Humans never outgrow a fascination with new playthings, but after a certain age it is unseemly and unrealistic to expect a steady stream of surprise gifts from doting parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. One consolation for this loss is new words: clever coinages come along all the time to supply our craving for novelty. A word, term, or phrase that was unknown yesterday can be on everyone’s lips in a matter of hours or days because it fulfills a human need: a new thing to have fun with.

The soberer side of this phenomenon is the province of lexicographers and dictionary publishers, who must decide whether a newly-minted word is of sufficient importance and longevity to be included in a dictionary. Here’s the dilemma: it’s a commercial dead-end for a dictionary to seem out-of-date and old-fashioned, but a dictionary that allows every fashionable word to climb onto its bandwagon will quickly lose the respect of its peers.

Language watchers may have noted a spate – perhaps it was only a spatter – of news stories six weeks ago, grandly proclaiming “Tebowing now an official dictionary word” or “Tebowing makes it into the dictionary.” It’s the sort of headline that makes lexicographers roll their eyes heavenward. The flutter of excitement, upon analysis, turned out to be in essence a promotion from a website, The Global Language Monitor, which has been involved previously in various schemes to call attention to itself by baiting journalists on a short deadline with faux news. In fact, Tebowing has not been added to any respectable dictionary, and it’s too early to tell now whether it will be.

What (in case you’ve been living under a rock) is Tebowing? It’s a word based on the surname of Tim Tebow, quarterback for the Denver Broncos football team. He’s an evangelical Christian and he manifests his faith, quite unconventionally, by genuflecting. Yes: genuflecting. English already has a word for what he does, but the novelty of its being done by a football player in uniform, combined with the easy convertibility of his name to a gerund and the fun of saying “Tebowing” certainly encouraged the coinage. A coinage, however, is a far cry from an entry as a headword, and it seems unlikely that Tebowing will appear in any dictionary soon. The word got a lot of airtime when the Broncos pulled off a number of heart-stopping, eleventh-hour victories, but they lost their bid to participate in their division’s championship playoffs. No amount of genuflection seems to have been able to change the fact that their opponents played better football.

A trip down short-term memory lane shows that fad words like Tebowing come along all the time – and they go with equal frequency. Do you remember cyberchondria? It gets about three hits today if you try it in Google News, but for a few weeks back in the day (5 years ago or so) it was nearly as frequent as Tebowing was in December. Snowmageddon had a heyday in 2010 when the East Coast of the US was blanketed in several feet of snow, but it left lexicographers cold and the word does not yet appear in any standard dictionary. Matrimania – hyping of all things related to marriage – seems to have been coined around the turn of this century and it enjoyed a few days in the limelight, but has hardly been seen since. People enjoy words like these when they come along, and today unconventional reference websites like Urbandictionary and Wikipedia provide a place to record them, but speakers are fickle. We soon abandon these novel playthings because we know that others will be coming along soon.

The run-up to a general election in the United States provides an opportunity for observers of English to see it stretched beyond ordinary limits. The winnowing process that will reduce the various Republican contenders in the race to one has begun and as we plod steadily toward the November election, the rhetoric heats up and we may be tempted to ask, as Alice did of Humpty-Dumpty: “The question is whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

Speakers of English who did not grow up in the US may be nonplussed by the recurrence and special emphasis that a few words receive in debate rhetoric: the words are familiar, but the vehemence with which they are bandied about might make you wonder what gives the candidates such animation. The key to understanding this phenomenon lies in the special meaning that a handful of words carry in American politics. Here are a few watchwords that, when used by a candidate for office, may contain meaning or connotation that goes a bit beyond what you will find in a dictionary.

socialist and socialism: Throughout much of the 20th century, and culminating in the McCarthy era witchhunts of the 1950s, communism inspired fear and panic among Americans; it was portrayed as the most tyrannical form of government, and the antithesis of freedom and the American Way. When Soviet and European communism died with a whimper in the late 20th century, there was a need for a new bogeyman, and socialism quickly filled the void. So while Americans today uphold many of the virtues espoused by socialism – such as equality of opportunity and state financing of essential infrastructure and services – being labeled as socialist, or promoting socialism, is equivalent to being called un-American. Not surprisingly, a favorite missile aimed toward president Obama from all of the Republican candidates is that he is a socialist and aims to move the US towards socialism.

