Opinion: The boy who mistook himself for a twit

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Paging Dr. Oliver Sacks! The neurologist and author of ‘Awakenings’ and ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat’ should look into the case of William McCartney-Moore. Ten year-old William came out of brain surgery speaking not with his own unfashionable Northern English accent but with the refined accent known in England as RP, for Received Pronunciation (or Really Prissy).

You can read all about it in the Daily Telegraph, under the rather tabloid-like headline ‘Vowel Surgery: Brain Op Boy Baffles Doctors After Waking Up with ‘Posh’ RP Accent.’

William’s mother told the Telegraph: ‘We went on a family holiday to Northumberland and he was playing on the beach and he said ‘Look, I’ve made a sand castle’ but really stretched the vowels, which made him sound really posh.’ For an American analogue, think of Joe Pesci getting bashed on the head and waking up sounding like George Plimpton.

Having lived in England for a while, I know that accent still matters (to paraphrase the title of an entertaining book on the subject). An English friend who speaks RP has two children who adopted the flat vowels of their mother, who hails from the North. Unlike their father (and the new posh William McCartney-Moore), they pronounce ‘castle’ to rhyme with ‘vassal,’ not ‘jostle.’ Tres déclassé!

In the down-market dialect which William mysteriously has lost, there’s an old saying: ‘There’s nowt as queer as folk.’ (The rough American translation is: ‘People are weird.’) The question, one that medical ethics makes unanswerable, is what the wee bairn would sound like if they noodled his noggin again. Maybe the next time he’d sound like Michael J. Fox -- or Michael Jackson.