> Colour me also more than slightly intrigued by this idea of being from the "actual Mid-Atlantic"- which was an ocean last time anybody checked.
That is exactly why "mid-atlantic accent" is called that[0]. It's halfway between American and British, and it's the native accent of somewhere indistinct where nobody is actually from.
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[0] Also, since apparently this needs to be explicitly stated in this ridiculous, Gell-Mann-Effect-in-full-force HN thread: "mid-atlantic accent" and "trans-atlantic accent" are synonyms. They are different words for the same thing. BOTH ARE RIGHT.
The first thing is obviously playful hyperbole, but I don't know about "childish".
But, regarding your second quote... if you bring up the idea of a way of speaking being "better" or "worse" to a modern linguist, trust, me: you will understand why the author uses "wildly offended" instead of just "offended".
If the author had just kept it at "The entire concept of an elocution class is offensive to most of the modern linguists I know", that would not at all be sufficiently conveying the degree to which the idea of a prescribed elocution class is violently at odds with everything most modern linguists believe in.
Even just a single modern prescriptive linguist, without any of those other qualifiers. I would genuinely love to see it.