Still :-) mostly -- McWhorter on "standard English"

[Robin Hamilton]

>>>Received Standard English -- "I say, my good man (or woman, or person as
> the case my be), would you do me the favour of providing me with
> nourishment
> in the form of ground up cow clasped in a bun?"
>
> Doesn't this just make RSE equivalent to "fossilized, circumlocutional
> English suitable only for class-directed satire?"

Yeah, mea culpa -- the substance of this quite legitimate observation was
made to me independently, by someone who read the post over my shoulder
after I sent it.  Basically, I got caught out perpetrating a bait and
switch.

> If so, amusing; but surely the reality is more subtle.

I'm not sure it's even amusing (me trying to be too clever for my own good).
And lazy -- it was easier to generate a parodic text than to try to find a
more cogent example.

Brooding over this issue, and trying to determine within myself whether
Glasgow Urban Working Class Speech/es constitute/s a dialect, pidgin, patois
or creole, it occurred to me that two separate issues are at play here --
the question of dialect and the question of register.

Strictly, the choice of which speech variation to use when ordering a
hamburger in McDonalds as against submitting a scholarly paper to a peer
reviewed journal would be a matter of a choice of register.  This would
apply *regardless of the dialect or dialects of the customer, employee,
scholar or editor in question or questions.

Robin Hamilton

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