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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 anything. But the manner in which words are strung together is completely different and rather poetic sounding to my ears.
These women were, of course, citizens of the 20th century. But I assume they formed many of their speaking habits early in their lives during the 19th century.
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.
There has certainly been a shift from the verbal to the visual in the last century, which undoubtedly impacted the "common man's" verbal fluency. Vocabulary has shifted from the "emotive" and "rich" descriptors to a verbal shorthand; like you I've found rural people have better preserved speech. While vocabulary and cadence are very obvious differences, I particularly notice how speakers in the past were able to construct a story--even in a casual manner. The difference in verbal skill between an adult from the 1950s and early 2000s is massive. Even news programs from the 1990s sound much more formal and precise than now.
Personally, I've struggled since childhood with verbal coherence and cohesion and our "rapid fire" way of speaking limits practice opportunities.
Before the 60s/70s, most interactions were through either radio or books. Then TV and now internet. Check the vocabulary used in these different eras and generations. At least, as a French, I can see large differences across generations.
The downfall of book sales and libraries marks the end of good literacy.
Language is a class shibboleth even in the present days, even moreso in the Victorian era.
Maybe it's just all in my head, though.
What you said makes perfect sense to me.
It's all just meme referencing.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
The both sound middle class.
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.
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.
It’s wonderful. I love the word “slurring” for sliding. It describes the way a cart might move through mud perfectly.
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.
I was just thinking.
Somebody born in the 1870s and who went on to live for a 100 years would have seen:
- people going around on horses and donkeys with carriages and everything getting replaced by motor cars
- invention of aircraft, jetplanes, and even supersonic aircrafts that obsoleted ocean-liners
- moon landing
- two world wars
- decline of the British Empire
- telephones
- computers
- germ theory
It's too much.
I wonder what the world would be like if I survive till the later parts of this century.
My grandmother was born in 1895 and died 1987, she went through all you listed and something you forgot (and many more missing):
- photography (in the family, outside professional shops)
- electricity in homes
- radio
- television
- spanish flu (she lost her first born in 1918)
and she was just fine, as a matter of fact she remained curious about everything ( and this probably helped her live for such a long time with a perfectly working brain till the very end).
My mom is now in the same ballpark (born 1930) and she often brings up this topic, all in all she believes that she witnessed much less changes than her mother, most of what she went through were refinements and betterings of existing technologies rather than "revolutionary", as an example the telex and fax were essentially evolutions of the telegraph, what she points out are:
- electric dishwashers and washing machines
- computers/internet
- cellular phones
I don't think that if we live to that age we will see many "new" things.
My grandmother was an 1895-1995 stretch and experienced that same remarkable sweep of technology. The other item that most people forget about are some of the radical consequences of the democratisation of travel in that period and just prior. My great-grandparents came of age when most people lived and died within view of the place they were born and where travel to another city was a days journey at least, by the time their youngest daughter died she could travel halfway across the planet in the same time and do so rather inexpensively.
I am sure there is some aphorism out there about how we do not recognise the big change while it is happening, but I think you are underselling just how much is changing around you. Advances in medicine, energy, transport, and computing over the past couple of decades have been rather amazing, and you are really underselling the past few years of mobile phones combined with internet advances. When I grew up the phone in the house (because landlines were all that existed) was owned by Ma Bell and was one of three types, rotary dial, no answering machines, and long-distance cost an arm and both legs. Last night I was walking my dog down a street in London while my watch updated me on turns for my new route while I was having a video call with my mother back in the US at a near-broadcast quality; 15 years ago that would have existed only in science fiction. It takes a bit of distance to see what really was 'new' and important.
Hell, one of my friends fathers grew up in rural Sicily; he can remember the excitement at the first mechanical tractor to arrive in the village back in the 1960s.
One year, for christmas, he was gifted an orange - in midwinter! There was considerable speculation about how far it must have traveled.
Nearly every item on your list was a change he saw in his lifetime - the date a technology was widespread in the area it was invented can be separated by several decades from the date it becomes widespread globally.
One year, for christmas, he was gifted an orange - in midwinter! There was considerable speculation about how far it must have traveled.
Was that really all that uncommon, though? My father, born in the 50's, always associated oranges with christmas - it was their season, after all. For me, my parents kept up a tradition of giving an apple and an orange in stockings - this was in the late 70's to the 90's. Many years later, I moved to Norway, where I can buy boxes of mandarin oranges every christmas, as they are a traditional christmas time food (Last year was filled with mandarin cocktails to use up the box).
