@Peter Reynolds - unless they're going to publish different versions they have to adopt a standard of some sort, but I imagine nowadays it's a fairly soft version of RP. And not all differences follow the same regional patterns. Scotland and the West may be more rhotic, but Scotland is with the South when it comes to long A as in bath, grass etc, and U in cup, as opposed to short A; and pronounce U more like Southerners than in 'oop North'.

I don't know about children's phonic books, but don't children's listening materials include different accents? I teach EFL and ours certainly do. Standard English but in different accents. In a any case kids get lots of exposure to different accents on TV.

I'm sure the child's home environment is going to be much more important than any book. That, after all, is how most of us learn.

@Peter Reynolds - I would suggest that no accents or dialects are any more slovenly than any other (it's a typical mistake to call users of certain dialects lazy because they use non-standard verb forms, for example), or inferior to others. They just follow different rules. And in this case RP follows the same rule (non-rhotic) as Cockney. Just as speakers of both say /pɔː(r)/ (paw) for poor, whereas we Scots pronounce it as it's said - /pʊr/ (including many Scots RP speakers)

Are we all slovenly for missing out the T in the words I listed above? Or the S in words like answer and island. Are the English slovenly because they don't pronounce the H in when, where, why etc (unlike some Scots, including me)? Are we all slovenly for pronouncing vegetable with three syllables rather than four.

And then there's the schwa /ə/, the most common sound in English. The whole rhythm of English depends on us NOT fully pronouncing every letter, as we try to teach our EFL students - think about how you pronounce, for example, generation /dʒenəˈreɪʃn/ - one fully pronounced E, a schwa, a dipthong and a sort of 'shn' for 'tion'.

I think where English is concerned you're on a pretty sticky wicket if you're going to make judgements based on pronouncing every letter. :)

@Peter Reynolds - interesting - Google Books won't let me see that page - they say 'You have either reached a page that is unavailable or reached your viewing limit for this book'. I use Google Books a lot, and I've noticed before that availability seems to depend on country. I've been corresponding with a guy in the States about the first occurrences of 'have another think coming' and he gets full access to books that I only get in snippet view (I'm in Poland)

http://random-idea-english.blogspot.com/2014/01/having-think-about-another-think-coming.html

@Jasper - I'll certainly echo Brus's last paragraph and Peter's last comment. We all have our sillier moments (especially me when I get goaded into defending the indefensible), and your comments are usually very moderate and constructive.

What's more PITE has been rather barren lately, with days on end without comments for me to react to. We need everyone, old hands like yourself and newbies like Peter, who I notice is busy posting on other threads as well, so you don't seem to have put him off. :) :)

@Jasper - I really think you're making an interpretation I just don't see. Peter's 'offending' sentence was:

'The first time I heard "this is she" I thought the customer was being ironic because she was being asked if she was, say, Janet, by an unidentified caller'

I don't see any sense of superiority there at all. As Peter hadn't heard this expression being used before, he was puzzled, that's all. And even joy, who uses 'This is she' herself, far from taking umbrage, found Peter's observation interesting.

I hate to say it (because it really seems out of character), but I'm only getting a feeling of superiority from one person in this discussion: I quote - 'You don't have knowledge of formal grammar, do you?', ' I will not concede to my despisal of his ignorant judgment of another person.'

As regards 'whomever', its use seems to be on the increase:

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=whomever%3Aeng_us_2012%2Cwhomever%3Aeng_gb_2012&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cwhomever%3Aeng_us_2012%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cwhomever%3Aeng_gb_2012%3B%2Cc0

@Jasper - Well, I for one found Peter Reynold's 'anecdote', which was just a simple observation, quite interesting, especially as it was more or less repeating something I'd said - that this expression wasn't used by Brits when answering the phone.

Observations like this can add something, even if they are not strictly about the grammar point the questioner was asking about; it was something that was puzzling me, too - who would say 'this is she' when answering the phone. And in a any case, it's all English, after all - grist to the mill for PITE readers.

Ah, the seventies and eighties! That's when the rot set in. I think they've probably been saying that every century since Dr Lowth started laying down the law. Whether I'm one of 'the educated', or simply a member of (the) hoi polloi, I don't know, as I don't have much need for words like decimated or fortuitous.

