This dropping of r's in Britain ?didn't happen all of a sudden, and the sticklers of the day ?didn't take it lying down. "The perception that the language was 'losing a letter' was a cause of profound upset to some writers," the linguist David Crystal has written. The poet Keats, for example, was cruelly upbraided by critics for rhyming "thoughts" with "sorts," and "thorns" with "fawns." Lord Byron blamed a critical article for hastening Keats's death in 1821: "'Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle, / Should let itself be snuffed out by an Article." But by the time Keats died, the dropped r was a standard feature of educated British pronunciation.

The other letter that's a dead giveaway in telling a Brit from a Yank is the a in a word like "past." We all know how an American would say it — with an a like the one in "cat." And as anyone who's watched Masterpiece Theatre can tell you, the standard British pronunciation is PAHST. But it wasn't always so. The Brits used to say it the same way Americans do now. Here again, the Americans stuck with an old way of speaking, one the British abandoned about the same time they dropped their r's.

The a, like the r, has ping-ponged in British pronunciation. Until the 1500s, the English did indeed pronounce words like "bath" and "laugh" and "dance" with an "ah." But in the sixteenth century they began pronouncing the a in what we now consider the American way (as in "cat"). So things remained for the next two or three hundred years. This is the a that went to America on the Mayflower in 1620. And this is the a that both the Redcoats and the Colonists used during the Revolutionary War. Not until the 1780s did Londoners begin pronouncing their a's like "ahs" again, and for a few decades the broad a and the short a battled it out. But by the early 1800s, educated Britain was saying BAHTH and LAHF and DAHNCE.

That's also about when literate Britons started pronouncing the h in "herb." Before the nineteenth century, both the English and Americans pronounced it ERB. In fact, the word was usually spelled "erbe" for the first few hundred years after it was borrowed from the Old French erbe in the 1200s. The h was added later as a nod to the Latin original (herba, or grass), but the letter was silent. Today, Americans pronounce "herb" the way Shakespeare did, with a silent h, while the Bard wouldn't recognize the word in the mouths of the English.

Speaking of aitches, some British speakers, especially on the telly, use "an" before words like "historic" or "hotel," and some Anglophiles over here are slavishly imitating them. For shame! Usage manuals on both sides of the Atlantic say the article to use is "a," not "an." The rule is that we use "a" before a word that begins with an h that's pronounced and "an" before a word that starts with a silent h. And dictionaries in both Britain and the United States say the h should be pronounced in "historic" and "hotel" as well as "heroic," "habitual," "hypothesis," "horrendous," and some other problem h-words.

When the British aren't adding or subtracting an h, stretching out an a, or dropping an r, they're chopping off whole syllables from words like "secretary," "necessary," "military," "extraordinary," "satisfactory," "literary," and others. "Secretary," for example, is shortened to SEC-ruh-tree, cutting off the next-to-last syllable. Americans, on the other hand, pronounce all four syllables (SEC-ruh-teh-ree), as the British did until the eighteenth century. We know this because British textbooks of the time recommended pronouncing all the syllables. But by 1780, the British educator Thomas Sheridan was complaining about people who spoke too quickly and dropped syllables, leading to "indistinct articulation." In A General Dictionary of the English Language, Sheridan suggested that the guilty parties "pronounce the unaccented syllables more fully than necessary, till they are cured of it." The cure didn't work. If it had, the British would be saying "necessary" today as Americans do, instead of NESS-uh-sree. No doubt Sheridan would have found that satisfactory.

Back to the Future

Prince Charles's mom may be the queen of England, but he has a lot to learn about the Queen's English. In 1995, the prince complained that Americans were corrupting the English language. In a speech to the British Council, an institution that promotes British culture and the English language, Charles said Americans "tend to invent all sorts of nouns and verbs and make words that shouldn't be." If the English don't protect their language, he said, "the whole thing can get rather a mess."