Not to mention the prevalence of things like clove-studded oranges that pop up around christmas.
From what I can tell, not associating oranges with Christmas is really a more modern take on the holiday, as at one time, they were in season around the holidays.
> - decline of the British Empire
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpohrKaos2o
There's a long but very good interview done with the philosopher Bertrand Russell in the 60's, and a point he makes in it was that in the early 1900's the idea that the British empire and specifically their navy would be supreme forever more was widespread.
And I suppose pre-WW1 they might have had a point - he said the people at the time didn't view "land powers" like the Prussians as being terribly threatening to their global status.
Another takeaway from it, was that he was very particular about how his kids were educated, these days, we mostly give it to abandoning them to cultural groupthink rather than having any critical input into how their taught.
> I wonder what the world would be like if I survive till the later parts of this century.
I suspect much the same as today, but somewhat worse. Electronic gadgets will continue to get cheaper, while essentials like housing and healthcare become more expensive.
The pace of change has slowed as the low-hanging fruit of industrialization has been picked, and the costs of negligence like pollution and antibiotic overuse will become more apparent.
Consider:
- No major new household appliances have been introduced since the microwave.
- Trains in many parts of the USA are slower than they were in the 1920s: https://slate.com/human-interest/2009/05/why-trains-run-slow...
- Supersonic aviation is over.
They would have only just seen computers. The first "practical" home computers became available in 1977, and even that is stretching the definition of the word "practical".
Mainframe computing had obviously been around for a while before that, but the general public would not have been aware of it.
The social changes are also quite dramatic in that time span, especially the position and role of women (at least in the developed world) - gaining the vote, increased representation in the work force, etc.
With water becoming scarce and our inability to generate more electricity, I wonder if we'll see the reverse of progress.
you’ll probably see..
-a moon landing
-two world wars
-decline of the nato empire
-the end of telephones
-hopefully not the end of computer technology cause by the world wars but…
-germs striking back
- having water, electricity, washing machine, dishwasher in every home
- cinema then radio then television
- half of the world falling under communism, rise and fall of nationalisms
- fall of religion in the west, sexual revolution
- art dropping beauty for originality
My dad was born 3 years after the invention of sliced bread, escaped Nazi Germany as a child, worked with early computers, and will soon turn 92.
"Mud brushing" their skirts for hours. Ah, the things we are convinced to do from a social expectation standpoint. In terms of what she saw on the streets of London -- mud and fog -- my understanding is that London rarely sees fog, and that "fog" in the 1890s was actually smog.
a large part of the "Mud" was almost certainly horse waste, one of the same reasons why traditional new york brownstone townhouses have their entrance up a set of stairs.
I believe London referred to as the "The Big Smoke" in Victorian times, due to the pollution from coal fires - people could see the near-permanent dark cloud over the city from several dozens of miles away.
I thought about the smog too. Probably from the coal fires, gas lamps and the like. And now we’re worrying about dust from tyres! Things move on eh.
> Ah, the things we are convinced to do from a social expectation standpoint.
Shopping for new clothes for hours because our perfectly serviceable old ones are less fashionable.
Cleaning sneakers for hours to ensure our streetwear look is on point.
Queueing up for hours to take selfies at an influencer hotspot.
etc
Tangential, but this is a great channel by an old school amateur film maker who posts lots of great old videos that you can't find elsewhere, two of my favorites:
Vietnam vet:
Mountain clog dancers:
That recollection of the vietnam war should be required watching for all Americans, thanks for posting it, what a pointless war.
My city is now best known for Microsoft headquarters, but in those days it was a logging town. The roads and sidewalks were made of “skids”, aka logs. Skid Road later became “skid row.” Falling in the mud was a preoccupation of everyone but especially the ladies in their Victorian dresses.
This is a majestic video. The elegant elocution of these ladies helps reveal much about the parallels between then and now.
Theirs was a time of enormous change in society, morality, identity, gender, poverty, industry, technology, religion and so on.
Just as ours.
Some years ago I was asked to record interviews with older family members for a class in collage. The result was something similar to this interview, those college interviews have become family memories.
The second woman on the video, Berta Ruck, has her own Wikipedia page. She was quite a prolific author in her day https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berta_Ruck
The BBC Archives are great, including British Pathé
spaking about 19° century, there is a yt channel "life in the 1800s" which takes old black&white videos of that time and adds/restore audio/color:
So much better-sounding than the affected “trans-Atlantic“ accent we Yanks used roughly until Robert DeNiro.