America in 2016 is fractured. Our culture has too few shared dreams, and too many overblown squabbles. And yet, take heart, my countryfolk, and unite in the face of our nation's truest enemy: The American who puts on a fake British accent.

To American ears, British accents have power. Intelligence. Passion. Charm. Class. Sincerity. Its long vowels are the love of your favorite auntie, the gaze of your heaviest crush, the wit of your favorite professor. Americans' love for the British accent is quite possibly the glue in one of the tightest diplomatic relationships in world history. Woe to the charlatans who twist that to their own purposes.

So you would expect that I, like any other true patriot, would have been triggered into rage when I saw a TV news about a Texas woman who developed a British accent after jaw surgery. But I entreat you, fellow patriots, hold your buckets of tar. There is a loophole, and its name is foreign accent syndrome.

"It's a rare disorder that has been described for about 100 years or so," says Timothy Young, a neurologist at Mayo Clinic Health System in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Fewer than 100 people have ever been diagnosed. Foreign accent syndrome is a language disorder, not unlike stuttering or dyslexia.

Most sufferers (if such a label can be responsibly used for a condition that confers such obvious social capital) develop their accents after neurological trauma. "Speech is produced in the left hemisphere of the brain, so the best documented cases involve a stroke or trauma to that hemisphere," says Young. A person with neurological foreign accent syndrome will often have visible signs in their MRIs or PET scans. A recent case study in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience describes a French-speaking Belgian woman who developed a German accent after a car accident.

However, Young says it is probably unlikely that the Texas woman developed her case from neurological trauma. Her surgery was to correct an overbite. It is possible the doctors pinched a nerve, but that would more likely cause a slur than an Estuary drawl.

An even rarer possibility is that, in healing from the surgery, she developed a speech impediment that sounds to listener's ears like a British accent. "Her muscle memory would have to be relearned with a new pattern of coordination," says Keith Johnson, director of the UC Berkeley phonetics and phonology lab. "At first she could have been coordinating the movements of the tongue and lips with no movement of the jaw."

This fits with the stiff-lipped, fixed-jaw British stereotype. However, the woman hiccups over consonants like a Bow Bells cockney, "which don’t have an easy explanation in the physical adjustments that she might have had to make following surgery," says Johnson.

The most likely explanation is the psychological experience of the surgery triggered the accent. "Stress can cause all kinds of physical symptoms, called conversion disorders," says Young. "Stressed people can fall into convulsions that look like epileptic seizures." This is far less common than trauma-induced foreign accent syndrome, but Young says after World War I some British soldiers developed German accents. "Even if they had no head trauma, the experience would have been enough to produce this problem," he says.

None of these hypotheses solves the mystery of whether she is faking. So how do we know if this Texan is puttin' on airs? I asked for a professional evaluation. "She doesn’t sound fully British, there’s something off when I listen," says Jack Stewart, senior transportation writer at WIRED and actual Brit. However, he adds, "It's actually easier to believe because she's not speaking plummy Downton Abbey British as most Americans will do when they fake it."

The Texas woman says she is trying to revert her accent back to normal. "These things almost always go away eventually," says Young. The sooner the better. This country can't stand much more trauma.