I do Television and Radio VoiceOvers and Advertising Jingles. Maybe I'm a bit more sensitive to how we speak, but I feel that in this electronic age, our speech has gotten lazier.
It's one thing when you are just talking to friends, but now I'm noticing this "lazy talk" more and more in advertising. Sure, you hear things in local radio or tv advertising that make you cringe, but now I'm hearing it more and more in regional and even national advertising.
"Your" has become "yer." "Our" sounds the same as "are." I've been noticing the way some announcers say "forward" now. It's become "foeward." A new one that I'm noticing - especially with younger generations - is in the pronunciation of a name like "Patton" which has now become "Pat'n."
In my face to face meetings with clients, I almost feel weird now if I say, "Here's what I am going to do for you" as opposed to "Here's what I'm gonna do fer you."
Maybe I'm old school? Is it elitist? I just feel that if we're going to spend the money to promote our business on broadcast media that we should ask the announcer to "annunciate" and pronounce words correctly. I would argue that it's just about maintaining a standard. It has nothing to do with regionalisms. It's just pronouncing the words with all their syllables intact.
It seems that we're getting so far away from the King's English that the Court Jester is doubled over in laughter. lol
Enunciating when we annunciate (they mean different things), especially in VO work, is important...but it can also be overdone. To me, if someone is over enunciating it sounds pompous and I get caught up in listening to the words rather than the message. There is no excuse for sloppy speech. The art is in making proper pronunciation sound approachable.
ReplyDeleteWhat gets me are things we say that work their way into everyday speech, whether those words and expressions are right or wrong.
ReplyDeleteI work in the news business and wonder when "lockdown" became a word, as in, "We put the school on lockdown." I thought "lockdown" was prison slang, not an actual word meaning "to seal."
When did "off the hook" come to mean "crazy" or "outrageous?" I always thought when someone was "off the hook," they were no longer responsible for something.
My personal pet peeve -- and I fight this battle in the newsroom regularly -- is the use of the brand name Taser as a verb. As in, "police tased the suspect." Do you Kleenex your nose? Do you Honda to work every day? How about "shocked with a Taser" or "shocked with a stun gun" instead?
Don't Tase me, bro. And speak gooder while yer at it!