@Jasper - of course bored is normally an adjective, but it could also be the passive of bore - but I think you're missing the point of David L's joke - that you use a drill to bore a hole. He's playing on the fact that bore has two meanings. You say nothing was trying to bore him - but it was, and it apparently succeeded - the drill bored (a hole in) him.

Of course RP has always been a minority dialect, but to see RP pronunciation as being inferior to other forms is no better than an RP speaker thinking their pronunciation is superior.

RP only really rose to prominence in the nineteenth century, and the backbone of RP has always been the Public School system of the educated upper-middle class, rather than the aristocracy in particular.

In any case, there had been five hundred years of the possibility of intermarriage since the Anglo-Normans lost their territories in France, and genetic research shows the Normans made very little difference to the general gene stock. What's more, social mobility was much higher in England, than say in France, as the the aristocracy in here learnt early on the benefits of marrying money, and encouraged others to aspire to join them, which in part explains while they have survived more successfully in Britain than in other European countries.

So I think it's very difficult to make generalisations about modern RP speakers' backgrounds. Nowadays at the BBC the purist RP accents tend to come from people like Mishal Hussain, Zeinab Badawi and Kasia Madera, so I don't think indigenous has much to do with it.

@John Gibson - one or two, just like most other consonants

often, soften
hasten, moisten
glisten, listen
castle, hustle, bustle,
apostle, jostle
nestle, wrestle, trestle
thistle, whistle, gristle
mortgage, Christmas

http://mws.ust.hk/sir/silent_words.php

Common indigenous Britons? Are you talking about the Celts? Aren't RP speakers (the few that are left) indigenous then? I certainly don't remember any member of my family immigrating.

@Meade - to be pedantic - Scottish-Irish please. We Scots are very pernickety on this one - Scotch is only for products or things, some would say only three things - Scotch Whisky, Scotch broth and Scotch egg. The people and their language are Scots or Scottish. And if you hear someone ask for 'a Scotch' (meaning a whisky) in Scotland., odds on they're either English or American.

@Jasper - hoist with my own petard, you mean. Of course I agree about natural change, but my first reaction was that someone at the BBC was foisting it on us; it looks a bit 'clever' to me. But a check on the BBC website shows ton to be more common in idioms, so there's my conspiracy theory down the can:

a ton of bricks 169 / 69
tons of work 26 / 10
it weighs a ton 158 / 44

I'm just an old fogey, I guess, but I don't think my thing with 'another think' is a gripe so much as slight bewilderment. I certainly don't make any judgements on its correctness or otherwise.

I know things can cost a pretty penny, but do you really spend a pretty penny? How sweet! :)

@Hairy Scot - is there perhaps a word missing after 'erstwhile', or do you know something that we don't know? Anyhoo, the learned Mr Fry is obviously wrong on this one (the humble Wikipedia could have told him that - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gill_%28unit%29).

Oxford Online - /gɪl/ for the fishy organ, and /dʒɪl/ - for the measure. Add looking that up has taught me two more meanings - a deep ravine or narrow mountain stream (although I seem to remember there are quite a few of those in the Lake District) - /gɪl/, and a female ferret - /dʒɪl/.

When I was young, the standard Scottish pub measure was 1/5 gill, as opposed to a 1/6 gill in England, and there were some Scottish pubs who advertised 1/4 gill, which is apparently still the standard measure in Ireland. And as HS will well know, a single measure being considered rather paltry in the West of Scotland, it is referred to as 'a half', a double being 'a glass'. Thus the West of Scotland version of a nip and chaser is 'a half and a half', which sounds more like 'a hof 'n' a hof'.

@Jasper - in jayles's example maybe, but not in David L's. The important word here is 'happen'. The question wasn't 'How did you feel when you were drilling?', but 'What happened when you dropped the drill?'. David L is talking about an action, not a state.

Being bored is a state, and doesn't 'happen', I would suggest. Actions 'happen' - he was bored by the drill is the most obvious way to read David L's little joke, I would say.

And even in your example you could turn that into a passive - what he was doing bored him, in other words he was bored by what he was doing.

@AnWulf - I think many people say it both ways without realising. As for our idiosyncratic spelling, at least it gives us gems like these three poems, the first one quite well-known to EFL teachers and students. I've only shown four lines from each. You can see the rest at the link below:

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, lough and through?

We’ll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes,
But the plural of ox should be oxen, not oxes.
Then one fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,
Yet the plural of mouse should never be meese,

Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.

http://www.wordhord.com/humor/english-pronunciation-poems/

Hi Skeeter - one reason I'm not so sure about the spelling angle is the rise in the pronunciation of aitch with a preceding H. I'm pretty sure this used to be limited to Cockney and possibly a few other dialects, but we are now hearing it from young people in Britain who speak otherwise absolutely Standard English. When young people pick up a pronunciation feature like this, I think it's simply because that's what they hear around them, rather than a conscious effort based on some fallacy or other.

For example, I've been pulled up elsewhere in this forum for using 'different to'. And I realise that for me it's often my natural first choice. But I have absolutely no idea where I got it from; I certainly never made a conscious decision to use 'to' rather than 'from'. I can only assume I got it from school. On the other hand, I do remember in my hippy days making a conscious effort to adopt certain words (and then get rid of them a couple of years later - a much harder thing to do) - but that was because of the fashion within my peer group.

I'm pretty sure that these two factors: subconsciously picking up what they hear around them, and consciously adopting the language of their peer group; are the dominant ones when it comes to young people using new words or forms of pronunciation.

As for the meaning, it's pretty obvious, as porsche and others have said - You are a charade - a fake, a phoney etc, and there's really no need to look for any obscure meaning, especially given the context of the song. Yes, 'charades' is also a game, but this is 'charade', which is rather different.This is from Oxford Dictionaries Online.

absurd pretence intended to create a pleasant or respectable appearance:
"talk of unity was nothing more than a charade"

As regards British pronunciation, it's not so much 'sha-rahd' as 'she-rahd' - /ʃəˈrɑːd/ in IPA - which is exactly how Walters sings it.