He has, for example, always said
"financier," with the accent on the last syllable; and if he has
consulted his Webster he has found that there was no choice for
him. Then, when he hears it pronounced at Oxford by the head of a
college with the accent on the second syllable, and learns on
asking that it is never otherwise accented in England, his head
whirls a little, and he has a sick moment, in which he thinks he
had better let the verb "to be" govern the accusative as the
English do, and be done with it, or else telegraph for his
passage home at once. Or stop! He must not "telegraph," he must
"wire."
XI
As for that breathing in the wrong place which is known as
dropping one's aitches, I found that in the long time between the
first and last of my English sojourns, there had arisen the
theory that it was a vice purely cockney in origin, and that it
had grown upon the nation through the National Schools. It is
grossly believed, or boldly pretended, that till the National
School teachers had conformed to the London standard in their
pronunciation the wrong breathing was almost unknown in England,
but that now it was heard everywhere south of the Scottish
border.
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