Why did people in the past speak so much better than people today?

I don’t think the first link worked.

My grandmother was born (1904) and raised in Connecticut. She sounded very much like Bette Davis. To hear my young nieces and nephews speak now is appalling.

Because everything in the past was better particularly my erections.

The public educational system. Plain and simple. Also demographic changes— I am black but am always real about shit. A lot of minorities do not know how to speak correctly. Code switching is one thing but many only know the ghetto code.

I think fewer people were given a platform to speak. And when they were, they were prepared and tried to get it perfect as it was less likely they could erase and start again.

Blame rap culture.

It has ruined America.

Proper speech was a big part of being educated. To advance in society it was necessary to speak well. Not so now much plus you don’t want to be seen as elitist or racist.

Op your vid doesn’t load for me.

Not so much now….

OP, you consider those people to be well-spoken? Where do you live?

There are those who equate speaking well, with getting ahead of yourself.

They "spake" instead of "spoke" back then, too. Would you like to return to those days as well, OP? Excrement everywhere, as far as the nose can smell?

Social media has allowed us to communicate without speaking. Working from home has further prevented communicating in person.

R5 nailed it. "Man on the street" interviews originally focused on businessmen – and they were all men back then – under the presumption that as "educated types," they'd automatically (!) be informed about any given topic. Everyone just loved sitting around listening to white men talk interrupted!

People didn't "speak better" in the past. Perceptions to that extent are rooted mainly in the vastly increased number of interviews with "urban" and "regional" types, a.k.a. hoodrats & hicks. The '60s-era "tune in, turn on, drop out" types were generally students at what we'd call "elite" universities nowadays, especially Cal Berkeley & Stanford in SF's case.

Perhaps ironically, most people now speak *better* than they otherwise would've. Something most here over 50 have probably noticed is the gradual elimination of regional accents. Pick any given state associated with strong accents – could be the South, could be Texas, could be Boston or even NYC – and far fewer people have them. We have TV to thank, or I guess "thank," for that: kids watching it too much under the age of 4 tends to result in them developing the "Middle American" accent heard from most news anchor types.

People read more.

The only thing people are reading is text messages.

r13 Seriously, seek help

R17 are you too stupid to even understand his reply? It’s not r13 that needs help.

Reading, or lack of it. Better read folks have a better vocabulary.

[quote]The public educational system. Plain and simple.

The government (democrats and republicans) allowing our public education system to be dumbed down.

Fixed that for you.

One reason would be that people who were interested in what was going on in the world (just about everybody) would eagerly read the newspapers, which in past eras were written by journalists who took some pride in their abilities with the language and with their abilities to cite and refer to literature and science, be it for the inherent value, be it because that way they'd put their competition to shame. This created an ever-present standard that people, consciously or unconsciously, would follow or at least be aware of, such that when they spoke (or wrote letters or whatever), the literacy that they experienced would be reflected in what they themselves produced. What people read most frequently today does not aspire to the standards which were present in the past, and so today's speaking is guided by other models.

I still can't get past that OP thought those were particularly well-spoken individuals. Because one woman who'd had therapy said "neurosis."

Now, due to the internet and phone cameras (videos), all kinds of people are recording themselves and each other (and posting on SM). Back in those days, only a select few were recording themselves and others.

Hence, we are now exposed to more bad English, etc.

I do think that people over 60 have more pleasing voices regardless of accent or class. Both currently and when they young. A lot of young women have the upspeak and vocal fry while a lot of young men have the nasal “stoner voice”. I’m an older millennial, I listen to a lot of podcasts at work and some younger voices are so unpleasant that I have to turn them off. They may be “well spoken” in that they are smart people discussing political issues and contributing some good points but I just cannot listen to some dude who sounds like a sloth with a headcold.

A friend of mine is a teacher and he recently suggested that speech classes should be part of the curriculum! Ha! Vance wants to stop funding public education, if he gets anywhere near the WH today’s kids will be lucky if they’re not in a factory at 14.

OP that was from BB21 which premiered on June 25, 2019 and concluded on September 25, 2019.

You really consider five years ago "the past" I was expecting something from the 1940's or 50's.

[quote]I think fewer people were given a platform to speak. And when they were, they were prepared and tried to get it perfect...

Agreed R5. I think also that there was a much stronger sense of distinction by class and education and even sex. You see it in exaggerated form in the 1950s housewives who deferred in 'complicated' matters to their husbands 'I wouldn't know a thing about that, but you should ask my husband' was less to profess ignorance than to indicate it wasn't for a married woman to exercise political opinions in a street interview -- a matter of role. A half century ago, what now seem too humble protests of lower class and lesser educated people was again a matter of role (or a lack of) and an embarrassment of position and background -- deferring opinion to more favored classes.

