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From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm John McWhorter, and I happen to have been reading. My sweetie has been watching me strangely obsessed with reading Rick Atkinson's book on the Revolutionary War. It's part of a trilogy. It's called The British are coming. And it is quite immersing.

And of course, it also has me thinking about language. It's at that time that I find interesting

when we've already got modern English and not early modern English. And yet, there are things

that are different. There are reasons that the way we see those people communicating with

each other always seems a little off, little arch. They often just seem like a radio station

that's not quite tuned in. And there are all sorts of things we can learn about how language works

and how English works just by paying attention to, among other things, in a book like that,

language, because these are

people who wrote a lot. People wrote a lot from the war. They wrote a lot about the war. And so we can

get insights into what it would have sounded like to actually sit on one of those battlefields or just

in a parlor and listen to people speaking, either formally or casually.

How did these people talk? You've got these Brits and these Americans and they're fighting?

Well, there's one thing that Atkinson does not mention explicitly, but that we definitely need to

mention because the whole issue never comes up, and the reason it doesn't come up is because of

something counterintuitive. And that is we never hear about anybody having a British accent.

The idea is never that an American hears somebody saying something in a British way and

knows that the British are coming or has some opinion,

yay or nay, about the British accent. And that's because during this time, there wasn't one.

It's very easy to think. And I brushed by this in an earlier episode of the podcast,

but we're talking way before the pandemic. and I think that sometimes repetition is okay.

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