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I'm always completely fascinated by the change in language style between now and then. They're speaking the same English; it's not like a different dialect or

• sammalloy 4y ago
  Richard Pogge at Ohio State touches briefly upon this problem in his astronomy lectures as an analogy to trying to communicate with a putative extraterrestrial culture. We can barely communicate with our own species just a few generations removed. Have you ever tried to talk about technology with your oldest living ancestors (such as your grandparents)? I have, it’s a comedy of errors.
  • personjerry 4y ago
    There's a classic science fiction novel, The Forever War, which explores this idea as well - because of relativity, when the soldier returns from his battles he is speaking almost entirely a different language. Edit: Corrected from Starship Troopers to The Forever War
    • NortySpock 4y ago
      I think you are thinking of The Forever War by Joe Haldeman.
      • personjerry 4y ago
        Yes! Thanks for the correction
    • hnzix 4y ago
      The Languages Of Pao by Jack Vance is another classic science fiction novel that explores the impact of language on anthropology (the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis). For example, the warrior caste speak a dialect that encourages aggression.
      • euroderf 4y ago
        Another one is Babel 17.
    • golem14 4y ago
      Also along these lines: Return from the stars by Stanislaw Lem. Spoiler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_from_the_Stars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_from_the_Stars
    • mhh__ 4y ago
      There's also '39 (the queen song) where the relativistic travellers come home and find everyone they've ever known or loved are long dead.
  • ghaff 4y ago
    Although I know people who are grandparents who are probably far more technologically sophisticated than a lot of teenagers are. More generally though, there is just a lot of culture, ways of doing things, lived experience, etc. that are--if not bubbles--more disjoint between different ages and other demographics than not. It's probably really hard for a teenager or young adult in western society to really imagine a world before the internet, smartphones, home computers, etc. and all those imply. You had to watch whatever was on one of three channels at a specific time of night?
    • WalterBright 4y ago
      > You had to watch whatever was on one of three channels at a specific time of night? True. But then again, far less TV was watched. There was an occasional good show, the rest was filler that was pure drivel. There's a reason kids played outside with their friends in those days. There was nothing to do in the house. The stations would broadcast a test pattern at night.
      • tragomaskhalos 4y ago
        Looking through and old tabloid newspaper from the early '80s I was amazed to see that the TV listings was just a bare half page showing the names of the programmes, and that was it. Nowadays you have endless recommendations and reviews of what's coming up, and endless analysis of what's been on (e.g. just last night was reading the House Of The Dragon episode recap in the Guardian). What was most striking is that I don't remember TV being so low-key in the culture, nor how it crept up in importance, despite living through the change. Edit: Briton here.
        • ghaff 4y ago
          >What was most striking is that I don't remember TV being so low-key in the culture, nor how it crept up in importance, despite living through the change. TV was anything but low-key in culture. In fact because everyone watched a show at the same time, there was much more cultural synchronization/watercooler talk with respect to shows like MASH or Seinfeld. What did change beginning with maybe the Sopranos was that (a limited slice of) TV became more high culture and displaced film to a certain degree in that regard. (And streaming enabled the sort of serialized drama that was hard to pull off in a fixed time slot broadcast world.) >the TV listings was just a bare half page showing the names of the programmes, and that was it. True, but in the US, TV Guide magazine was I believe the most subscribed to magazine in the country. That's where a lot of people got more detailed (though relatively still quite limited) information from.
  • cm2187 4y ago
    That's massively hyperbolic. I can walk the streets of Rome and understand most of what was written 2000 years ago on the walls, and I was always a mediocre student in Latin, just the latin-derived languages are close enough.
    • sammalloy 4y ago
      You’re right, but when you try to explain a cell phone to the most learned Roman, how far do you think you might get?b I’m guessing they will try to have you locked up, or worse.
      • ginko 4y ago
        Eh, just tell them it's a magic trinket that allows you to see and hear others with such a trinket from far apart. It's not like the average person of today's understanding of cell phones is significantly more sophisticated.
• OJFord 4y ago
  It's not particularly prominent here (as far as I can tell anyway), but worth noting I think that often some (to a lot) of that is clipping and similar artefacts from the microphone (et al.) used at the time. I agree though, and why should it happen really? Every next generation's slight defiance of the (then) norm? It's tempting to call ours a more relaxed English, but I don't think that's right, it only seems that way by comparison to something else we'd have to adopt consciously.