Now, of course, everyone has an opinion or ten and isn't the least shy about holding forth on matters. Nevermind if the question doesn't really affect them or if they don't know the least fucking thing about the subject, they are ready to expound and at length. Rich, poor, educated, ignorant, attractive, ugly...doesn't matter.

R20. Yea you are right. Even some teachers nowadays cannot speak.

[Quote] today's speaking is guided by other models.

Social media speak using mostly acronyms

Phyllis: Whats the fish like?

Bernice: It’s square fish, Phyllis.

The schools were much better and being an articulate, intelligent adult was what people strived to be.

My mother and her sisters only had HS diplomas, but they were articulate, informed, intelligent and had a maturity about them that is severely lacking in the generations who came of age from the mid-60s on. It has only gotten worse. I work with millenials who have like no historical knowledge about anything, and they are proud that they don't know and they don't care that they don't know.

The answer is easy, OP: in the past, the academic syllabus emphasized the importance of grammar, orthography, syntax and morphology and above all, in order to pass, students had to read extensively. Nowadays, our elites have deliberately sought to dumb us down by practically eliminating the humanities form the educational curriculum. Moreover, what is left has been reduced to minimums, because the humanities teach people how to think and provide us with points of reference that we can use to analyze historical trends, which would prompt us to seek ways to solve the problems that we face as a society. The people at the top want functionally illiterate serfs, not intelligent, properly educated people who can challenge their increasingly totalitarian rule and the extreme inequality they've created.

That is also why so much emphasis has been placed on visual stimuli and escapism has been intensively promoted, because slaves who dream to alleviate their suffering, but are too ignorant and stupid to even know that there are much better alternatives, let alone how to fight to implement them, make ideal serfs for psychopathic, wannabe neo-feudal tech lords.

Like, whaddya mean, OP? The use of the word "like" after every word started it.

That first hippie in the video has great hair. There ain't no words for the beauty, the splendor, the wonder of his hair.

That first "hippie" has a ROCKING HOT BODY

I just started teaching a bunch of college students from Francophone African countries. I will tell you this. Their French is fine but their English is fluent yet ATROCIOUS. Written and spoken. Nobody has taught them anything about proper English and they seemed to have learned most of it online and gaming.

Phonetic spelling and zero awareness of register. Any sound they have ever seen or heard online is assume to be a real English word.

I'm guess their French is OK because there were adults in their young lives who paid somewhat attention.

These are the digital natives. All over the world they have quite fluent English skills but it's total crap Pidgen English.

In short - nobody is paying attention to the kids.

In the old days, we had 1000x fewer communications in front of our eyes everyday and older folks were paying attention to kids and kids were paying attention to HUMANS, people, who place a value on communication. You don't have to educated even. Uneducated people can still be very effective communicators, and even delightful communicators.

We have farmed out a generation of young minds to intertubes and this is the result.

[quote]R20: The government (democrats and republicans) allowing our public education system to be dumbed down. Fixed that for you.

No, you fucked it up with that Russian troll 'bothsider' shit.

There's only one party destroying the public schools in favor of private schools; one party attacking the contents of schoolbooks, trying to revise history and skew the curriculum; one party banning books, and one party that wants to completely eliminate the Department of Education. Here's a clue: it ain't the Democrats.

I’ll never forget when my 7th grade Spanish teacher told her predominantly black class that she was happy about the new job she got in Northern Virginia because we didn’t want to learn. The kids there want to learn. Racist ass bitch but she low key had a point 😂. And granted my school was considered one of the better public schools in the city.

I remember having to stand in front of the class and give a verbal book report.

Modern society values self-acceptance over self-improvement. Correcting a young person’s speech patterns or grammar was once commonplace, but less and less socially acceptable now. People used to expect to be judged by how they spoke and how they dressed. With those social pressures gone, most people look and sound awful.

I’m not saying that there are no disadvantages to the more judgmental attitudes of the past, but people did look and sound better.

I actually am old enough to recall having one of those inane early grammar-school grade teachers in the late 1960s who would sternly correct our “slang word” for each other, admonishing that “‘Kids’ are baby goats, not ‘children’!”😜

R41 What about the substitute teachers that got pissy when you asked to go to the bathroom instead of the lavatory. So annoying.

Lol ikr🤪

Jesus Christ you bitches love running with your masturbatory anecdotal musings about "kids these days" instead of the cold hard facts. R5 is closer to the truth. You could work at the BBC if you had a regional accent and couldn't speak in region-free "Received Pronunciation" until relatively recently for example, even though it's not an indigenous accent.