liberal: If you read through the several definitions of liberal in the Macmillan Dictionary, you would conclude that being liberal, or even being a liberal, is a Good Thing, and you might consider that you are one yourself. But in American politics, you never want to own the label, and if you are accused of it, the usual thing to do is ignore it or supply as much evidence to the contrary as you can. Americans value liberty (a related word) and personal freedoms perhaps more than any other people in the world, but in politics, liberal is an economical code word meaning “someone who promotes, demands, or gets too much freedom, which will lead to the destruction of society, and I don’t want my taxes to pay for that.”

agenda: the main meaning of agenda is “all the things that need to be done” and so you would think that politicians would embrace the word – they like to be perceived as people that get things done. But there is also a subsidiary meaning of agenda, sense 1a in the Macmillan Dictionary: “a plan that is kept secret.” For this reason, American candidates for office don’t usually talk about their own agendas, for fear of suggesting that they have a secret one. But they talk freely about their opponents’ agendas, and when this happens you can be sure that it’s sense 1a you’re hearing about, or perhaps something even more sinister, along the lines of “something you would hate to see happen in this great country.”

welfare: the preamble to the US constitution states that the document is established, among other reasons,  to “promote the general welfare” – and by that it means “the health and happiness of people.” But that’s not the welfare that candidates for office talk about. They mean something a little closer to Macmillan Dictionary definition 1a, “money given to people who do not have work or who are in need.” It’s likely that what they really mean is something along the lines of “money that the government takes from hardworking taxpayers and doles out to feckless and lazy people who can’t be bothered to earn a living.” Thus, modern American politicians do not promote welfare.

Europe and European: Americans are aware of the fun things about Europe – castles and what not – and they’re wild about European fashions, styling, design, and other consumables. But the Europe that politicians talk about these days is not that place at all. It is a scary place, riddled with debt crises, street riots, monetary chaos, and – yes, you guessed it – socialism run amok. President Obama is regularly accused of wanting to make the United States “more like Europe” and the accusers don’t mean that he wants to build more castles, or insure that money spent prudently on health care actually contributes to better health outcomes, such as you find in many European countries. They mean that his agenda is to create a liberal European socialist welfare state.

Discussion of class and English continues for one final week. In this guest post, journalist, author and blogger Robert Lane Greene looks at class and language, specifically pronunciation, in American English.

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In my last post I wrote about the messy variety that characterizes American English, saying it was far too often treated as a single mass when viewed from Britain. In fact, America has great regional variety.

But one thing it does not have, in contrast to Britain, is a strong tradition of class-marked accents. Shaw, who gave us the braying phonetic snob Henry Higgins, wrote in a preface to Pygmalion that “It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.” English accents have both geographic and class divides; America has many of the former but fewer of the latter. Across broad swathes of the country – most of the midwest and west – it’s hard to know at a quick listen whether someone comes from a well-heeled background or a poorer one.

But class does appear in the oldest European-settled parts of the country. Ben Trawick-Smith wrote here that in places like New York and Boston, “r-less” accents persist, and mark a working-class origin. These accents are at least well-known; outsiders can usually fake a broad Boston accent – badly, perhaps, but they get the right idea when they try “Pahk the cah at Hahvahd Yahd”.

When non-southerners try to do a southern American accent, though, the result is usually a total hash. I noted this in the HBO vampire show True Blood: about half the “southern” characters, ostensibly from Louisiana, throw in features only found in Inland Southern accents, in places like Kentucky and Tennessee. (The actor who plays Jason Stackhouse, Ryan Kwanten, an Australian, is the worst offender.)

But the other thing outsiders often don’t get is that there is still a clear class-distinction in the south.  Upper-class r-dropping still exists vestigially among those unafraid to flaunt such an accent. Watch this (fictional) pair, the redneck deputy Roscoe Coltrane and the white-suited local political honcho Boss Hogg, in The Dukes of Hazzard, set in Georgia. Boss Hogg isn’t true southern aristocracy, but his white suit and his speech show that he likes to think of himself that way. (The actor, though, is from New York State.) Meanwhile, deputy Coltrane’s dim wit is meant to be clear through his R-ful (sorry) English.

