Two interesting linguistic things have happened to me today.

The first was that I received an email from the couple with whom I will be partaking of Easter lunch tomorrow. This is an awesome American couple from New York (although the wife is originally an Okie) who moved to France this year to enjoy spending their niece and nephew's inheritance. I met them through the book I am co-editing, and the Okie wife and her husband, who we shall call Blanche, seem to have decided to look after me. Which is lovely.

Okie and Blanche are inviting about eight people for Easter dinner tomorrow, and I received an email from Blanche about one of the other dinner guests. It seems that they felt the need to alert me that one of the guests, despite his, and I quote, "non-U" accent from Coventry, is very cultured. Apparently they are worried that a) I will be shocked and appalled that they are friends with someone, again, to quote, "NQOCD" (not quite our class dear) or b) that this person will take offense at the fact that I speak a fairly high-end version of received pronunciation (RP.)

I have always spoken like this. People assume I learned it from boarding school, or that I had elocution lessons. The fact is, my parents spoke like this, and so did most of our family. I just learned to speak RP like a Japanese child in a French family would grow up speaking French and not Japanese.

RP in Britain is traditionally associated with money and class. A couple of generations back that was true of my family: there were boats and horses and foreign travel when nobody did it. However, all the money my immediate family has (and as my Mother constantly reminds my Father, it's not nearly enough...) was earned. By my Dad. It's ours. We didn't get it because of our accents.

We do, however, have what I consider class. I don't mean we're aristocrats, or that we consider ourselves better than Scottish people with actual Scottish accents simply because we speak differently from them. I mean that we behave in a certain manner, that is, don't talk publicly about money, always send thank you notes, when going to someone's house always take a gift, and so on.

I know plenty of people with no money, and broad regional accents who have oodles of this kind of class. I know far too many people who have oodles of money, and diamond vowels, and have not a jot of class - because they brag, treat others with disrespect, and behave abominably.

In my second year in college I took a sociolinguistics course on NC dialects with a German professor who has since moved back to Europe. Our research project was based around a tape of two code-switchers, that is, a man and a woman who spoke Standard AND Southern English, and switched between the two depending on what register they were talking in. They read a grammatically unmarked text, so they were reading something that was dialectically neutral, it was merely phonetically accented.

I did a fairly ethnographic kind of survey, where I sat people down and talked to them for a long time about their upbringing and thoughts and perceptions after I had them fill out a questionnaire about the tapes.

The results were pretty interesting: all the people I spoke to came to a similar conclusion. Namely, they could hear the difference, but since both were speaking grammatically correct English, the accent didn't affect their perception of how much money they made, how educated or intelligent they were. The only places you saw the two diverge was that the Standard accent was considered less "friendly" overall than the Southern one. Keep in mind that this was one person reading the same text, just in a different "voice."

Anyway, I wish I could say the same for Britain, where my accent has earned me ridicule over the years as being "posh." Even people at boarding school with me would tease me, because the current vogue among young people all over Britain is to adopt a vaguely Essex twang named Estuary English by linguistics researchers, that I like to call "urbanese." See Jamie Oliver for details.

I had a dream last night about being a radio presenter (I was really rubbish) but this is very unlikely because the BBC, to make up for years of bias towards RP, now leans towards people with regional accents: a British Broadcoasting Company for ALL Britons is a worthy idea. But it's still biased.

UPDATE: It is apparently not just me that finds the bias against RP annoying. While I myself switch to a more american accent among my yankee (and confederate) friends, this lady feels obliged to talk 'ackney. I was particularly appalled to read about the Glaswiegian Speaker of the House of Commons firing his secretary for having an annoying sloane ranger accent. Not considered discrimination in that direction is it?

Anyway, the second interesting linguistic thing was that the Google legal department sent this letter in response to a Wired article using the verb "googling" as interchangeable with "using a search engine."

This is a common phenomenon: look at Kleenex, Xerox and Hoover. More importantly, look at Radio, Television, Newspapers (and, I might add, the Internet or the Web.) All were originally names for particular types of a new technology. All have been de-capitalised as they became interchangeable with the name of the technology itself. Wired itself was the first publication to declare that its house style now recognised internet as a lower-case noun, and not an upper-case brand name. Nevermind that people had been using it for years like that.

All that the Wired article on googling was doing was using language the way that speakers do. That is really all written language is: a reflection of how people agree on correct speech. Writing tends to lag behind spoken, because written language is still a code of power that uses prescriptivist grammar to keep it high-prestige as a skill. This is not a bad thing, more formal writing is, of course, going to get you somewhere in life as opposed to writing like ur txting (sic.)

Anyway, I say use google as a verb. As Calvin remarked to Hobbes "verbing weirds language." I would add that it also enriches it.

P.S. Looking for the comic strip linked above, I came across this.