We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Don’t forget Katherine Hepburn, Born and bred in super snobby Connecticut into a wealthy upper crust family. Her Lockjaw is considerably more pronounced than the people in your video.
The wife calls it the Mid-Atlantic accent and says it was taught in finishing school. She says there was never a region of the country that talked like that.
She's correct. You see it everywhere in movies from the 30's and early 40's, but it went away post-war. It was taught in the northeastern finishing schools and ivy league, I think; My grandmother was a 'Smithie' and had it, superimposed with a Boston accent.
I've also heard it referred to as New England Blueblood; but my mother, who attended what amounted to a finishing school, notes that they taught the accent there. I was not surprised at this, because her family were New Yorkers, and spoke like New Yorkers as long as I knew them.
What's funny about this video is that poor people will take it as proof that capitalism creates inequality. For the poor, life is a zero-sum game. For everything a person gets, another person must lose something. If you ask them about general improvements in the standard of living, such as mobile phones, supermarkets, and hospitals, they will brush it aside. "Well of course" they will say. "All of those improvements came from the exploitation of the working class." But that's not the case. Those improvements came from the efforts of individual men who made improvements, and occasionally, breakthroughs. Penicillin didn't just show-up. Neither did the light bulb, or the transistor, or the steam engine. All of those inventions came from specific people. But trade unionists have been taught that achievement in itself is unfair, because some people achieve more than others. So they don't want to talk about the relationship between competence and success. For them, the "world" invented everything. And that's why they hate the upper class so much. First, those rich people are having caviar for dinner every night. They are enjoying life more than the poor, and that's a form of inequality. Being happy and carefree shows that rich people lack empathy. And they are selfish for not giving away happiness to unhappy people. In their world, money exactly equals happiness. And the second reason that they hate the upper class is that it exposes the reality that not all men are cut from the same cloth. In real life, some men are better than others, and they rise accordingly. But trade unionists, many of whom are black or female, bitterly resent the fact that intelligence, and refinement, and family heritage play a role in determining a family's social position. To an illegitimate black woman with an I.Q. of seventy, it seems unfair that she can't have what everybody else has. The result is that all trade unionists suffer from a terrible envy. But the reason for this envy isn't the living conditions of the working class; it's the fact that the decision-making process of who should rise in society is outside of their control. Trade unions have no power in the world of the upper class, and it fills them with rage because they wish to control everything. And they don't want any evidence of their own genetic or educational inferiority to stop them. That's why the "rich" are selfish. And the "poor" are victimized. Trade unions will be glad to document how a person got rich, but they will never discuss how a person got poor. Blacks and hispanics make bad decisions everyday. They steal, cheat, lie, use drugs, commit act of violence, get arrested, and do everything possible to destroy their own lives. That's why they're poor. But they can't say that, so they insist that rich people stole their "surplus value".
The only way to fix the problem is to teach children in school that life is uncertain, but in general it rewards good behavior and hard word. Trade unions believe in a guaranteed salary, regardless of effort. They don't want people to compete for money, or prestige because they think that it's a competition for happiness. But it's not. There's plenty of happiness, but right now it's being denied to the working class by the trade unionists, who want everybody to feel aggrieved about social or financial inequality. They want rage extended outward to be the motivation for perfecting the human race. So nobody is allowed to love anybody until the entire system has changed.
We, of a certain age, were all taught to speak that way at east coasty boarding schools, and we were taught the squarish or left slanting handwriting that looked "just so" on invitations and Christmas cards. After a moving man asked me from what foreign country I came, I was horrified and made great efforts to speak as God intended me to (actually unclenching my teeth and using the full range of my orbicular muscles.) My handwriting is still stuck, though, in the last, more proper, and frankly nicer, century.