I’ve always loved the well-heeled southern tones; for real-world examples, check out William Faulkner, Eudora Welty or Shelby Foote. The sad thing is that they’re getting rarer; the fact that I reached for three dead exemplars here says a lot. (I wish I had a recording of my Aunt Sue for you.) I wonder if there isn’t a political component to this: the anti-“elite” political climate of the South since the 1960s may have made many reject the planter-elite tones in favor of a demotic general southern, much more R-ful, as well as distinct in its vowels.

Class English month continues with the pronunciation theme: guest blogger Ben Trawick-Smith, from Dialect Blog, takes a look at (non-)rhoticity in American English. Ben has worked as an actor, playwright, director, critic and dialect coach. His other passions include linguistics, urban development, philosophy and film. Ben lives with his wife in Seattle, Washington, in the USA.

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George Bernard Shaw deemed the US and Britain ‘separated by a common language.’ Yet a century ago, the ‘elites’ of these two nations shared quite a bit of linguistic common ground. When one listens to the accents of America’s old East Coast moneyed class – those of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, William F. Buckley, and Katharine Hepburn – one notes striking similarities to the ‘Queen’s’ English once spoken on the other side of the Atlantic.

The common denominator is non-rhoticity, sometimes known as ‘r-lessness.’ Non-rhotic accents drop the r’s in words like car or butter, while a rhotic accent keeps said r’s intact. We tend to think of England as non-rhotic, where Ireland, the US and Scotland are ostensibly rhotic. In reality, however, there are exceptions to these generalizations: Northeastern US accents, popular Dublin English, and some urban Scottish accents being the most notable.

The past century has seen American and British attitudes toward non-rhoticity diverge. Where r-lessness was once a prestige feature in both countries, it is a marker of working-class or vernacular speech in 21st-century America (typical of the broadest New York City, Boston and African American Vernacular Englishes). In England, on the other hand, non-rhoticity is stronger than ever, colonizing the country’s last rhotic safe havens.

So what happened? Arguably, World War II happened. Upon arriving home, middle-class American GIs scattered throughout the country in search of jobs and housing. Sheer numbers probably influenced the resulting dialect shift: since rhotic Americans likely outnumbered the non-rhotic, /r/ won out. R-fulness became the norm, while ‘r-dropping’ became (to the unenlightened) a regional, lower-class aberration. Thus the feature did an about-face: what was a badge of upper-crust honour now marks low socioeconomic or educational status in the U.S.A.

I can think of few features with such rapidly devalued social currency. Contemporary English people may find older varieties of Received Pronunciation hopelessly stuffy. Likewise, the Irish still laugh at ‘Dortspeak,’ the British-influenced accent once spoken by Dublin’s elite (and recently well-summarized by Stan Carey on this blog). But in both cases, these accents merely lost their elite status, rather than being relegated to different classes entirely.

How we perceive non-rhoticity in America is inconsistent. American non-rhotic accents are largely stigmatized; New Yorkers and Bostonians, every bit as non-rhotic as Londoners a century ago, now often insert the /r/ wherever it appears written. And yet, paradoxically, we Americans readily accept this feature in the speech of Britons, even finding it ‘proper’ or ‘elegant.’ Is this a case of American dialect self-loathing rearing its ugly head?

Moving on from theatre and acting to music, subcultural English month brings you a guest post by Orin Hargraves, an independent American lexicographer and author of books about English, including Slang Rules!, a lesson book for English learners about American slang.

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The music that we call rap today can be heard in nearly every spoken language. But the rap music that began today’s worldwide phenomenon was in English, specifically in a subcultural variety of American English. It’s informally called Black English but that’s not quite accurate; many Americans with African roots don’t in fact use this dialect, and Africans around the world speak a wide variety of English dialects, but not this one. A more accurate name for the variety of English that fuels Rap English, and the name currently favored by academics, is African American Vernacular English, or AAVE.

