The algorithms are getting good. Facebook used to crack me up by targeting me with ads for random things like Moroccan fezzes and dating services for the over-80-combat-veteran set, but lately — to borrow the language of my favorite reality-TV romance show, “The Bachelor” — they’ve really been showing that they’ve begun to know me. It is Valentine’s Day today, and I feel seen: Facebook ads this morning are offering inn-to-inn walking-tour itineraries along a pilgrimage route to literary sites in the highlands of Scotland and a chance to win a sweepstakes prize from the rebranded Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus. A few days ago, it was lampshades and wallpaper hand-block-printed with seabirds and honeysuckles. I feel appreciated.
I’m not sure what I was scrolling on Monday evening when YouTube offered me up a video of the British philosopher Bertrand Russell speaking aloud. But you get me, YouTube, you really do. I am probably one of about five people on the Eastern Seaboard who actually do want to hear Bertrand Russell speaking out loud. (If you’d like an unexpected giggle, go to YouTube and listen to Virginia Woolf talking in 1937 on the topic of “craftsmanship.” YouTube offered me Virginia Woolf next. She sounds like a jerk, if I’m honest, but I do love the way she says the word “mysterious.” She gives it quite a flourish, a stage magician swishing her satin cape.) Anyway, Bertrand Russell was born in 1872, and so when he speaks in his YouTube video on the topic of “A Message to Future Generations,” we are hearing a pronunciation forged almost two centuries ago.
What a lot of vowel sounds we used to have! Bertrand Russell’s mouth muscles get quite a workout on the word “intellectual.”
He pronounces it like this: “In-tee-lect-tyu-wall.”
How lazy we’ve become. I’m a bit of an over-pronouncer — when compared with the millennial generation and Gen Z, who, to my ears, flatten everything out — but my rendering of “intellectual” requires much less vigorous calisthenics of the tongue. Instead of “In-tee-lect-tyu-wall,” I say “nt-tuh-lekt-chu-wul.” See how I’ve dropped a vowel or two in there?
Bertrand Russell rolls his Rs. So does Virginia Woolf (born in 1882). I like the way they both say the word “memories.” Many modern Americans would pare “memories” down into two syllables: “mem-rees.” I’d still give it three, “mem-oh-rees,” but not only did this earlier British generation render it with three syllables and a fillip of ruffle, the rolled R, they positively frilled it with a singsong of vowels, including a very open and operatic O.
It has been apparent to me for a few decades now that American vernacular is becoming smoothed out, slippery corners cut, paths of least resistance found. Why take the bother to say “charity” when you can say “cherrety”? It’s some kind of linguistic law of nature, like water finding the swiftest route down a slope: The human tongue keeps seeking swifter ways to communicate.
It’s probably just progress, but I don’t like it.
This might be the ultimate expression of what it means to be a curmudgeon — it won’t be long before I’m standing in my front yard wearing a mis-buttoned cardigan sweater and swinging a cane — but I am a positive fanatic about preserving variety and localisms — variety in all things, in the face of all that is homogenizing about our era of global commerce and global communication — and that is why I torture my poor children over their pronunciation of the words “Mary,” “marry,” and “merry.”
Their classmates may hear those words, and pronounce them, all the same: “mary,” “mary,” and “mary.” But my children’s ears will be able to differentiate: “Mare-y,” “mah-ry,” and “meh-ry.”
Wouldn’t you prefer it if future generations were able to hear and pronounce a distinction between Prince Harry and Prince Hairy? Many of us of a certain age still hear — and pronounce — the A in “Harry” like the A in “hat,” and the “hair” in “hairy” like, uh, the “hair” in “hair.” They are not homophones.
When I first looked into this disappearing-vowel business, back in the 1990s — this was around the time when early search engines like Ask Jeeves were enabling us to waste time online during the office workday, “surfing the net” while appearing to be, as the British say, beavering away — the experts said that there were only a few remaining geographical pockets in the United States where the distinctions between different A-vowel sounds could be heard by American ears. The Tristate Area was the main pocket of resistance to verbal homogenization. Long Island proud!
Obviously, the loss of regional accents has to do with mass media. Radio came, and then television, and pretty soon all the modern teenagers grooving to the Partridge Family sounded like they were from Southern California. I’d like to read an expert linguist’s update on TikTok vernacular, ca. 2023. To me, it sounds like the average American teenage girl is now affecting an adopted accent in which she doesn’t have to move her tongue at all, but leaves the muscles in her mouth and lips entirely lax, while moving just her lower jaw, like a duck. There aren’t six vowels, each with different sounds depending on the placement in the word, there is just one vowel sound: quack, quack, quack.
Again, I don’t think I’m wrong about this evolution in elocution, but I’m sure I’m wrong in the ethical sense. What’s the harm? As Lord Russell, in his “Message to Future Generations” on YouTube, says: “In this world, which is getting more and more closely connected, we need to learn to tolerate each other. We have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don’t like.”
(But you have to hear how he elocutes, even, the simple words “put up with the fact”! It’s like a tap dance, tippity-tapping between each distinct crisp sound. Bert Russell doesn’t flap his Ts.)
I remember, one time, running into a crush of mine in a coffee bar on Smith Street in Brooklyn, around 20 years ago. I’ve forgotten his name, weirdly, but he was a musician with prematurely white hair, very tall, and there he was sitting with a young woman at a two-top table near the door when I came in after the gym for my regular morning soy latte. It was slightly awkward, because I’d been romantically interested in him — and he probably knew it! — and they were clearly having a morning coffee after a night together. She introduced herself: “My name is Mare-y.” I replied, “Is that Mary? Or Merry?” She looked confused. Her ears couldn’t hear the difference. My crush was a native New Yorker, though, and he rushed in: “Mary. Mary.” I swear I wasn’t being a jerk! I just didn’t want to get her name wrong.