"Like the French," he says, "we have a marked /liaison/--the borrowing of a letter from the preceding word. We invite one another to 'c'meer' (=come here) ... 'Hoo-zat?' (=who is that?) has as good a /liaison/ as the French /vois avez/." This critic believes that American tends to abandon /t/ for /d/, as in /Sadd'y/ (=Saturday) and /siddup/ (=sit up), and to get rid of /h/, as in "ware-zee?" (=where is he?). But here we invade the vulgar speech, which belongs to the next chapter. [Pg173] Among the vowels the most salient difference between English and American pronunciation, of course, is marked off by the flat American /a/. This flat /a/, as we have seen, has been under attack at home for nearly a century. The New Englanders, very sensitive to English example, substitute a broad /a/ that is even broader than the English, and an /a/ of the same sort survives in the South in a few words, /e. g./, /master/, /tomato/ and /tassel/, but everywhere else in the country the flat /a/ prevails. Fashion and the example of the stage oppose it,[89] and it is under the ban of an active wing of schoolmasters, but it will not down. To the average American, indeed, the broad /a/ is a banner of affectation, and he associates it unpleasantly with spats, Harvard, male tea-drinking, wrist watches and all the other objects of his social suspicion. He gets the flat sound, not only into such words as /last/, /calf/, /dance/ and /pastor/, but even into /piano/ and /drama/. /Drama/ is sometimes /drayma/ west of Connecticut, but almost never /drahma/ or /drawma/. /Tomato/ with the /a/ of /bat/, may sometimes borrow the /a/ of /plate/, but /tomahto/ is confined to New England and the South. /Hurrah/, in American, has also borrowed the /a/ of /plate/; one hears /hurray/ much oftener than /hurraw/. Even /amen/ frequently shows that /a/, though not when sung. Curiously enough, it is displaced in /patent/ by the true flat /a/. The English rhyme the first syllable of the word with /rate/; in America it always rhymes with /rat/. The broad /a/ is not only almost extinct outside of New England; it begins to show signs of decay even there. At all events, it has gradually disappeared from many words, and is measurably less sonorous in those in which it survives than it used to be. A century ago it appeared, not only in /dance/, /aunt/, /glass/, /past/, etc., but also in /Daniel/, /imagine/, /rational/ and /travel/.[90] And in 1857 Oliver Wendell Holmes reported it in /matter/, /handsome/, /caterpillar/, /apple/ and /satisfaction/. It has been displaced in virtually all of these, even in the most remote reaches of the back country, [Pg174] by the national flat /a/. Grandgent[91] says that the broad /a/ is now restricted in New England to the following situations: 1. when followed by /s/ or /ns/, as in /last/ and /dance/. 2. when followed by /r/ preceding another consonant, as in /cart/. 3. when followed by /lm/, as in /calm/.