The stuff about the social stratification of /r/ is more or less the solidest argument for prestige factors influencing uptake of phonetic change I've come across, and even it falls short, because correlation is not causation. Still, a valiant effort, and you get to imagine staff dropping their /r/'s and not dropping them at Macy's and Gimbels and whatever the hell and it's like a Woody Allen movie crossed with a linguistics seminar.

NB USED FOR CLASS. DID NOT READ COVER TO COVER ( )