Say It Like The Big Boys Do
A puzzle I've often spoken about is how different our movie stars, sportscasters, news announcers, even politicians sound these days, compared to those of the 1950s and before.Here's the Atlantic's James Fallows on this huge shift in what we consider a style well-spoken:
"It was a style of phony-British “Announcer Speak”
that dominated formal American discourse from the
1920s to maybe the 1950s—and now has entirely
disappeared."
Except, my guess is that this staccato spit-fire, bowl-you-over style dates from the 19th century and before. The speaker who used it was displaying an ability to 'say it like a big boy'. Names, places, foreign languages, and certainly vocabulary, would all be readily available, without delay, to the mind in speech; appropriateness be damned.
This mastering of the spoken word would be analogous to the colonialism of the period. It was the same stark, unexamined supply-and-demand that began with the needs of the 'superior' civilization, met with product, without appropriate second thought, from the lands of the 'inferior'.
To return the analogy to speaking style, the speaker would speak rat-a-tat, forcing the words out with the self-knowledge of a prize fighter, reveling in his mastery. But suitability, the self-fulfillment that comes from fitting beautifully the needs of a mate, a friend, another people, an artful world, that was absent, or tended to be walled off into a separate compartment labelled variously: 'religion', 'buddies', 'marriage'.
Which is why, given the end of the colonial era, the rise of the environmental movement, women's rights, civil rights, even the historic preservation movement, we began to speak differently, too.
Update: Fallows expands on his original post, quoting feedback he received from his readers. The most likely explanation for the style in question seems to be the use of primitive microphones in the early years of sound recording that demanded enunciation and clarity. While this may be a contributing factor, I stand by the above explanation.
