Vox humana.(The Straggler)(American accents; phonetics)

'WITH that voice," the lady gushed, "you can always get what you want!"

If only it were true! The mise-en-scene, I hasten to say, was far from intimate. There were half a dozen of us sitting round a restaurant table in Washington, D.C., and the ladies, who were a clear majority, were all of the most respectable sort. In any case, I hear this a lot. It seems counterintuitive to me, given this nation's origins, but native--sorry, one is nowadays driven to pleonasm here: I mean native-born--Americans just love a British accent. And yes, the temptation to swing matters in one's favor a bit by laying on that accent is occasionally irresistible. Contra my lady dining companion, I can't always get what I want, and there are of course some places--certain bars in Boston or New York--where the effect might be dramatically the opposite of what is intended; but it is a fact that having a British voice gives one an edge in most of the USA.

It took me longer than usual to get wise to this because I have always thought my own voice very unsatisfactory. I was raised in a rustic English county where nothing much had happened for a millennium or so. The nearby prominence that official maps showed as Hunsbury Hill was known to us as Danes' Camp, a name it must have acquired in King Alfred's time; and people still argued about which route Thomas a Becket had taken when fleeing the county seat in 1164. The local people, who did not venture from home any more than necessary, had developed their own dialects. There were at least two in the county proper--three if you included the Soke of Peterborough, which we generally didn't, and where the plural of "house" is "housen." The playmates of my childhood dropped their initial aitches and the terminal "g" from "-ing," formed the regular perfect tense with "be" instead of "have," pronounced the "oh" and "eye" diphthongs as "oo" and "oy" respectively, spoke of the world about them with a variety of dialect words like "jitty" (an alley) and "mardy" (ill-tempered), addressed friendly strangers as "Duck," and used metonymy to refer to London, 60 miles away: "the Smoke."

None of this sat well with my parents, who both came from further west and north, and had washed up in the county as part of that great shuffling the English population underwent during WWII. My mother in particular thought dialect speech uncouth, and corrected us ceaselessly when we were in her presence. Cowed by this relentless pressure at home, yet unwilling to be scoffed at by my coevals for putting on airs, I reached my teens in a state of bilingual confusion. Then my secondary school, which demanded high standards in all things, laid my vowels and consonants on the anvil, so that I emerged into the adult world speaking a nondescript non-dialect: Oikish, the flat, characterless, locality-less diction of working-class lads and lasses trained up to be acceptable in polite society. "You can take the boy out of the Bronx, but not the Bronx out of the boy," New Yorkers say. The English know better.

Alas, the adult world I had been trained into was disappearing just as I arrived. By the time I graduated from university, not only was it no longer the case that local dialects ...