That British Accent - Tony Hayward cured us of American inferiority

Chuck it up to our American inferiority.  We were suckers for a British accent.  I recall in graduate school how we deferred to even our classmates who had a British accent.  Incidentally, too many of our fellow classmates who came from Akron, Ohio or Brooklyn, New York returned from studying in the UK with distinct British accents they never lost.

Well, all that is history.  BP Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward has been so horrific in his public statements that the British accent has become downright cartoonish.  Expect it to be lampooned everywhere from "SNL" to the monologue on "Letterman."

Given this upset in what was perceived as the prestige dialect, I give my Jersey City, New Jersey accent a good shot at being hailed as the language of candor.  Movers and shakers will all be adopting it.  Yeah, I will be called upon to teach JerseyCityese as a Second Dialect.

Comments

[D, Woods]

Tony Hayward doesn't speak with what eben the worldly and erudite Chris Matthews calls a 'posh' British accent. On the contrary, Hayward speaks in so-called Estuary English ... something that one UK minister of education called ' a slovenly, mumbling, bastardized Cockney.' Professor Henry Higgins would have been appalled.

[Jwisner]

I certainly could be your teaching assistant, although the midwest tampered my "Dees, dems and dozes".