x&y

X. speaks in ponderous banalities, but he speaks as someone who is used to having these banalities listened to, taken seriously, who expects them to be taken seriously, who thinks that the accent and diction in which they are couched, with various Latinates and formal terms, lends them gravitas, and so on. Y, on the other hand, is hesitant, checking himself, apologising for his idiom, acutely aware of what he takes to be the gap between this idiom and the language appropriate to talking about ideas etc. someone like Y. who wants to be part of the academic world, will probably have to digest and mimic much of the language of X. He will often over-compensate, appearing mannered, or his words will always be ghosted with a kind of irony. His language will have the stain but also the sometimes huge advantages of being ‘an acquired speech’ – hesitating between an especial dexterity and a tendency to self-parody. The distance between the language he grew up speaking and the language in which he makes his adult living is never forgotten. (With X, of course, the distance was never noticed, did not exist.)