When My Class Discussed ‘Mischievious’

Two weeks ago I published a blog post about deleting my “nonstandard” pronunciation of mischievous (I pronounced it “mischievious”) from a podcast. That same week, students in my introductory English linguistics course and I were slated to talk through the concept of “Standard English,” which is a more challenging concept than it might first appear.

“Standard English” (or “standard English” without the capital S, or more specifically “Standard/standard American (or British or Australia...