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| | The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-23) |
 | | Labov explained his contention that the city’s dropped “r” has its origins in posh British speech: when F.D.R. dropped his “r”s (“The only thing we have to feah is feah itself”) and Katharine Hepburn dropped hers (“My, she was yah”), it sounded upper class. |
| | Or the Lower East Side.” The city’s dialect, he said, is much more indicative of one’s social status than of one’s neighborhood. |
| | He found that customers on the upper floors, where the goods were more expensive, were far less likely to drop their “r”s than those on the lower floors, and that the floorwalkers almost never dropped theirs, while the cashiers sometimes did, and the stock boys always did. |
| www.newyorker.com /talk/content/articles/051114ta_talk_seabrook (935 words) |
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