John F. Kennedy took his to the White House; Michael Bloomberg to New York. You can hear it around Fenway Park, up and down the halls of the State House, in suburbia and even in Hollywood, where the bold-faced names from Beantown can turn it on when they need to. It’s the authentic Boston accent, and if you weren’t born with it, well, have fun trying to pull it off perfectly.

As the TODAY show took a Friday field trip to Boston, anchors Matt Lauer and Savannah Guthrie got a lesson in how to speak with a real Boston accent from speech-language pathologist Wendy Wiberg, who coaches people on how to lose their accents.

“No accents are wrong,” said Wiberg, who showed off her versatility by speaking with and without her accent. “But sometimes accents can be distracting,” and cause people to focus on the sound, not the meaning, of a person’s words.

Even as some research suggests that some accents across the nation are fading, the Boston accent is as wicked strong as evah.

The Boston accent, one of the nation’s most imitated and parodied, involves dropping the final ‘r” to make “car” sound like “cah,” pronouncing some short vowel sounds differently, and adding the ‘r’ sound to the end of words, to make “pizza” sound like “pizzer.”

“If you see Dunkin’ Donuts you've gone too fah (far) ... bang a uey (u-turn) and look foh (for) signs foh 93 Nohth,” one man said on TODAY through his heavy accent.

Native Bostonians blend their distinct accents with some unique dialect, too. Kids put jimmies, not sprinkles, atop their ice cream; they gulp water from the bubblah, not the water fountain; and cars travel around the rotary, not the traffic circle.

Perhaps the most famous Boston colloquialism of all, is that life isn’t just good when the Sox/Pats/Celts/Bruins win, it’s wicked good.

The accent even has different forms within the Boston area, the upper-crust Brahmin version, the Kennedy accent (think of John F. Kennedy's “Ask not ... ” speech), and one from South Boston — Southie as it’s called — as one man on TODAY showed off by speaking the old saying, “Birds of a feathah flock togetha.”

Parts of the accent can be traced back to the earliest settlements of New England and are related the parts of England that prominent Bostonians came from, Ben Zimmer, a linguist who writes about language for The Boston Globe, said on TODAY.

“The fact that you can so quickly identify the accent, it’s a kind of a calling card,” Zimmer said. “It adds some local color to speech and I think the more local color the better.”

Not everyone agrees that a Boston accent is charming, however. Speaking through a thick Boston accent can draw some negative stereotypes.

“Sometimes people can get the impression that people that speak with a Boston accent are uneducated, uncultured, rough around the edges,” Wiberg said in a phone interview with TODAY.com.

She often works with people who have foreign accents, and actors who don’t want to be typecast with playing Bostonians. But not everyone wants to lose their accent for good.

“I’ve worked with actors that say last thing in whole world they want to do is lose their Boston accent because it’s full of character and pizazz,” Wiberg said. “They want to learn an additional accent so they can turn it on.”

In her work, she evaluates speech, points out deviations from standard pronunciations and works with people to practice a new way of speaking, first by repeating words, then using the words in sentences and short conversations.

“If someone is really determined to take a serious bite out of their accent, it’s going to take about a month before they will begin to incorporate their new speech sounds they’ve practicing into spontaneous speech,” she said.

Wiberg doesn’t call her work “therapy,” nor does she think the accent should be eradicated. “There’s nothing wrong with a Boston accent,” she said. “It’s not a disorder.”

One fan is a famous face who grew up in the area without a Boston accent.

Actress Mindy Kaling told Guthrie that as a kid, everyone thought she was from Southern California. “I never had one growing up,” she said. “But I love it. I think it’s kind of sexy, actually.

And proving that saying “wicked” is just so wicked fun and a wicked hard habit to break, Kaling revealed the last of her remaining Boston lingo.

“For a woman in her 30s, I say 'wicked' more than I probably should,” she said.

As they say in Boston, “Oh God yuh!”

Related:

Mimicking accents may be innate talent

Like, California has hella accents, study finds

There’s no pill or cream to cure baldness yet, but researchers may be getting closer.

Scientists have discovered that vitamin D seems to awaken the receptors in the hair follicles that shut down in hair loss, giving doctors hope that there could some day be a cure.

“It’s how the vitamin D is being handled by the receptors in the follicles that may be part of the puzzle of why we begin to lose our hair as we get older,” Dr. Marc Avram, a professor of dermatology at New York’s Weill Cornell Medical College, told TODAY. “In the next few years, we will have many other options that ultimately one day will make hair loss a voluntary thing.”

Today, more than half of men over age 50 suffer from hair loss. And while notable actors and athletes have embraced the bald look in recent years, not everyone loves their “chrome dome.”

Doctors perform more than 100,000 hair replacement operations a year, at an average cost of between $8,000 and $12,000.

"What I see in my patients is when we can restore the hair, not only does it make them feel better about themselves but it restores their self-confidence,” Dr. Marc Dauer, a hair transplant specialist in Los Angeles. “This research that we've come up with is fantastic news for us.”

Dr. Susan Taylor, a dermatologist, told TODAY that baldness can occur when the hair’s sleep phase, which is only supposed to last weeks or months, becomes permanent as the follicle goes to sleep for good.

Scientists have found that vitamin D is the key that fits into the lock of the follicle receptor, said Taylor. “That seems to cause hair to grow and can help generate stem cells, cells that can turn into follicles,” she told TODAY’s Matt Lauer.

