Vox populi

Victor Davis Hanson, whom I greatly admire, has a long piece on a variety of un-PC things and touches on the femmy change in the American male voice.

The other nine:

1. High school Latin would arrest the decline of American education.
2. Hollywood is going the way of Detroit.
3. The old media is old.
4. Wisdom about money will return after this panic.
5. California has become a touchstone example of what not to do.
6. The US male accent has become feminized.
7. Do not go into farming.
8. The shrill Left is worse than the hard right ever was.
9. K-12 education in the US is wrecked.

His paragraph on speech is way down the page, so I am gonna reprint it here, without permission. Hope he doesn't mind.

Unfortunately for me, I am quite aware of voices. How a man or woman sounds when they speak is something that I pay attention to. I wish I didn't. The increasing metastasis of the Rising Terminal Interrogative, where every sentence sounds like a request for permission, makes the intonation of a lot of people --especially a lot of gay men-- grating.

An opposite style is epitomized in ubiquitous TV adman Billy Mays, whose high-volume shouting about rags and soap and health insurance makes me want to put chopsticks in my ears.

I know I have blogged on this before and most people don't even notice (not only the blog, of course, but the issue), but this is my blog and I'll, like, post what I want to? Here's VDH.

Something has happened to the generic American male accent. Maybe it is urbanization; perhaps it is now an affectation to sound precise and caring with a patina of intellectual authority; perhaps it is the fashion culture of the metrosexual; maybe it is the influence of the gay community in arts and popular culture. Maybe the ubiquitous new intonation comes from the scarcity of salty old jobs in construction, farming, or fishing. But increasingly to meet a young American male about 25 is to hear a particular nasal stress, a much higher tone than one heard 40 years ago, and, to be frank, to listen to a precious voice often nearly indistinguishable from the female. How indeed could one make Westerns these days, when there simply is not anyone left who sounds like John Wayne, Richard Boone, Robert Duvall, or Gary Cooper much less a Struther Martin, Jack Palance, L.Q. Jones, or Ben Johnson? I watched the movie Twelve O’clock High the other day, and Gregory Peck and Dean Jagger sounded liked they were from another planet. I confess over the last year, I have been interviewed a half-dozen times on the phone, and had no idea at first whether a male or female was asking the questions. All this sounds absurd, but I think upon reflection readers my age (55) will attest they have had the same experience. In the old days, I remember only that I first heard a variant of this accent with the old Paul Lynde character actor in one of the Flubber movies; now young men sound closer to his camp than to a Jack Palance or Alan Ladd.