[Sidenote:  In deliberate repititions.]

So, then, we are asking what is the condition of a man who has learned the dictionary standard?

(1) In common talk if we speak so indistinctly as not to be understood, we repeat our sentence with a more careful articulation.  As Sweet used to say, the only security against the decay of language through careless articulation into absolute unintelligibility is the personal inconvenience of having to repeat your words when you are indistinctly heard.  ‘What’ leaps out from the dictionary with a shout to the rescue of all his fellows.  And when you have experienced this warcry ‘what? what?’ oftener than you like, you will raise the standard of your pronunciation (just as you would raise your voice to a deaf listener) merely to save yourself trouble, even though you were insensible to the shame of the affront.

[Sidenote:  In asseveration.]

And this more careful articulation obtains also in all asseveration.  A speaker who wishes to provoke attention to any particular statement or sentiment will speak the words by which he would convey it more slowly and with more careful articulation than the rest of his utterance.

Under both these common conditions the man who has learned only the vernacular of Mr. Jones’ phonetics has no resource but to emphasize with all their full horrors words like seprit, sin’kerpate, din’ersty, ernoin’t, mis’ernthrope, sym’perthy, mel’ernkerly, mel’erdy, serspe’ct, erno’y, &c.[24], which when spoken indistinctly in careless talk may pass muster, but when accurately articulated are not only vulgar and absurd, but often unrecognizable.

[Footnote 24:  Writing er, always unaccented, for [e].]

[Sidenote:  In public speaking.]

(2) Again, public speakers use a pronunciation very different from that in the dictionary, and Mr. Jones admits this and would teach it sepritly as ‘style A’.  But it is wrong to suppose that its characteristics are a mere fashion or a pedantic regard for things obsolete, or a nice rhetorical grace, though Mr. Jones will have it to be mostly artificial, ’due to well-established, though perhaps somewhat arbitrary rules laid down by teachers of elocution’.  The basis of it is the need of being heard and understood, together with the experience that style B will not answer that purpose.  The main service, no doubt, of a teacher of elocution is to instruct in the management of the voice (clergyman’s sore throat is a recognized disease of men who use their voice wrongly); but a right pronunciation is almost equally necessary and important.

Now if public speakers really have to learn something different from their habitual pronunciation, Mr. Jones is right in making a separate style of it, and he is also justified in the degraded forms of his style B, for those are what these speakers have to unlearn; nor is any fault to be found with his diligent and admirable analysis.