‘Hi nigh brine kai?’ is often the first sentence you will
learn in Received Pronunciation (RP) – how to enquire about the health of a
brown cow at a precise moment in time.
Of course, the Queen’s English is used not only to establish
the welfare of tan cattle, but to impose the way people expect us to speak. And
by ‘people’, we mean society. One needs a clipped accent to be respected or to
have one’s authority accepted, in order to advance in life.
What might not be appreciated so much is that that word
‘received’ is loaded. The suggestion is that one’s pronunciation should be
something that should be communicated or despatched (from the ruling classes) and
accepted (by the hoi polloi) i.e. received. The pronunciation must be
registered (in our minds), much as one might in analogy sign for a courier-delivered
parcel to verify its receipt. By wiggling one’s finger across the screen of
that big mobile phone thing couriers hand you.
‘Is that OK?’ you ask the courier. ‘Is that alright as my
signature?’
‘Yuh.’
‘So, I could have just twitched; squiggled anything? And you
would have accepted that as my signature?’
‘Ar.’
‘Or I could have forged the signature of the person who this
package is for? Like forging banknotes, but instead of making fake money you
can spend fraudulently, getting something random you might not want from
Amazon? Like unexpected socks?’
‘Alright, mate?’ says the courier by way of taking his leave,
finding an excuse to terminate the further probing of the verification process.
He is on a mission to deliver as many parcels as he can, aspiring to prove to
Jeff Bezos that he can meet the minimum wage on a zero-hour contract if he
works fast enough and doesn’t waste time on signature talk.
It wasn’t though, as commonly thought, the British who
invented Received Pronunciation. That honour belongs to...
