There aren’t many things on which John Humphrys is undecided, but one of them shows itself nearly every time he presents the Today programme. It’s a trait shared by many broadcasters, and indeed people from all walks of life, and constitutes one of the great social barometers of our time. It’s the inability to decide whether your ‘a’s should be long or short.
If your upbringing conditions you to pronounce ‘grass’ to rhyme with ‘ass’ rather than ‘arse’ — if, in short, you’re a non-posh non-Southerner — there is a temptation, on moving to London, to lengthen your ‘a’s in order to fit in. To say ‘clarse’ instead of ‘class’ (an apt example, as that is what this is all about). An accent may be softened, or even jettisoned altogether, but that irritating first letter of the alphabet remains, ready to trip you up. Unless you insert an ‘r’ after it (sorry, ‘arfter’ it), your cover will be blown.
Part of the problem is that received pronunciation doesn’t lengthen every ‘a’. Imposters give themselves away by not remembering this. ‘Aftermath’, for instance, has a long first ‘a’ but a short second one. Michael Howard’s downfall has always been ‘substantial’. He turns it into ‘substarntial’, whereas genuine RP-ers keep the ‘a’ short. ‘Pakistan’, meanwhile, is as tricky linguistically as it is politically. One BBC radio presenter got himself into all sorts of trouble when the England cricket team toured there, somehow working all four possibilities — ‘Pakistan’, ‘Pakistarn’, ‘Parkistan’, ‘Parkistarn’ — into the same bulletin.
Even when you know the exceptions to the rule, however, a more general danger remains. Something keeps nagging away at you (I know this from personal experience, having moved to the capital from the Midlands), a rogue instinct that nudges you back towards the short ‘a’. Nine out of ten will get safely lengthened, but then your true voice insists on being heard, and before you know it a shortie has passed your lips. Humphrys tends to do it when he’s animated about something. For the last few weeks that something has been the lack of rain. In one newspaper round-up, citing a Daily Telegraph article about weather forecasting, he went short with both the paper’s name and the subject of the piece. Lord Jones, who emerged from Birmingham as plain Digby, is another serial offender. In one interview he went long with ‘ranch’ but short with ‘advantage’. Even Nick Robinson, who almost always brings his A game to the ‘a’ game, recently betrayed his Northern roots with a stray ‘classes’.
The only real solution, it seems, is to make your accent so posh that you sound like you’re auditioning for the royal family. This completely removes the temptation to go short, and was the route chosen by the Black Country’s very own Sue Lawley. If you want to retain something of your regional identity, on the other hand, you can copy Alan Bennett, who starts his ‘a’ sounds as though they’re going to be short but then keeps them going, never quite inserting an ‘r’ but somehow softening the harshness of the flat Yorkshire vowel.
For everyone else, though, the dilemma persists. And it really is a dilemma, something eating away at your sense of self, of who you really are. Trapped between a fear of the metropolitan elite thinking you a yokel, and your folks back home thinking you a snob, you stupidly do the one thing guaranteed to produce both results — you alternate. David Pleat, Radio 5 Live’s Nottingham-born football pundit, often lapses into a short ‘a’, then spends the rest of the interview fretting about it, often pausing before subsequent ‘a’ words, wondering which way to jump. The actor David Morrissey, narrating a TV documentary about the English National Ballet, went short for ‘danced’ then, later in the same sentence, long for ‘last’. Famously proud of his Liverpool roots, even he can feel torn.
A few years ago I decided to stop worrying about all this, and reverted to my original short ‘a’s. As my accent itself is long gone, however, the vowel sound sometimes comes as a surprise to people. In a similar position is Tom Sutcliffe, the presenter of Radio 4’s Saturday Review. With his standard-issue neutral-to-posh accent, the short ‘a’s leap out at you. His fellow Yorkshireman the Foreign Secretary also stays true to his roots. But they’re very much the exceptions. The long march of the short ‘a’ has some way to go.