What did the original colonists sound like? - Big Questions - (Ep. 36)

The odious, modern British, so-called Received "Posh" Pronunciation is the deliberate contrivance (affectation) of the odious, newly affluent British Lower Classes in the early 19th century, grown fat during the Industrial Revolution, in order further to set themselves apart from others of the Lower Classes who hadn't prospered and who, remaining poor, were unable to afford the fashionable, erroneous, non-rhotic elocution lessons of jumped-up, fraudulent Irish pedants. The word for such deliberate contrivance (or affectation) is phony, heartless, hypocritical, hateful, ridiculously pretentious, and appallingly vulgar snobbery.

Come to think of it: Though we might have been (charitably) hard-pressed at the time of the Great Separation to give explicit reasons for the general revulsion we felt from the character and the apparent philosophy, and the affected, non-rhotic speech, of our "fellow" Englishmen--our patriotic dislike of the very notion of "class" was even more divisive, of us from them, than our resentment at their taxing us (and thinking they had a right to).  It's going on two and a half centuries, and the issue still rankles.  I just can't bring myself not to loathe Benny Hill and Hyacinth Bucket (while the Queen, I hear, still thinks they're funny).