proto wrote:Haha. I seriously laughed out loud when I was reading that, especially the bumblebee part. Wow, that is great! 
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proto wrote:Another thing I've been thinking about lately are people's accents and how that relates to this subject. Have you noticed alot of guys and girls talk like a bunch of surfer dudes and valley girls? Eeeek. What is going on? Especially with me, coming from NYC, where that's not a native thing. You can tell if someone is from NYC just by looking at them, but you see people who seem very East Coast yet talk as if they're from Anaheim,CA. For example, I hear business guys walking down the street with their cell phones plastered on their ear and saying phrases like: "Yeah, totally dude! She's so fu*king hot. Yeahh!!" And mind you, these guys are usually along the 30-45 age bracket. I'm sorry, excuse my tasteless language, but WTF is up with that? I know guys did not talk like that years ago, up until maybe when Bevis and Butthead (and later, the movie clerks in 1994) came out on MTV. Now, you see guys mostly talking and acting like Bevis and Butthead, who don't smoke pot nor surf, yet act stoned because they think it's "funny" and "super cool". Yeahhhhhhhh dude, woo hoo!
Women on the other hand, take the lead on this. It's so bad that I find it refreshing when I come across a woman (either in person or not) that speaks in their own natural voice and not influenced by television or the evils of Paris Hilton and Co. They speak with such utter melo-dramatic tones that if they see someone wearing orange this year instead of last year, they would say "OH MY GOD, ewww!" I'll spare everyone the catch phrases of valley girl talk since you already know them. It could be just the way American women speak, especially when you compare women 50 years ago and how they had their own accent, which I think, was a classier than "OMG, that's hot!" But I just can't help but think: are people that insecure that they would train their vocal chords to speak in a different manner just to fit in? to be accepted? to get ahead? whatever that means?! Just another thought in my mind in response to this pod people question I would like to share with the rest of you.
!!!!!! THANK YOU!!!!!!!!
I was going to mention this last week but then forgot. But YES, absolutely.....as somebody who lived in four states in a three and a half year time span - SoCal, Oregon, Florida and now Virginia, almost like "4 corners" you could say - I can absolutely verify this. People all over the country are speaking as if they're from SoCal. I LIVED in SoCal for over 10 years, and let me tell you, to leave and go elsewhere......3,000 miles away even......and hear people talking the same way is stunning. What happened to regional accents?!? What happened to natural voices and inflection like you noted?? I was thinking the same thing, so I'm really glad you brought this up. The problem isn't so much the guys, who sound like generic frat boys, it's the girls. They talk like the girls in SoCal talked. Every other word is "like." On those rare occasions when I use "like" when I'm typing on NR, I insert it in on purpose and am very aware of it. It's to create a certain sound to what I'm writing. But these girls have it inserted in every other word, as if they can't help saying it and aren't even aware of what they're doing. And the vocal inflection, artifically high intonation, up down, sing songy, is completely SoCal.
When we moved to Virginia, I expected that everybody would have Virginia speak. X! It seems that relatively few people have the accent. Not only that, but pretty much anybody under 30 sounds like they're from California. So I really dig the ones who do have that accent.
Now, where we live is a college town, with kids coming in from out of state, which also explains the lack of a prevailant southern accent around here. However.....they can't all be coming in from Southern California, yet, that's how most anybody under 30 sounds around here. So the only thing I could come up with as an explanation for it all was good ol' television. TV has become so ingrained in everybody that everybody now speaks the way that people on TV speak. And especially considering how many shows for young people are based in SoCal settings, whether L.A. or Orange County, then it's no wonder.
Something I've wondered about is whether "The Powers That Be" are deliberately inserting cultural changes in, no matter how subtle, and then tracking how fast they spread. Meme tracking you could say. Insert in phrases, words, ways of speaking, with the accent/intonation, and see how quickly it spreads, so they can gauge the effectiveness of their mass programming. Many people believe in the idea that TPTB are doing this with regards to bigger things, such as cultural attitudes and trends, but I'm thinking they're doing it on a smaller scale too. Like we're a big lab experiment.
"Life's journey is not to arrive at the grave safely in a well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, totally worn out, shouting "Holy shit ... what a ride!" - Anonymous
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"I get by with a little help from my (higher density) friends."
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