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Did you notice the last word spoken by the host Garry Moore was "withal", meaning "nevertheless". Can you imagine a game show host using the word today?
by neonscribe 15y ago
Did you notice the last word spoken by the host Garry Moore was "withal", meaning "nevertheless". Can you imagine a game show host using the word today?
- jerf 15y agoYes. Or rather, the temporally-updated equivalent. Withal sounds erudite because now it's dead, and a sign of sophistication to know the word at all. Much less so then, albeit perhaps not zero. The problem with some modern game shows isn't vocabulary. It isn't even necessarily spectacle qua spectacle, because if they could have done it and afforded it in the 50s their shows would have been bigger, too. Humans haven't changed in the past 60 years. The problem with modern game shows is something more like they have more resources than they know what to do with, competing against ten other shows with the same "problem". I'm not convinced there's a good argument for modern people being more relatively degenerate than people of old... the set of which, I would remind you, really does include actual, factual people who considered combat to the death fit entertainment.
- kelnos 15y agoI can't imagine anyone using that word today. Perhaps "withal" was in wider general use in that time period?