And surely to a purist, decimate doesn't simply mean 'reduce by a tenth' but refers to a very specific form of military punishment, derived from the Romans, but practised in the Parliamentary army to deal with mutinies. Incidentally, its use in English to mean 'destroy large numbers' seems to have be almost as old as the punishment meaning (both 17th century).

Sudden started to be used as a noun in the sixteenth century. At the time various expressions were used, with both 'a' and 'the', but without 'all' (there are none with 'all' in Shakespeare, for example).

'All on the sudden' was probably the first version with 'all', followed by 'all of a sudden' and 'all on a sudden', with a few examples of 'all on the sudden'. ' All of a sudden' fairly quickly became the standard, but apart from usage, I can see no reason why it is logically better than the others. Incidentally 'on a sudden' lasted well into the eighteenth century.

'All of the sudden' and 'all the sudden' seem to have caught on in a small way since the 1980's, but especially in the 2000s. I can't see any dialect basis for them, and they seem to have largely gone unnoticed, except by Brian Garner:

http://books.google.pl/books?id=FwmQpyibKkAC&pg=PA35&dq=%E2%80%9Call+of+the+sudden%E2%80%9D&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ctQDU-PXI-rN4QTxmoC4Aw&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%E2%80%9Call%20of%20the%20sudden%E2%80%9D&f=false

For my copiously illustrated history, see:

http://random-idea-english.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-origins-of-all-of-sudden.html

On the subject of troops: its use as a synonym for soldiers or armed forces in general, and not simply meaning a cavalry unit of a particular size, is the first meaning given at Oxford Online, and goes back to the sixteenth century:

"They were supposed by their imprecations to destroy kings with all their troops." - 1545

"They make frequent sallies, and beyond all expectation defeat Maurice's troops." - 1547

Examples with numbers can be found from the seventeenth century:

"The soldiers say it means ruin and the population cannot support such large forces shut up inside the walled towns, especially in Antwerp where there are one-thousand- eight-hundred troops instead of the usual garrison of five hundred." - 1607

"Colonel Nicolls had three hundred troops under his command, with four frigates, for the reduction of the Dutch at Manhattan" - 1669

"A force of about a thousand troops was raised and sent into Rhode Island" -1676

" a row of stone barracks, not inelegantly built, sufficient to contain sixteen hundred or two thousand troops" - 1700

"Commodore Hood then took possession of the fort, and landed several thousand troops, which had been sent by the Pacha of Rhodes" - 1700

"he conferred the command of the ten thousand troops destined for Holland on the earl of Marlborough" - Smollett, 1800

Troops to mean soldiers is as old as the hills, and I find all this talk of it being euphemistic, in the way of 'collateral damage', so much nonsense, just as insisting it can only be used for a cavalry group commanded by a captain, or whatever.

@Skeeter Lewis - 'the social sciences have a lot to answer for linguistically' - Oh, dear! Mind you they've brought the word cohort out of the military scholarship closet: judging by Ngram, the use of cohort in books has more than quadrupled since 1960.

I was joking about 'decimate'. You don't seriously think it should be reserved for the disciplinary killing of every tenth member of a military group, do you? A use there's not much call for nowadays, and which hardly anyone uses.

Sorry, but it's the speakers of a language as a whole who decide on the meanings of words, not etymology or a few language mavens. And I welcome that - a kind of representative democracy rather than autocracy.

If we took etymology as our only guide, we could never say it was a terrible film or a terrific film unless we were terrified or an awful film unless we were struck with awe.

As for fortuitous, 'some years ago' turns out to be at least nearly ninety years ago, as Fowler was commenting on it in 1926. Although it is indeed sometimes used instead of fortunate, its most common use seems to be rather a combination of accidental and fortunate, as in this from James Thurber:

"... I was saved in college one night by the fortuitous appearance in the night skies of the most brilliant aurora borealis seen in Ohio since the Civil War" (MWDEU)

Lots of words in English have multiple meanings, and just because words take on new meanings doesn't mean they can't be used in their original meanings or that the original meaning are somehow diluted. Context will tell us which applies. When I hear that Cromwell decimated certain of his units, I know what is meant, just as I know that soldiers being decimated in battle means something else. The same goes for troops and cohorts.