How to find out, and whether you should care.And similarly on the role of ridicule in speeding the move away from this accent:The variety of English you are referring to has a name in linguistics: "Mid-Atlantic English".Here’s a sampling for today, with more planned in the days ahead.
I just heard that George Plimpton has died. Even the manliest actors, such as Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable sometimes slipped into this voice-coach mode.One more note from the academy:TheAtlantic.com Copyright (c) 2020 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. Off screen, George Plimpton and Gore Vidal come to mind. (Newsreels ran in movie theaters, of course: what better critique of the high newsreel style than the new movies that jarred against it? George Plimpton — writer, publisher, amateur lion tamer — died in 2003 after 50 years as the founding editor of The Paris Review. (This is not to belittle Lowell Thomas, but to recognize the artifice that served him so well in his career).“According to William Labov, teaching of this pronunciation declined sharply after the end of World War II.
George Plimpton during Actor's Studio 46th Anniversary at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in New York City, NY, United States.
The limited frequency response of the recording technology of the late 19th and early 20th centuries has left us with only a pale, and sometimes caricatural image of the original sound.
But he has never employed that voice professionally, and certainly does not speak that way in “real life”.Off screen, George Plimpton and Gore Vidal come to mind.
And the answer may explain partly why it has gone out of fashion: Jonathan Harris, the actor who played Dr. Smith on the television show "Lost in Space. Did he have the celebrated "Boston Brahmin" accent, or was it a psuedo-Brit affectation?
All Rights Reserved.If you listen to Grossman (who is originally from Boston) starting about 15 seconds into the clip below, you’ll see that he uses a split-the-difference UK/US hybrid that is literally “mid-Atlantic,” in the sense of combining accents from both countries, but is different from the newsreel announcer voice:The enormously popular speech styles of Brando and Dean (and I could add Elvis Presley) clearly pushed vernacular style into a kind of mainstream acceptability, then desirability.
He was married to Sara Whitehead Dudley and Freddy Medora Espy.
(Did Eisenhower speak the newsreel style? Mia had the perfect model!Microphone technology improved enormously in the 40s, but a pattern, a style of speech in the news and entertainment industries had been set: radio announcers and broadcasters could, from the late 1940s onwards, speak more naturally, but those who wanted to "sound like a real newsman" had to affect the old way of speaking, probably as a way of establishing their bona fides...We’ll have a lot more to say about Buckley and Vidal — for now the leaders in the race for Last American to Talk This Way (with George Plimpton in third)—in the next installment. His response was "no, just affected. Labov suspected that WWII had something to do about it. Prestigious prep schools and ivy league institutions (though Gore Vidal never went to college).
For instance:I think that perhaps Harris' portrayal of Dr. Smith made the accent so identified with cowardly buffoonery that no one in the baby boom generation and later would want to use the accent as anything other than a joke.This is only partly facetious, but I think I know who was the American to speak "Announcer." He never went all the way, though his authenticity and newly-downstyle speaking could probably be marked in the crisis/triumph stages of his reporting: the death of JFK; the Vietnam report; the moon landing. But for now, just one more category:In it Van Voorhis has the formal delivery that would have seemed familiar to many mid-century listeners but which in retrospect we know was on the way out. Your Getty Images representative will discuss a renewal with you.Your Easy-access (EZA) account allows those in your organization to download content for the following uses: I’d like to offer a speculation, for what it’s worth.Buckley clearly flaunts it, probably to set himself apart from the hoi polloi of his contemporaries.I remember the Lowell Thomas documentary films of the 50s where Mr. Thomas' mellifluous tones and distinct radio-style pronunciation gave him a respectability that a similar huckster could hardly hope to replicate today by the mere application of such an artifice.
After her transformation, I noted that Mia sounds precisely like her mother, Maureen O’Sullivan, who had that patrician manner of speaking on and off screen.
Another entertainment-related explanation for the shift, right about the time of the Eisenhower-Kennedy transition:As an old film buff, I am used to this voice, though it figures unevenly in old movies.