Perhaps no variety of English generates more enthusiasm among English learners in the world today than the English they hear in rap – and perhaps no variety of English is more opaque to the learner, especially to the learner who is studying standard English in a classroom. The good news is that Rap English is actually much simpler than the English that you may be studying. You can throw out a number of rules, and you can dispense with one of English’s worst bugbears: spellings that bear little resemblance to the sounds they represent. Let’s explore some of the rule bending that goes on in rap songs today.

The pronunciation of many of the most common verbs and pronouns that you hear in rap music is the pronunciation found in most varieties of informal American English, including AAVE. Rappers often go one step further, and do us the favor of actually spelling words the way they sound. So, for example, when you hear (or see) “Whatcha gonna do?” it may not be immediately obvious what the standard English translation is. “Whatcha gonna do?” is a pronunciation spelling of “What you going to do?” – that is, a spelling that closely matches the way that people pronounce the words. When a word ending in a t sound is followed by a word beginning with a y sound, American tongues tend to convert this combination to a ch sound. The spelling whatcha reflects this pronunciation.

Gonna is a pronunciation spelling of going to and reflects two patterns of informal American pronunciation: words ending in –ing often lose the g sound in speech, and the word to, rarely stressed, is pronounced with a schwa vowel: hence, gonna. What happened to the t in to? No one has reported its whereabouts, but the t sound is a common one to disappear in informal pronunciations. Two ts go missing in wanna, a pronunciation spelling of want to.

If you’re an astute learner of English, you’ll notice that we skipped over an important problem with “What you going to do?” It’s not grammatical! The correct form of the sentence is “What are you going to do?” Informal dialects of American English, including AAVE, have simplified use of auxiliary verbs, and in many sentences, auxiliary verbs are eliminated. This is particularly true of are and have when they are part of a verb phrase. So if you noticed already that “What you going to do?” is not strictly grammatical, you get an extra point: before “What are you” becomes whatcha, it has already lost the are. This loss of an auxiliary verb can also be seen in a line like: “I’ll deliver and give ya whatcha been waitin for”, which in standard, more difficult English, is “I’ll deliver and give you what you have been waiting for”.

Are you ready to tackle a whole stanza? Try this one, from the song “Life Ain’t Easy”:

When I get old Imma be real cool
Sittin on the porch with a fresh pair of shoes
Whole bunch of stories for the neighborhood kids
Tell em to believe that we makin it big

Here you can see illustrated the points discussed above, along with two new elements:
1) em is a pronunciation spelling of them that dispenses with the th sound;
2) imma is an AAVE shortening of an informal contraction: I’m going to > I’m gonna > Imma.

Armed with these two principles – “spell it like it sounds” and “don’t be bothered with too many auxiliary verbs” – you’ll find that Rap English is not as mysterious as it looks.

Of the countless varieties of English, American English (AmE) and British English (BrE) are the most significant. This is why you can set Macmillan Dictionary’s default setting to either, and switch back and forth throughout.

American English regularly comes under fire from some BrE speakers who perhaps feel a bit possessive or protective about their mother tongue. Corpus data show that the word Americanism is often modified by a disparaging adjective, such as horrible, disgusting, absurd, and vile.

The BBC website recently published an article about AmE and its influence on BrE. Though the writer acknowledges the great flexibility of English, he cannot resist grumbling about particular Americanisms he finds “ugly and pointless”. These are subjective judgements, of course – and several of the facts he cites are wrong, as Language Log shows.

Occasional Macmillan Dictionary guest blogger Dan Clayton wrote an interesting response on his own language blog. He makes the important points that the dividing lines between dialects are far from clear-cut, and that with respect to AmE and BrE, the influence does not operate in one direction only.

Given that languages and dialects undergo constant change, and blend and blur into one another, the purist point of view seems misguided to me. It also encourages unsavoury peeve-fests like the one the BBC subsequently printed.

Catchphrases and idioms (often AmE) spread quickly, and grievances over new coinages and linguistic conventions are often knee-jerk objections that develop over time into pet hates. But some of these neologisms eventually become standard, widely used, and even loved.

