Edward R. Murrow (1908-1965) was a classic user of “Announcer Speak”
James Fallows, in the Atlantic, identifies a broadcasting convention, the use of a slightly Anglicized version of grammatically correct Standard Mid-Western English as the formal voice of news reader, announcer, or celebrity on the radio, which he contends has recently disappeared.
The narrator of [this] film [“Wings Over the Golden Gate” (1930s)](spoke in a way instantly recognizable to anyone who has seen footage of FDR-era newsreels, or for that matter listened to recordings of FDR himself. It was a style of phony-British “Announcer Speak†that dominated formal American discourse from the 1920s to maybe the 1950s—and now has entirely disappeared.
I mention this because today I was listening to a rebroadcast of a great 2012 Fresh Air interview with the musician and writer Michael Feinstein, which included a rare, brief interview that George Gershwin had done on Rudy Vallee’s hyper-popular radio show in 1933. The amazing thing was that even George Gershwin sounded this way!
The revolutionary genius of modern American music, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, the child of Brooklyn who moved to Hollywood, the epitome of whatever seemed jazzy about America of the Depression years—even he had that Voice of Time diction.
Here is what I asked four years ago, and would still like to know: Who was the last American to speak this way? And when and why did this accent disappear? We often think of language change as evolving over long historic periods. But this is something that has happened with comparative speed. By the time I became conscious of TV, radio, or movie voices in the late 1950s, the formal Announcer version of American English still existed. Now, no one would use it except as a joke.
When? How? Why?
———————————-
———————————-
I think the slightly more stressed consonants (British style) did tend to disappear, along with the last remnants of the British Empire, sometime in the course of the 1950s, but news broadcasters like Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley still, in my opinion, delivered the news in much the same carefully-articulated and artificially-elevated tones as 1930s announcers.
Perhaps, we can attribute a slightly more recent preference for a less formal and pretentious, a more natural kind of broadcasting diction to Culture Wars conflicts, and the wide American recognition that Voice-of-God news readers (like Cronkite) frequently served up atrociously biased reporting and outright misinformation (Cf. Cronkite’s misreporting on the supposed Viet Cong “victory” in the 1968 Tet Offensive) and that (despite those elevated accents) broadcasting talking heads had commonly in reality roughly the same I.Q. as your average box turtle.
The astonishingly dim but equally pretentious anchorman rapidly became an American comedy staple. After all that, it should not be surprising that the preferred broadcasting style has become more natural and less affected.
We all read that poor John Kerry broke his leg recently, bicycling at age 70 near the French border, then winding up in a hospital in Geneva before being flown home to Massachusetts General at the expense of the US taxpayer.
But the Jerusalem Post reported subsequently that the Iranian media exploded this week with stories claiming that Kerry was actually shot in the course of a meeting with ISIS representatives that turned out to be an assassination attempt.
The latest Iranian report, first published by the Nasim news agency and subsequently picked up by dozens of Iranian news sites, based its information on “an American news website” which cites a Russian foreign intelligence service report as the source of the information.
According to the report in Nasim, Kerry secretly met with one of the leaders of Islamic State on Sunday. The meeting eventually led to an armed clash and an attempt to assassinate the US secretary of state.
Kerry’s meeting, in which the alleged assassination attempt took place, was with Gulmurod Khalimov, a senior Tajik police commander, trained in the United States, who announced his defection to Islamic State in a video released last week, the report states.
Having received training from the US State Department previously, Khalimov was well aware of State Department security procedures and he used the knowledge to get another member of his entourage into the secret meeting with Kerry, with the intention of assassinating him, the report claims.
The report cited communications intercepted by Russian intelligence from France, the US and Switzerland as confirming that two other people were shot in the incident, one of them fatally.
The story of Kerry breaking his femur in a bicycle accident in Switzerland was then concoted to hide the real source of his “grave injuries,” according to the report.
Jon Mertes of Onawa, Iowa bought the Sears Motor Buggy 107 years ago. It has outlived two generations of owners and now belongs to the grandson of its original purchaser. The Motor Buggy still runs, and apart from an engine repair and a new set of tires, is in completely original condition. When Ken Mertes drives it, he is using 107-year-old brakes!
Hilarious North Korean propaganda videos showing fanatical pilots taking off in 40 to 60 year old Russian jets to crush their American adversaries, pretty ladies shopping in friendly stores packed with merchandise, advertising the automobile of which they have successfully produced 1000 examples in 16 years, depicting the long-promised “Three-Day-War” in which North Korea completely routs South Korea and her American ally, and so on.
Analyst Dale Gieringer figured that the benefits of FDA regulation “could reasonably be put at some 5,000 casualties per decade or 10,000 per decade for worst-case scenarios. In comparison … the cost of FDA delay can be estimated at anywhere from 21,000 to 120,000 lives per decade.â€
The Onion quotes a devastating report identifying yet another form of startling inequality resulting in large-scale social injustice in America.
According to the sobering report, the disproportionate distribution of soda-can wealth is greater than ever before, and has become one of the worst instances of economic inequality in the nation’s history. Data showed that over-salvaging of cans by a small and elite group of can-horders has created a steadily growing and possibly unbridgeable gap between the rich and the mega-poor.
“Although our nation’s upper middle class actually consumes the most beverages, a staggering percentage of these cans wind up in the hands of a very few,” said economist Cynthia Pierce, who worked as a consultant on the three-year, $14 million government study. “It’s a troubling trend. And as a tiny fraction of the population continues to maintain its stranglehold on redeemable can wealth, it’s a trend that shows no sign of slowing.”
According to Pierce, the study points to a distinct economic advantage for the most can-affluent—those who possess the resources necessary to collect, transport, separate, and accumulate more and more cans than the rest of the population.
“Members of this exclusive group come from exceedingly poor backgrounds and have access to outrageously low levels of education, which makes them much better prepared to reap the benefits of digging around in garbage,” Pierce added. …
One canned individual cited in the study is can tycoon Will Dorsey, a 33-year-old Detroit resident who spent his childhood living off the funds collected from his family’s vast can holdings. At the age of 16, Dorsey inherited five carts and dozens of garbage bags overflowing with recyclables when his father passed away unexpectedly one cold December morning.
According to economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, people like Dorsey, who maintain an ultra-poor lifestyle that is vastly different from the rest of the population, are egregiously out of touch with the everyday economic realities of mainstream America.
“Dorsey is one of those select few who come from old can money,” Krugman said. “They’re just hoarding their assets so nobody else can benefit. And then they parade down the street with their carts full of recycling.”
