All of this was in email exchanges on Friday.
BOSS: [Regarding a spreadsheet I’d put the final touches on] This is GREAT! You guys rock!
ME: [Regarding past jokes about my design and grammar predilections] Wait! I forgot to add a bunch of colors to the spreadsheet, as well as adding in a lot of commas, just to be safe!
BOSS: That’s why we call you Too Many Commas Man, or Oxford Man for short.
ME: I shall have to affect an Oxonian accent at our next off-site soiree.
FELLOW GRAMMAR WONK CO-WORKER: [Just to me] Please tell me you had to look up Oxonian. I would have stuck with Oxfordian.
ME: No, I knew it was Oxonian. I did have to look it up to confirm it’s affect an accent, rather than effect one.
Yeah, I know any joke you have to explain is lame (and the above humor was more than lame), but the whole exchange tickled me greatly.
You are going to to imitate a vaguely rural ‘bumpkin’ accent? Why? Or is it possible you mean an ‘Oxbridge’ accent?
I’m disappointed in you, that you may have ever considered it to be an effectation
P.S. Oxford is 20 miles <– that way as I type.
Ah. Of course, if I’d thought about the “-tation” it would have been obvious. Considered purely as a verb, though, I was thinking that one might reasonably effect an accent in terms of performing or enacting it.
Re Oxonian vs Oxbridge, I will bow to your knowledge. I find references to an Oxonian accent, but if the Oxford sorts don’t mind linguistically hobnobbing with the Cambridge crew, who am I to question? 🙂
I don’t think I’ve ever had to wonder what the adjective for ‘from Oxford’ is, I’ve certainly never had to use Oxonian or Oxfordian. Thinking about it I believe that in modern English it is one of those places where the town is the descriptor. “It was an Oxford accent, definately not a Cambridge one or a Buckinghamshire one”. Other towns and cities do have their own adjectives – Glaswegian, Liverpudlian, etc.
The point I was cheifly making was that the accent that you are thinking of, representing dons from the University, is not that of the town in which it sits. Oxfordshire is a has a mild ‘oo-arr’ accent, your cliched yokel ‘mummerset’ speech.
‘Oxbridge’ was coined to indicate a certain priviledge in upbringing/education, though not necessarily having attended Oxford of Cambridge. “The senior civil service is seen as the last bastion of Oxbridge education, where who you know is more important than what you know.” I suppose a Columbine version would be something like “Yarvard” – i.e. coming from an ‘WASP’ family via an Ivy League university.
Thus, John Cleese has an Oxbridge accent, the little scrote who has just nicked your car to do handbrake turns round the Blackbird Leys estate has an Oxford accent. 🙂
Ah. Good to know. 🙂
Perhaps Yale and Harvard should be forced to relocate to a suburb of New York, just so Richard Dawkins could become a visiting Professor, and people say – that’s a real Bronx accent!