The American Spectator

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p> "R" YOU READY? br> Re: Lawrence Henry's In the Matter of the Boston "R" : /p>

Lawrence Henry's article on the Boston "r" reminded me of my three years' residence in Cambridge as a Harvard Law student from 1969-72. Accents in the Boston area (as they do in NYC), vary from neighborhood to neighborhood, and I suppose reflect the various patterns of immigration that have occurred in the region.

p>On the last day of constitutional law class in May 1971, the late professor Paul Freund brought in an old 78 rpm phonograph and played for us a transcript of an NBC red network broadcast made in 1931 on the occasion of the 90th birthday of Supreme Court Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Holmes was interviewed by Charles Clark, who went on to become dean of the Yale Law School and later a judge on the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York. I was surprised to discover that Holmes spoke with what sounded to me as a decidedly upper class British accent. Here was a man born in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston in 1841, before the great waves of Irish and Italian immigration, who probably had a similar accent to the colonial citizens of 70 years earlier. br> -- Stuart W. Settle, Jr. br> Richmond, Virginia /p> p> Loved your article today. I once asked my buddy from Boston to read aloud two words that I had written on a piece of paper: drawer and draw. He pronounced the first one "draw," and the second "drawer!" br> -- unsigned

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