The Failed Attempt to Give America its Own "Received Pronunciation"

The reader may have heard of something called "the mid-Atlantic accent." First coming across the term (it may have been when I was reading John Gardner's For Special Services; Gardner describes Felix Leiter's daughter Cedar as having a "mid-Atlantic accent") my thought was of the "mid-Atlantic states" on America's eastern seaboard, and took it for a regional accent belonging to the people of Maryland and its close neighbors, perhaps.

However, in this case the term "mid-Atlantic" referred to not the middle of the Atlantic seaboard but the middle of the Atlantic ocean--halfway between America and Britain--in a figurative sense, the accent being a compound of both the accent of the Northeastern United States and the English Received Pronunciation that, by the late nineteenth century, had emerged as the accent of Britain's elite. Some of the relevant history seems obscure, but it appears that there was deliberate copying of Britain's "RP," with, just as in Britain, much of this going on in the private schools of the country's elite, and in the emergent mass media--on the radio, in movies.

In the United States, however, the effort to develop a distinct elite accent was a comparative bust in the long run, taken almost for an individual eccentricity in the case of a George Plimpton rather than a badge of Authority, and today an anachronism. ("Why does Audrey Hepburn talk like that?" one might wonder watching one of her movies. "Is that Cary Grant guy English or American or what?" Watching Charade they can wonder these things about both of the movie's leads.)

Did this failure do anything to make America a more egalitarian place than it would have been otherwise? Diminish its social divides? It seems to me that the situation is so bad that way that one would have a hard time proving that--but for all that I suspect that it is probably for the best that the United States does not have this added bit of cultural baggage to cope with as well.