Mid Atlantic to me is someone UK attempting to sound American, Joe
Could it be that "mid-Atlantic" sounds something like this? - "Glug, glug, glug...."
I'll get me coat...
I hadn't heard the term mid-Atlantic accent - I wonder if the term is used more commonly in Britain, than it is in the U.S. This Wikipedia article says:Mid-Atlantic English was popular in Hollywood films from the 1930s and 1940s, and continues to be associated with people such as Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, William F. Buckley, Jr., Christopher Hitchens, George Plimpton and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In the United States, it is often known as a "Boarding School accent".
I've certainly heard the term "boarding school accent," to describe a manner of speaking which seemed to be viewed with disdain by many Americans of my generation (although no American would ever criticize Cary Grant or Katharine Hepburn). Orson Welles was another who often affected this accent, and I read somewhere that this is Tony Blair's current accent. The term "trans-Atlantic accent" would make more sense to me, because the other term would be confused here with our multi-accented "mid-Atlantic region" (the area affected by both hurricanes and nor'easters).
-Joe-