What sort of English do the English speak? It is certainly not always the Queen's, says Harold Orton, professor of English language and medieval literature at the University of Leeds. Last week, after ten years of gathering material for a definitive Linguistic Atlas of England in the Mid-Twentieth Century, Orton and his colleagues revealed that had Gertrude Stein only known the farmers of England, her celebrated "rose is a rose is a rose" might have read a "rose is a hep is a shoop is a schoop is a dog shoop is a cat jug."
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