• deleted 4y ago
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• wahern 4y ago
  Before smartphones, television, etc, language was a much more significant source of entertainment in itself, and so people invested much more time in word play, or employing more descriptive and emotive vocabulary and phrases. I think this is why, for example, not too long ago you typically saw more colorful language in rural areas, especially before television became such a ubiquitous past-time, but after more modern entertainment like film became common in the cities and suburbs. This seems still somewhat true in less developed areas around the world, where "back country" folk sometimes have a peculiarly rich vocabulary and manner of speech compared to their counterparts from more urban, modern areas. Imagine if we spent (intentionally or unintentionally) all the time we spend today learning to identify and applying pop-culture references to instead improving our vocabulary or using more expressive speech patterns. Or to put it another way, before mass consumer popular culture, expressive speech was the popular culture--stories, jokes, songs, turns-of-phrase, or just gossiping, but unlike those things today you had to add the flourish. Maybe it's just all in my head, though.
  • LAC-Tech 4y ago
    Maybe it's just all in my head, though. What you said makes perfect sense to me.
    • brazzy 4y ago
      Doesn't mean that it's true, though.
      • LAC-Tech 4y ago
        what would you offer as an alternative explanation?
        • tshaddox 4y ago
          That unfamiliar language usage sounds more complicated or embellished simply because it’s unfamiliar.
• maegul 4y ago
  Interesting. I don't have quite the same impression. To me it feels like they're generally well spoken but with a decent amount of a casual or conversational style. In essence, I'd bet it's a relatively clean and efficient use of the language where you could probably transcribe their words and not need to make many corrections for written publication. Fewer fill words ("like", "umm" etc) and pauses and relative fluency with their selection of meaningful but not bombastic words.
  • doingtheiroming 4y ago
    The both sound middle class.
• doingtheiroming 4y ago
  It’s wonderful. I love the word “slurring” for sliding. It describes the way a cart might move through mud perfectly.
• cm2187 4y ago
  You observe the same in French. The quality of the language of people interviewed in the 40s is almost flawlessly superior to today's french literature. And every generation from there has been a step down, I don't think there is an exact cutoff. It seems to me that it affects all social classes and levels of education. I am not sure why.
  • henriquemaia 4y ago
    I read your comment and, though I understand the sentiment, sometimes even feeling the same myself, I don't quite agree with it. Just think: who would be interviewed in the 40s from the previous century? Just a few, highly selected individuals. So what you have is a very biased sample. Compare that to what we have today, and the noise is obviously much, much stronger. We are almost drowning in information, everyone can virtually host their own show, and so on and so forth. But once you weed out the noise, and select the gems, they're still there, still shining. Our time is just that, our time. We are different, for sure, but not less qualified language wise.
    • verisimilitudes 4y ago
      • becquerel 4y ago
        If you think there weren't songs as raunchy as Anaconda back in the 40s, 30s, 20s or even the 1500s, I have a bridge to sell you.
    • Retric 4y ago
      Plenty of average people where interviewed for one reason or another and the difference is still generally striking. Here’s some interviews with former southern slaves for example: https://www.loc.gov/collections/voices-remembering-slavery/ https://www.loc.gov/collections/voices-remembering-slavery/
      • 4y ago
• rejectfinite 4y ago
  A better language instead of the americanization and slang for modern English. As someone who is not English I would rather listen to those old women than any modern man.
• adam-a 4y ago
  It is a dialect of course, basically RP. They are both middle-upper class Londoners and the accent still survives to some degree. You can tell when the one lady sings the "cockney" song, she imitates the working class accent of the area which also you still hear a bit in East London.
• ohthehugemanate 4y ago
  Other posters here are bemoaning the degradation of language, kids these days and their hippity hoppity music and tock tick videos, and so on... But we should bear in mind that one of these women was a professional novelist, and the other, one of the first professional typists. Meaning they both had a much higher sensitivity to the use of language than the average Joe on the street. They were professionally more literate and intentional in the use of language than the average. A better comparison would be modern professional writers or speakers. Or if you prefer, compare modern tiktok speech to those "cockneys" who sang the bawdy song. I am not discounting the terrible effect on the English language of the kids these days, of course. We are all entitled to our expression of "ugh" like the magistrate in her story.