Ever since English was brought to America, the two dialects – or rather the two sets of many dialects – have assumed their own forms and standards. AmE has steadily become the centre (aka center) of gravity, but each side affects the other in all sorts of ways. As Dan put it: “While the bigger picture might be of a drift towards more Americanisms, it’s not all one-way traffic and the drift is not uniform.”

I love the Irish English dialects I hear around me, but if I encounter an idiom I like from another dialect – guddle, for instance – I’m liable to adopt it. The history of English is a history of many languages and dialects mixing with one another. It’s what they do. I think linguistic diversity can and should be enjoyed and embraced. Instead of getting wound up about phrases we dislike, we can celebrate not only the great variation that exists but also the fact that so much mutual comprehensibility remains.

The other day, an American friend of mine told me he’d got a kitten, but then completely stumped me by saying she was a ‘brindle’. Was that a special breed, I wondered, or did she need medical treatment? It turns out, ‘brindle’ is what we in the UK would call tortoiseshell, and it got me wondering what other UK-US linguistic differences there might be when it comes to colour. As it happens, there are quite a few.

In British English, we say something is ‘brindled‘ to mean its fur is varicoloured, but then we have specific names for the results. In the same vein, Americans use ‘tabby’ much more widely than we do; there, you’ll find ‘yellow tabby’ cats – what we Brits would call ginger. I have to say, I prefer ginger; somehow ‘yellow tabby tom’ just doesn’t have the same ring to it as ‘ginger tom’, and doesn’t bring to mind the image of a great big burly male cat surveying his territory. But it does take account of the fact that ‘tabby’ refers to markings that feature dots, stripes or swirls of a different colour (which ginger cats often have, in white).

There are similar differences in the world of horses. What we would call a chestnut, over the water is likely to be known as a sorrell, which sounds much more exotic to me (though maybe that’s just because I loved My Friend Flicka when I was young). Where we differentiate between black-and-white (piebald),  brown-and white (skewbald) and tricoloured horses, in the US these are just known as paints. Again, I like this, because a lot of them do look like the product of some kind of art project, where someone has been standing, flicking paint at the horse, á la Rolf Harris (Can you tell what it is yet?).

When it comes to dogs, there’s further confusion. In the UK, we shorten Golden Retriever to Retriever, but in the US, they’re known as Goldens. Irish Red Setters, though, seem to be more likely to be called a Red Setter here, and an Irish Setter there (possibily to distinguish from the English Setter?).

It’s all quite fascinating to me, and if this look at colour has piqued your interest, check out Beth Penfold‘s tour through the autumn colours here.

Today we (re)introduce Dawn Nell, the second in a series of guest bloggers who are contributing to this blog over a two-week period. The first of their posts is on the subject of ‘Global English’, and the second will look at the ways that you (users) search Macmillan Dictionary. Dawn, who has written for this blog before, is an historian and blogger who works on the history of publishing. She was born in Cape Town, and these days lives mostly in Oxford and on Twitter.

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You know when a blog post begins with something really clichéd and you just have a feeling it’s not going to end well? This isn’t going to be like that at all, so stick with me despite the fact that I’m starting with one of the oldest clichés of language difference around: ‘You say tomato, I say tomato.’ Admittedly it’s kind of difficult to get this to work in text and to make any sense of this line you’ve got to know that it belongs to a song which puts it more like this: ‘You say toMAYto, I say tomAHto’. (You’re getting that feeling now, aren’t you?) The point I’m trying to make is that global English is characterized by diversity. A lot of diversity. In fact, you could even say, diverse diversity. The difference in pronunciation between ‘American’ English –(toMAYto) and ‘British’ English (tomAHto) is just one example.

Okay, let me move on to something else. Aubergines. I had a conversation with a friend recently in which she described making a brinjal curry, and I asked her a ton of questions about the aubergine curry she had made. We were talking about the same thing – just that she’s more used to using the word brinjal, and I’m more used to the word aubergine. And if one of us was American, we’d probably be using the word eggplant. The point is that it didn’t really matter, because we knew we were talking about the same thing and we understood each other perfectly.

