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.
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.
What you said makes perfect sense to me.
We rarely have that reaction to obscure accents of dialects of English we're unfamiliar with. Usually the instinct is to laugh or belittle.
Yet we hear this and we all know instinctively that it's a higher form than what we currently speak.
Surely there's a reason for that.
The downfall of book sales and libraries marks the end of good literacy.
Nowadays, sarcasm is frequently employed for a similar purpose, but it's a much blunter tool. Note also the ubiquity of hyperbole: anything that people want to express approval of, no matter how banal or quotidian, is declared to be "incredible", "amazing", "game-changing". If something genuinely amazing comes along, how are we to describe it?
This short video has many such examples that offer a high level of precision in everyday communication that seems rarely achieved today.
If I take a 2 hour lunch one day and don't make my 1pm meeting, it's lazy. If I generally only make 10% of my meetings for that reason, it's indolent.
These days "lazy" is used equally for either a single behaviour or a habitual behaviour. The meaning has to be inferred from context, which makes it less accurate than the above definitions.
Personally, I've struggled since childhood with verbal coherence and cohesion and our "rapid fire" way of speaking limits practice opportunities.
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.
Edit: Corrected from Starship Troopers to The Forever War
Spoiler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_from_the_Stars
True. But then again, far less TV was watched. There was an occasional good show, the rest was filler that was pure drivel.
There's a reason kids played outside with their friends in those days. There was nothing to do in the house.
The stations would broadcast a test pattern at night.
TV was anything but low-key in culture. In fact because everyone watched a show at the same time, there was much more cultural synchronization/watercooler talk with respect to shows like MASH or Seinfeld.
What did change beginning with maybe the Sopranos was that (a limited slice of) TV became more high culture and displaced film to a certain degree in that regard. (And streaming enabled the sort of serialized drama that was hard to pull off in a fixed time slot broadcast world.)
>the TV listings was just a bare half page showing the names of the programmes, and that was it.
True, but in the US, TV Guide magazine was I believe the most subscribed to magazine in the country. That's where a lot of people got more detailed (though relatively still quite limited) information from.
That is really interesting. For want of a better way to put it, I also agree that it had a "long-tail" quality to it; it was just implicitly part of the status quo.
Communication nowadays seems to be broadly impacted by disproportionate focus on explicit definition, disambiguation, structure, etc, but in such a way that abolishes and shuns implied cohesion. Constantly trying to define and underline the way things should be instead of just getting on with letting things be the way they already are. My current chicken-and-egg "hmm" is whether this came before or after the worldwide obsession around security and safety (which arguably started just before the turn of the century - I once read the "no no stay inside" thing started in America circa 1998).
From this perspective I definitely think TV occupied more of the "tribal knowledge" side of written vs implied culture, than it does today - both in terms of production and societal impact. Kind of weird, that; it had more of an impact when it wasn't trying to shoehorn and corral. Heh.
I lastly wouldn't say that TV "crept up in importance" so much as turned into a vacuous foghorn contest to see who can bellow the hottest air the furthest :P
(AU here, aka UK Lite Edition)
I remember daytime TV in the 60s. Jack LaLane's exercise show, aimed at bored housewives. You had to be desperately bored to watch that. There were daytime soap operas, about as interesting as watching paint dry (they were aimed at bored housewives). Then there were variety shows the local TV stations themselves produced aimed at preschool kids. Like the Krusty the Clown show on the Simpsons. The shows were just a camera pointed at a stage and the host tried to figure out something to do. I bet those shows are all lost from being taped over. There were talk shows, which were very cheap to produce. Game shows, which I never understood the attraction of.
The better stuff was prime time evening. I liked Daktari, but that was a half hour once a week. Movies were very rarely shown. The evening news 30 minutes was popular.
When Star Trek TOS appeared, that was amazing. Even my very skeptical dad actually said it was good.
It's not that I didn't want to watch TV all the time. I did. But there was very little to see on it. Much more fun to go outside and meet up with the neighborhood kids and do kid stuff.
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.
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.
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.