George Bernard Shaw famously observed that “it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him.” That was in the preface to Pygmalion, whose hero, Professor Higgins, was a phoneticist who could identify which bit of London any individual Cockney came from — which the flower girl Eliza Doolittle regarded as near necromancy.
Poor Higgins’s heart would have broken this week at the news that Cockney in all its manifestations is on the way out, as is Received Pronunciation or what was in happier days called BBC English.
