I remember a lecture given by a high school teacher sixty years ago.  One I consider the single most import lesson I learned in my formal education.  I was in a senior in English class in the 1940s at New Hanover High School in Wilmington, N.C.. The teacher was Miss Frances Formyduval, an excellent teacher.

This particular day, she said to the class," I'm going to talk to you about something very important that is not in the textbook" called "colloquial pronunciation".  Amazingly I listened to every word and learned.   She talked about certain words and phrases that are clues to being brought up in an uneducated environment; about t's being dropped, th's not being pronounced and many words by now that when I hear I remember.  It was such an important lecture.  She gave it only once during the year.

Even now, sixty years later when I hear people talking about happenings on TV and in person, I think of her.  How much they would have benefited from "the lesson"