Did people in the past talk more eloquently?

[Fretful_Porpentine]

(PS:Fretful Porpentine: Is your name taken from Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander?)

No, it’s from Hamlet:

I could a tale unfolde whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soule, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine

Best way to begin a ghost story that I know.

[LifeOnWry]

What really sucks here is that I should have known that. For one thing, it’s my favorite Shakespeare play, and for another thing, I JUST FINISHED RE-READING IT SATURDAY NIGHT. (insert smackie-face here.)

In my defense, I also recently re-read Outlander and it IS a phrase used in that book as well.

[partly_warmer]

*Originally posted by burundi *
**…Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has done some work showing that women often read each other’s diaries as a mark of friendship. Knowing that one has such a wide audience probably made one choose one’s words and topics carefully… Also, in the letters and diaries I’ve read, there tend to be stock phrases that, though they sound eloquent to us, were used so often as to become cliches. One that comes to mind is “when we meet in that bright land where sorrow is no more,” i.e., Heaven. Although its a lovely phrase, it doesn’t actually express an original thought. **

Does Smith-Rosenberg suggest that woman’s diaries were explicitly written with the notion of making them good reading for woman friends? Also, does she claim that this diary sharing occurred more frequently with women than with men?

One can appreciate that phrases seeming to be elevated today are merely cliches from yesteryear. But doesn’t the contemporary use of extended, poetical phrases suggest another, perhaps verbal, standard the diary writers were trying to emulate?

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

*Originally posted by Joe K *
**I think that the degeneration of speech in common usage may have started a tad more recently than I originally thought.
I was sitting around a few days ago, watching “Leave it to Beaver”; it was the episode where Wally becomes a Boy Scout and goes on a camping trip, leaving the Beaver to his own devices, etc. I noticed that the way that both the parents pronounced the words"boy scout" as a compound word/phrase was different than todays usage that I am accustomed to in that they stressed the word “scout”, i.e. “boy SCOUT”, rather than the way I have usually heard it, pronounced as “BOY scout”. The first version does seem more grammatically correct in that they are refering to scouts that just happen to be boys, emphasizing the important bit, that they are indeed scouts. This example can be combined with others that contain even, shall we say, less worry about grammar with emphasis on entertainment from only slightly earlier on in time. On the Three Stooges re-runs, you will see common references to “serviettes”(napkins), as well as the pronunciation of words such as “again” with a longer “A”. This is nowadays recognized by Americans as British (or Canadian) English , who are generally considered to be more grammatically precise in the English language than their Yankee counterparts. My humble opinion is that, as far as these limited examples allow, this “decline” in American English accelerated with the acceptance and celebration by certain gentries of the oft glamorized and misinterpreted “Urban Lifestyle”. AFAIK, this speech movement could have started its acceleration as late as the early 70s. **

I’m not sure that Brits and Canadians are really more precise in their grammar. For instance, I doubt if someone from either of those places would be less like to say “It’s me” than an American.

On the other hand, I think we do have a significant anti-eloquence factor, if you will, in our tendency to exalt rustic values and speech habits. This is most commonly manifested in marketing tactics, as when a disposable container for leftovers is christened a Servin’ Saver. Why is the g omitted? Is it supposed to make the idea of saving leftovers more delightful in some way? Or is it, as I think, an attempt to put a positive spin on the product by ‘countrifying’ its name? And how about the long running Dodge Caravan ad campaign, in which a vocalist strongly resembling Dolly Parton croons that it’s “America’s best selling mini-vayan”, sort of giving the word “van” an extra syllable as you might hear in more rural sections of the U.S.

[partly_warmer]

*Originally posted by DanielWithrow *
**Partly_Warmer, I challenge you, then – if rap is something so easy a 9-year-old can do it, try it now. Without forethought, give us a decent rap. You can type it, but no revising, and no thinking ahead of time: make it improv.

The rap I’ve listened to has highly complex rhyming structures behind it. Daniel **

It’s very interesting you would say this, because I half had in mind to to state it as a challenge. However, I wasn’t planning on doing it myself–but writing a computer program. In another thread I demonstrated that if I randomized the lines of a popular TV show, fans wouldn’t be able to put them back in the correct order without consulting a script. In that case, I was only claiming that parts could be written by a (completely unintelligent) computer program. With the rap I’ve heard, which probably isn’t the “cream”, the amount would be closer to 100%.

It won’t surprise you that I did make up a few lines in my head–that sounded to me, anyhow, like rap. However me reciting them isn’t a blind test, because you already know which “isn’t rap”. The experiment I’d suggest is similar to the TV show test. I take a lesser known rap song, we identify 5 people who agree not to participate if they know the song… and my computer program randomizes the words and lines. 5 versions are presented, the judges decide which is “real”. There are experiments similar to this done before with other unsustainable superlatives about art, and usually the original couldn’t be reliably detected.

Whether I actually do this depends on some other computer things I’m working on.

As for your comment about “complex rhyming structures”, would you care to give a short example or two? If it truly is on the order of Shakespeare, of course, no (existing) computer program could duplicate it.