”

Scenery? OK, we can’t win every category. But it’s always fun to exchange a knowing glance when the jaws of first-timers drop when they realize what we mean by “the lake.”

But what was truly spoiling growing up here was the accent. As in, many of us never thought we had one. And why should we? For generations, when we’d flip on the TV or a national radio broadcast, what did we hear spoken back to us?

Our own way of speaking, that good ol’ generic Midwestern dialect, known in the business as “General American” for its ability to be readily understood by English speakers everywhere.

So, you can imagine my surprise the first time I traveled to the South as a young man, and was asked by a child: “Why’d y’all talk so funny?”

His parents kindly shooshed him and apologized (bless their heart), and I told them it was no big deal, but I’m certain the look on my face said, “Who the (bleep) are you saying talks funny?” more clearly than even a TV diction coach could convey.

But upon my return, and the more travels taken since, the easier it is to hear the nasal intonations that define our “General American” dialect.

Well, that and the words you use and the way we pronounce them.

Traveling has, for instance, taught me that no one outside of the Chicago area refers to athletic footwear as “gym shoes.” And most of the rest of the English speaking world calls sweet, fizzy drinks “soda,” not “pop.”

We Midwesterners, however, appear to be in much better, or at least, larger, company when it comes to other lexical vagaries.

Such as, how we here in this part of the world pronounce the word “aunt.”

Growing up in the Midwest, it was always understood that the word was pronounced just like the colonizing, hardworking, ground-dwelling insect that, thankfully, hasn’t realized its full potential as a species for world domination.

But then, one day, a chance childhood encounter with another family’s visiting uppity East Coast relatives introduced me to what they assured me was the “correct” way to say the word. You know, like “taunt.” Just like the tone of their voice.

Then, later, a racial diversification in my friend base allowed me to learn that some people of darker skin tones refer to such relatives using a word most closely phoneticized as “un-ty.”

But through the years, no matter what others may call them, what I have really been spoiled by are the women who I have had the honor of calling my aunts.

While my mother shouldered the primary, laborious task of raising me and my siblings, these amazing women came alongside and added so many blessings to our lives. In many ways, they took us raw lumps of potential and added their own touches in refining us into the (mostly) civilized and (hopefully) responsible adults.

And they kept coming back, time and again, even when we were ungrateful and uncouth brats, putting in the work of imparting enduring lessons on etiquette and protocol in an adult world; inculcating a love for the arts; for individual sports, like bicycling and cross country skiing; igniting a love for reading, by constantly supplying great books, whether we knew it or not; and otherwise exposing us to a swath of life-altering experiences that opened our eyes to the possibilities offered in this great big world.

And through it all, they taught us perhaps the most important lesson of all, sometimes missed, but always understood in any dialect:

There is no such thing as “spoiling” a kid with too much love.