Worse yet, the teachers in the National Schools had
scattered far and wide that peculiar intonation, that droll slip
or twist of the vowel sounds by which the cockney alone formerly
proclaimed his low breeding, and the infection is now spread as
far as popular learning. Like the wrong breathing, it is social
death "to any he that utters it," not indeed that swift
extinction which follows having your name crossed by royalty from
the list of guests at a house where royalty is about to visit,
but a slow, insidious malady, which preys upon its victim, and
finally destroys him after his life-long struggle to shake it
off. It is even worse than the wrong breathing, and is destined
to sweep the whole island, where you can nowhere, even now, be
quite safe from hearing a woman call herself "a lydy." It may
indeed be the contagion of the National School teacher, but I
feel quite sure, from long observation of the wrong breathing,
that the wrong breathing did not spread from London through the
schools, but was everywhere as surely characteristic of the
unbred in England as nasality is with us.
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