A rhotic accent pronounces the R after a vowel. A non-rhotic one drops it.

Rhotic: "cr" sounded in car, farm, winter. That's most of America today.

Non-rhotic: the R goes silent — cah, fahm, wintah. That's England, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa.

It's one sound. But which way you say it has decided who counts as posh for two hundred years.

Four hundred years ago, every English speaker was rhotic.

Shakespeare. The king. The Pilgrims piling onto the Mayflower. Every R fully sounded — London and Boston, indistinguishable.

Nobody had won anything yet. The R belonged to everybody. Then England started moving.

Through the 1700s, fashionable London refined its speech — smoothing away the hard R for a lighter, more elegant sound.

It was an innovation, and it spread fast. In 1791 the elocution teacher John Walker wrote the new pronunciation down, and the great schools — Eton, Harrow, Oxford — taught it as the finest English going.

By 1800 the non-rhotic R was simply the sound of the educated. They later named it Received Pronunciation.

For a while you were right there with everyone else.

Boston dropped the R. New York dropped it. Charleston, Savannah — the whole respectable seaboard was already non-rhotic.

The Americans who mattered sounded half-British, and meant to. One more generation and you'd have arrived.

America built an accent to rival London's — and taught it, deliberately, as the finest way an American could speak.

Speech coach Edith Skinner perfected it in Speak With Distinction (1942) and trained it at Juilliard. The best schools and studios drilled it — half-British, fully non-rhotic, unmistakably refined.

It ran Hollywood and the White House — Hepburn, Grant, FDR. America had reached the summit. Then it walked back down.

Sounding British turned into a liability. So the R you'd been trying to lose was sold back to you as a virtue.

It started with Noah Webster, who rebuilt the dictionary to make American English a flag — different from Britain on purpose. Then radio finished the job: James Bender's NBC Handbook (1943) made the rhotic Midwest voice the official sound of America.

Keeping the R got renamed honest, plain, free. Same sound your great-grandparents strained to lose — handed back with a flag in it.

By 1966 the con was complete — and a linguist caught it on tape.

William Labov went into three New York department stores and counted who sounded their R. The fancy store: most R's. The cheap store: fewest. In one lifetime the R had flipped from a peasant marker to a posh one.

You don't defend an accent this hard unless you've been told it's the absence of one.