9.18.15 To have, or not have, class

I grew up on the South Shore of Boston, where a big bunch of inherited-wealth-with-high- paying-jobs-in-the-family- business lived in the woodsey burbs. Everyone raced into Boston each day to work , avoided speeding tickets because they were well connected, and had lots of kids, a house in New Hampshire for skiing, and really knew how to seriously party down. 

My maternal side came from Lowell, with that Lowell version of the Boston accent, which was studiously eradicated for class upward mobility reasons.

As far as all those wasps were concerned, the only people that should be speaking with a Boston accent were our own royalty, the Kennedys. Who were only ok, despite being Catholic, because they were so damn wealthy (#1) and outrageously wild (#2). 

When I began flunking out of sixth grade, my grandparents sent me to an excellent day school in Hingham, where a certain percentage of the wealthiest spoke with ... wait for it.....an English accent. Turns out they worked hard to retain that accent ( or affect it) due to, yes , class reasons. Btw, those same people managed to stay tan all year round , long before tanning salons , because they were always jetting off to some warm sunny place or another, and making it sound oh so tiresome .

At the dinner table , we were coached on the proper use of 'r' to forestall any danger of lowered class ranking.

When I was sent to a boarding school, I was awash in accents , and when I first fell in love, Yiddish was a saving grace , so fluidly inserted into everyday speech , to really nail expressing yourself . 

In that Westchester family that became my own for a long time , my speech morphed into a WASPY version of a New York accent , and for years after, whenever I was tired or in need of comfort , back it would come.
But to be honest, I must say that few things are more hands down appealing anytime anyplace ... than a Boston accent, what with it's brusque accompanying bravado. 

"The Boston accent possesses both linking R and intrusive R: That is to say, a /r/ will not be lost at the end of a word if the next word begins with a vowel, and indeed a /r/ will be inserted after a word ending with a central or low vowel if the next word begins with a vowel: the tuner is and the tuna is are both [ðə tʰuːnəɹɪz]

There are also a number of Boston accent speakers with rhoticity, but they occasionally delete /r/ only in unaccented syllables, e.g., mother or words before a consonant, e.g., car hop."