Couldn't work*

I started to watch a documentary the other day, and turned it off 5 minutes in. The narrator must have said "Riiiiiight?" about 3 times in 5 minutes.

People spoke better because that was expected of them. Better parenting, better children. Children had structure and were disciplined. They didn't have iPhones to cheat and communicate through. They had discussions and interactions with other humans.

I know she was a movie star and not a “normal” person but I absolutely love the way Elizabeth Taylor speaks in this interview.

Teacup, quit using emojis and talking to yourself. It outs one of your socks and reveals idiocy and mental illness.

[quote]The government (democrats and republicans) allowing our public education system to be dumbed down.

It's mainly the radical "woke" Democrats.

They consider anything to do with the English language as "colonialism" and thus bad.

Expecting immigrants to learn English and POC to speak like "educated white folks" is somehow "racist."

So, Democrats don't encourage "speaking properly" anymore.

Hence why so many Democratic-run things like Hollywood (i.e. California) and Broadway (i.e. New York) are so ghetto now.

And this is what they want to do to the rest of the country!

…because people today are fat slobs.

I reject the premise. Having your thoughts recorded and preserved used to require an allocation of scarce resources, so there was a certain bias toward filming and recording articulate, educated people. Now anyone can broadcast anyone and we get huck twah girl.

Idiocracy, baby, Idiocracy.

I blame pajamas in public.

It's a symptom of post-modernism. We used to match tone to the setting it was in (e.g. home vs. work. vs. organisational vs. academic vs. religious), but the boundaries between those settings are now blurred. We're also not training people to match tone to setting much anymore outside of academia and specialised professions.

R50. Get over your dim-witted racial and political obsessions. White people are at least as painful to listen to as anyone else today.

I try to speak proper English. Most importantly, I know how. I feel badly for these kids that don't even know what proper English is. Or they avoid it because they don't want to sound too white or too bougie. I suspect it will come back into fashion one of these days. Sounding ghetto or poor won't get you far in life unless you aspire to be the next Diddy. I do think it is funny to see the contrast between Snoop and Martha. They have a lot of fun.

R49 What is you talkin bout. And why did you like your own comment. I stay living in your head rent free.

No, I did not like my own comment, troll. I'm not like you playing with your multiple personalities and childish emojis.

Fucking pathetic, mentally ill troll.

I liked the comment.

I mean, I mean…you know, you know, you know what I mean?

R59 I use emojis sometimes but what are you talking about in regards to this thread. I’m not person who wrote IKR smiley face. It’s either my stalker or you tryna be funny.

R61, I mean, like, what I mean, don't you, like know what I mean?

Piss off, troll R62.

Speaking proper English with good enunciation is considered "elitist" today.

I don't agree, mafuckin OP.

Because were raised by our parents, who taught us good diction and manners. We were not raised by the tv & the internet like kids of today.

I dislike people who talk like they’ve got shit in their mouth

Part of it is simple exponents, OP.

What I mean by this is say a town in the 1950s has a small handful of uneducated hicks. Well, those hicks go on to meet other hicks and produce hick children. Those hick children grow up, associate with other poorly educated individuals and have children with them. Times that by multiple decades and generations and here we are, a whole lot of people running around saying, "I seen...," "it's the worse," "she don't talk good English," etc...

I know a working class white woman in her early 60s who has TERRIBLE grammar. She can't write a proper paragraph to save her life and she mispronounces a lot of simple words. Her father is an uneducated man who came from a farming family, her ex-partner is a gravel truck driver with poor education, and her son's grammar and manner of speaking is just as poor as his mother's. The son will never attract a highly educated woman to marry and have children with - he'll end up with a poorly educated woman and their children will not have proper speech modeled for them.

People imitate what they hear on TV and are influenced by those around them. I was shocked by my own mother who suddenly started talking in "question marks" because it was the thing 20 years ago.

Listen to Jackie Kennedy during the 1962 White House tour. Not a "you know," "I mean" or "like." Son John John on the other hand...

[quote] The son will never attract a highly educated woman to marry and have children with - he'll end up with a poorly educated woman and their children will not have proper speech modeled for them.

What does he do for a living. Is he working class too? If so, marrying someone in his own class would be the norm and the match with the greatest chance of success. I doubt he has any desire for a highly educated woman.

R65 another one of my fans. My God I’m a celebrity here. There is only one Teacake and it’s me.

[quote]I try to speak proper English. Most importantly, I know how. I feel badly for these kids that don't even know what proper English is.

Sad.

Timothée Chalmers owns this thread. He's an absolute embarrassment given his background.

Chalamet* (autocorrecte putaine de merde!)