bvi@sri-unix (08/02/82)
It varies from state to state, city to city, and probably person to person. When I lived in New York, I was taught that anybody living south of Virginia spoke 'barbaric' English. When I lived (briefly) in the Deep South, I was told that 'Yankees couldn't speak American'; when I moved to Miami (Fla), which is cosmopolitan enough that many people speak 'standard' (American) English, I got a few giggles about my 'northern' accent (which I emphasized to be ornery), but I was close enough to 'standard' that the flak soon died down. Moral of the story? The more cosmopolitan the area, the less insistence (usually) on 'correctness' of pronunciation, and the greater the acceptance of legitimate variants like colour/color - and by cosmopolitan I don't necessarily mean large cities, but merely places where a number of 'different' people congregate, such as major universities. The tolerance for variants in pronunciation and spelling have been correlated as far as my experience is concerned; try putting a '-' through your 7's in a non-cosmopolitan area and see what happens. Beatriz Infante, HP Design Aids Lab