Chapman's survey reminds us that what is really more important about SAE is the perception that it exists, reflecting an attitude towards language and standards that Webster originally sold to Americans and which our schools still promote today. Many educated Americans strongly support the authority of the school and continue Webster’s advocacy of SAE uniformity. However, SAE has no fixed relation to any American regional or social variety, other than the article of faith that, for national and moral purposes, the standard variety of the home language of Americans ought to be taught in school. What users of English world-wide recognize as SAE cannot be successfully codified, phonologically, lexically or syntactically. It is not a variety that has emerged from any particular population and then been accepted as a standard. Instead, what users of English world-wide typically recognize as SAE more properly consists of a selection of features of American English at the national level, such as tendencies towards rhoticity and the preservation of secondary stress, features which emerge from the continuing operation of the complex system of speech in America. SAE may be an idealized institutional construct rather than a variety on the same terms as American regional and social varieties, but that does not make it any less real as a problem to be confronted by Americans and other speakers of English.