quote:

On the other hand, I cannot truthfully say that, during the First World War, I learned very much about the speech-habits of the English and the Welsh, the Scots and the Irish. I played inattentively on the vast periphery of knowledge; I came to know something about, but hardly knew, the extensive, bewilderingly variegated, field into some of whose corners I was later to roam and pry.

But the influence of those war years is a subject upon which I could expatiate until I lost ever friend and estranged every acquaintance. I hated that war. Uet it benefited me more than I can tell.

Then in 1921 I came to England and went to Oxford. This meant that I was obliged to habituate myself to yet another way of life—almost another civilization—and to augment and, in some respects, change or modify a vocabulary, a usage, a pronunciation; it was pronunciation which took me the longest. I have not acquired, nor have I wished to acquire, that variety of Standard English pronunciation which is known as Southern, or Public School, English. Mine is one of the Modified Standards. My aim has always been to speak a clear and lucid, rather than a dulcet, English and to write a lucid and expressive, rather than an elegant, English; and to be occasionally subtle, never precious.
[Eric Partridge (1963) The Gentle Art of Lexicography: A Memoir, p.23.]

quote:

I came to know something about, but hardly knew, the extensive, bewilderingly variegated, field into some of whose corners I was later to roam and pry.