Reflecting its global spread, English has acquired – and continues to acquire – words and turns of phrase that allow this sort of choice and flexibility. And English is diverse in other ways too. English accommodates different spellings – grey in British English and gray in American English, for example. Even within British English, there are differences – for example, with some British dictionaries preferring ‘z’ to ‘s’ in words such as criticise or characterise.

But if there is such diversity, and we can use all these different words and spellings in English, can we ever be wrong? Is the English language so flexible that we can do whatever we want and simply justify it on the grounds that it’s right somewhere, or even just in our own perception? After all, unlike the French language, there is no organizational equivalent to the Académie Française to make definitive pronouncements on correct language and spelling. The closest we have in English are dictionaries, which have their origins in efforts to record English usage rather than prescribe it. It’s because they’re recording the ever-expanding diversity of language that dictionaries are constantly growing, with new words being added all the time as they appear in common usage. Where the speakers of English lead, the dictionaries follow.

With the huge diversity that characterizes English, we are left to choose what is best according to the context in which we’re communicating. The onus is on us to understand what the norms are for any particular context. For example, I’ll talk about sending a text message from my mobile (phone) when I’m in Britain, and about sending an sms from my cell(phone) when I’m in South Africa. And I try to remember to say freeway instead of motorway and gas instead of petrol when I’m in the United States. It’s not as if I’d be completely unintelligible if I didn’t make these choices, but I understand that these are the words people in South Africa and the US normally use, and I feel it’s about being considerate to the people I’m speaking to.

So does it matter if you say tomato or tomato, or brinjal or aubergine, or freeway or motorway? Probably not, but the more vocabulary we have at our disposal, and the more we understand the distinctions between different forms of usage, the more adaptable and creative and global we can be in communicating.

Tomorrow, on 2nd November, the US are holding mid-term elections which will determine who – Republicans or Democrats – will control Congress for the next two years (for predictions, see here).

As the 2000 Presidential Election spectacularly proved, the American electorate is divided into two camps. On one side are the Democrat-voting blue states, located primarily on the coasts (California and New York, for example) and in the northeast. They are opposed by the Republican red states of the so-called fly-over heartland and the south.

The core voters of each party are known as the base. On the Democrat side this tends to be made up of trade unionists and various interest groups defined by race or social outlook. For red state Republicans the unifying issues tend to be pro-life (anti abortion), anti gun control and pro small government. Democrats often describe themselves as progressives and Republicans as values voters.

How are elections decided? By what happens to a third group of independent voters in swing (or purple) states like Oregon, New Mexico or Ohio. Independents historically have sided with the winning party. These went with Bush in 2004 and Obama in 2008.

What do independents want? This is the key question for electoral strategists. Surveys consistently show that the electorate is more ‘conservative’ than ‘liberal’ or left leaning. That is why there are ‘blue-dog Democrats’ representing many purple districts. Blue dogs define themselves as being more fiscally conservative than the majority of their party and are usually against gun control and – to a lesser extent – abortion.

Republicans also field candidates who are seen as more socially liberal where this better suits the electorate. Examples include Scott Brown – who became a Senator for the Democratic stronghold of Massachusetts in January 2010 or Rudy Giuliani the pro-choice (abortion) former Mayor of New York.

Current polls suggest that the Democrats are quite likely to lose control of the House of Representatives, and could also lose their majority in the Senate. Democrats are pulling out all the stops to stop this happening, with Obama making history by becoming the first president to appear on the Daily Show.

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‘For a short talk on the main differences between the US Republican and Democrat parties (with some listening comprehension activities) see here.

Our American English month is shortly coming to its end. Perhaps this is a good point to stop and ask this question again: What is American English? This time the answer comes from Robert Lane Greene, journalist, blogger and author of a soon to be published (and now thoroughly copy-edited) book, You Are What You Speak, about language and identity.

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When asked to write something about “American English”, my first thought was “American English? What’s that?” The language spoken between Florida and Alaska is a messy thing, internally divided by almost as many features as it is divided as a whole from British, Irish or South African English. Don’t believe me? This is just one map of American English. Another such look at American English can be had for around $750 from Mouton de Gruyter, the 2005 Atlas of North American English by William Labov, Sharon Ash and Charles Boberg. Obviously the authors (with their years of work) and their publisher (who think you might pay almost $800 for it) estimate that there’s rather more to say about American English than that we say “line” for “queue” and write “color”, not “colour.”

