Joelle cleaning, remembering the Incandenza Thanksgiving
Orin’s Moms Mrs. Incandenza (‘Please do call me Avril, Joelle’) had been gracious and warm and attentive without obtruding, and worked unobtrusively hard to put everyone at ease and to facilitate communication, and to make Joelle feel like a welcomed and esteemed part of the family gathering—and something about the woman made every follicle on Joelle’s body pucker and distend. […] It wasn’t that her syntax was so artless and fluid and imposing. […] He and little Hal made dry fun of Avril’s Canadian pronunciation of certain diphthongs.
Context
Joelle, compulsively cleaning the 5-Woman room at Ennet House, remembers her first Thanksgiving at the Headmaster's House. Avril's flawless language is explicitly ruled out as the source of the fantods, which is exactly how the book handles Avril: the grammar is impeccable and the wrongness is somewhere underneath it. Note the sly "facilitate communication" (the very usage Hal silently grades in the Deans' mouths on the novel's first pages), and Orin and Hal teasing the Prescriptive-Usage chairholder about her Canadian diphthongs — pronunciation-policing running back up the family tree.