March 28: When my son S. worked at the famous Maine t-shirt company a few years back, he always said that the old ladies loved the t-shirts with prints of flowers and fish, while the young people wanted the outrageous, psychodelic, attention-getting ones. Yes, I've definitely joined the ranks of old ladies: Did I mention that we also have an apple tree in our back yard, lovingly planted a few years ago from one of the seeds of the "apple a day" I eat? If you picture a square around the koi pond, the lemon tree is the bottom left and the orange tree, such as it is, is bottom right. The apple tree sits at the top left. Just as I never thought a lemon tree would survive the cold of Georgia, I never thought an apple tree would survive the heat. But it did. So far, no apples, but the lemon tree had a few years of blossoms-only before those giant lemons erupted, so you never know. The first blossoms of the season are just appearing now. Every year, the pond lilies blossom, and I noticed the first one today. In a week, they'll be everywhere.
Okay, now to change the subject, just to prove that I have other interests beside fruit trees and the insanity of the school system. The following is a weird topic, but as an aficianado of linguistics, I've always been tuned in to people's speech patterns. Before I begin, please note: I am well aware that language is always changing, always has and always will. Words come in and out, pronunciations change, which is why the Middle English word "knight" has a silent k, and even meanings of words shift. I've translated enough Old English and Middle English, not to mention Latin, to have a consciousness about linguistic evolution. But that said, I have to confess that one of my pet peeves for the past few years has been that strangle-y, gargle-y monotone voice pattern used by many younger women. The curious aspect to me is that only females have it. If it was a true language change, why don't males have it too?
One characteristic of the pattern is the sudden dropping of the voice at the end of a sentence, and the gargling of the last three or four words. It sounds like a death rattle. I picture words treading water in the back of the throat and never quite making it out on the airstream.
Another is the almost screechy lengthening of the short vowel sounds: Here are some examples: "Do you like HAM? (Him)"; "I'm going out with THAM (them). "What is the matter with Hair? (Her)." "I need to get PRAD(bread)."
Another is the loss of consonants at the end of words: "Molly is my PAS FRAN (best friend)."
Another is the blurring of the consonant sounds B/P, D/T, which are the voiced and voiceless equivalents of each other on the sound continuum. It's more obvious with B and P sounds: "I'd PATTER go to PAD."
Another is the flat monotone sentence with little intonation or rhythm.
Another is words sounding as though they're being spat out, one at a time, rather than flowing smoothly out on streams of air.
If you've seen the hilarious movie White Chicks, the Wayans brothers do a side-splitting parody of this language pattern.
Yet, if we turn on a movie from the 1960's or earlier, we hear speech that is so airy and intonated with peaks and valleys that it sounds almost like a British accent. This leads me to think that the old ladies of the 1960's probably sat around in their flowered gardens talking to each other about how the younger girls, who in those days would have been me and my contemporaries, had ruined the language by speaking so sloppily.
Happy weekend---it's Chinese tonight.
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