I first discovered Labov’s work in particular while researching my own book about language and identity. One of the founding fathers of sociolinguistics, Labov sought to explain variation in American English. His master’s thesis was on a distinctive vowel on Martha’s Vineyard, the storied island off the coast of Massachusetts. (Roughly, the native pronunciations of the diphthong in “ride” sounds a bit like some Irish pronunciations of the same.) Contrary to the hypothesis that American English is drifting towards a bland Network Standard, Labov found (in the 1960s) that this distinct Martha’s Vineyard pronunciation was increasing, and asked why. It turned out to be a sociological variable: that those with the strongest attachment to the island’s traditional ways—often fisherman annoyed with the “summer people” who had recently discovered the island’s charms—moved their accent further in the direction of the traditional one, probably unconsciously.

Labov went on to do an ingenious study of New York English. He found that the “r-dropping” characteristic of that accent was more common in a lower-end department store than in a higher-end one. (In the lower-end store, when he asked people the location of something on the fourth floor, they were more likely to tell him it was on the foath floah.) So far, so unsurprising. He also found that if he asked them to repeat themselves, pretending he hadn’t heard, the r was more likely to appear the second time. None of this was surprising either. He further went on, in separate testing, to show that the r appeared more often when people read words off of a list and did other formal tests than when they spoke spontaneously. This wasn’t too surprising either.

But one surprise did come when he compared the difference in how much different classes “corrected” themselves. Everyone was more likely to pronounce the r in formal settings. But the lower-middle class corrected themselves even more than the upper-middle class did, relatively speaking. Labov posited “hypercorrection”—the aspiration of those in a lower-status group to try to sound more upper-class. Those already in the upper-middle class were more content with where they were, r-dropping and all.

Why go on about this? I think that the variation that Labov and others put their finger on is so interesting because mobility is such a key aspect of the American life, both geographical mobility and, at least in our American dreams, social. We do move around the country a great deal, much more than Europeans do. People also do move up and down the social ladder, and even those who don’t think they can and will. How accents and dialects change along with that movement can be fascinating to watch.

I was born in Tennessee, and grew up in Arkansas, Nebraska and then, mainly, Georgia. I remember moving to Atlanta at age 8 and beginning, self-consciously, to use “y’all”. We hadn’t said it in Nebraska and it came haltingly to me. I settled down into a lightly southern-inflected English there, with a Georgia-born father who said rassle and brefuss (for “wrestle” and “breakfast”) pulling me in one direction, and a Wisconsin-born mother pulling me in the other. My southern family always thought I (and my brother) sounded northern.

Imagine my surprise on coming to graduate school in Oxford, years later, and being considered the local southerner; people told me again and again they could hear a southern accent in me that I couldn’t hear in myself. I had half-worried that my southern family back home would really disown me if they heard me come out with a “queue” or a “motorway”. Now here I was in England sounding like Rhett Butler (or maybe Roscoe P. Coltrane – the class differences in southern accents are underappreciated by outsiders) to the mixed bag of Brits and foreigners at my college.

From Oxford, I moved to New York—foath floah and all. It hasn’t left too much of an imprint on the way I speak, except that I probably speak faster than I do down South. But the triangular trip from the south to England to the northeastern United States has made it so that when I think about it for just a second, everything sounds foreign or put on—including myself. My wife, Scandinavian, often says that I get more southern when I get excited or strident (or when I have a few drinks). But friends sometimes ask me why I don’t have a southern accent, and all of a sudden I truly can’t sound neutral to myself; either I sound too Yankee or too southern, and nothing is me.

My story isn’t so unusual. In a way, I’m a perfect American, just like that Italian-American from Michigan Madonna is a perfect American, with the half-British diction she’s been mocked back home for after years of living in England. To move between accents and dialects is part of human language behavior. But to me it seems poignantly and particularly American, with physical movement and social aspiration so big part of the national story. An American can be someone who says y’all come back or foath floah, or, just as easily, someone who has tried them both and more.