While drugs like Propecia and Rogaine prevent further hair loss, Taylor said the hope is that new treatments will turn the receptors on and allow hair to grow again on a bald scalp.

That led Lauer to inquire if men will soon be using a vitamin D ointment or taking a pill, but Taylor said it’s too early too know. And once a treatment is available, Lauer wondered how quickly the results will come.

“There are a lot of bald men out there who want their hair back,” Lauer noted. “Are we suggesting that at one point you’re going to get this vitamin D into your system and those hair follicles are going to be turned on immediately again?" he added.

“Are you just going to start sprouting hair?” Lauer wondered. “Is this going to take months, years?” But again, Taylor told him, it’s too soon to tell.

“We hope this is going to be a potential cure but there’s much work that needs to be done to translate what we’ve learned in the lab to humans,” Taylor said.

Men shouldn't just start popping vitamin D pills.  Too much vitamin D can cause calcium to build up in the body, causing an abnormal heart rhythm, kidney stones, nausea and constipation.

Lauer ended with what he called a “fun fact for our friends without hair.”

“You lose about 100 hairs from your scalp every single day, which means that in about 2 1/2 weeks, I’m Mr. Clean," he lamented.

Slideshow: Bald and beautiful

EPA. AP

Some of Hollywood's toughest leading men sport shaved heads.

Launch slideshow

More in TODAY Health

• Eating chocolate lowers men's stroke risk
• Family matters: Close ties boost men's mental health
• Women exercise less than men, study finds

Anja Niedringhaus / AP

United States' Manteo Mitchell competes in a 4x400-meter relay heat during the athletics in the Olympic Stadium at the 2012 Summer Olympics, in London on Thursday. Manteo had half a lap to go in the first leg of the 4x400-meter relay preliminaries when he broke his leg, and was faced with a choice: keep running or stop and lose the race.

He heard the break. He felt the pain. And he just wanted to lie down.

But after he broke his leg during the semifinal round of the men’s Olympic 4 x 400 meter relay on Thursday, sprinter Manteo Mitchell kept on running, even though, he said, “It felt like somebody literally just snapped my leg in half.”

“It’s impressive both because he’s dealing with pain as well as not having all of his parts in an optimal situation,” says Dr. Balu Natarajan, a sports medicine specialist in Chicago.

He attributes Mitchell’s feat to a combination of the highly trained athlete’s fight-or-flight response to pain and the fact that the bone he broke in his lower left leg, the fibula, absorbs less shock and does less work than the other leg bones.

“Part of it was that the fibula contributes less to weight bearing as opposed to the femur and tibia and part of it is that in that high-energy situation, he has enough adrenaline and endorphins kicking throughout his body that he’s feeling a lot less pain at that moment,” said Natarajan, who also serves on the medical team of the Chicago Marathon.

Had the 25-year-old Mitchell broken his femur or tibia, it would have been nearly impossible for him to finish the race, he said. If a leg bone had to break, he was in a sense lucky it was the fibula.

“If it’s a short enough distance and a high level enough athlete, even with a broken fibula, someone can finish the race,” Natarajan said.

In a statement released through USA Track & Field, Mitchell said the roar of the crowd was so loud that nobody heard his “little war cry,” and he said he didn’t want to let his teammates down. Mitchell finished his heat in 46.1 seconds, only 1.5 seconds longer than the runner of the next leg; the U.S. qualified for the finals and finished in the fastest time ever run in the first round of the relay at the Olympics. On Friday, the U.S. team went on to win a silver medal, thanks in part to Mitchell's sacrifice.

In a high-stakes event like the Olympics after years of training, athletes sometimes will stop at nothing, experts say.

“There’s so much that’s tied into the psyche during a race like this, it really can override a lot of things we would feel outside of such a high energy situation,” Natarajan said. “If the same thing happened on training run and no one was around, he would very likely have stopped.”

“Anybody who has trained for a particular event for four years, really they have one goal, and between that and the tremendous conditioning and excellent biomechanics, it’s really the perfect confluence of factors that might allow someone to overcome a break like this,” he said.

Mitchell said he had slipped on the stairs a few days earlier, but had it checked out, felt fine and didn't think much of it. Mitchell’s strong finish in the race was a clear example of a top athlete’s ability to put mind over matter, says Frank Smoll, a professor of sport psychology at the University of Washington.

“It’s a very good illustration of how highly motivated they are and their willingness to pursue and persist and play through pain, so that the importance of what they’re doing really outweighs the potential negative consequences, in this case, physical harm,” he said.

“They’re highly dedicated athletes, they’re courageous, and they’re willing to, at their own self-sacrifice, give it their all,” Smoll said.

The training Olympic athletes receive in "attention control," the ability to block out distractions like pain, helps them succeed, Smoll said, adding: “It’s not just the physical ability that makes the elite athletes but the mental preparation is what makes them excel.”

The U.S. men's 4 x 400 relay team won a silver medal on Friday; Mitchell, who has been fitted with a boot and crutches, will receive a medal with the rest of the team.

Related: 

• What is with that weird tape Olympians are wearing?
• Give McKayla Maroney a break: 2nd place is tougher than 3rd 
• You've just won a gold medal! So why are you trying to eat it?
• Gold medal mom: I felt selfish training for Olympics
• Video: Decathletes are amazing