Mushmouthed English: Why does everyone sound like Sean Connery now?

 

Why can’t anyone talk anymore? Am I being such a grammatical fussbudget? Not if I hear the language twisted into a corkscrew every day. First it was vocal fry, which is about as pleasant to listen to as fingernails on a blackboard (and WHY did young women suddenly decide to croaaaaak at the end of each sentence? Is there a club?) The total mangling of the word “lay” is another one: “He was just laying there.” This has become so standardized that if you say “lying”, people will “correct” you (and how I hate being corrected to the wrong one!). Now I’m hearing something new: a “str” sound comes out “SHTR”. This mushmouthed version crops up everywhere now, so that people sound like Sean Connery: shtrait, shtrong, shtart, shtrain, shtrive, and on and on. It has become standardized from sheer useage. These things sooner or later worm their way into the dictionary as “correct".

I hear this mostly in the young, of course, and mostly online, but it's also cropping up on TV talk shows - and, sooner or later, news anchors, weather people, etc. etc. (teachers?) will begin to use it as standard due to sheer familiarity - hearing it and, I guess, unconsciously mimicking it. Or not? It's like a disease, to my ears. And, of course, once you notice it, you  seem to hear it everywhere.

So how can the English language be warped and twisted that way? I once heard a recording of "old English", and it sounded more Germanic than anything else. Middle English is still pretty squashy. I studied Chaucer once in a literature course, and though I needed Coles notes to translate it for me, our prof was proficient at reciting the Canterbury Tales, the syllables rolling out of him as majestically as a hammy Shakespearean actor.

Not only that. Shakespearean English wasn't like standard English at all. It was more like "pirate talk", full of errs and arrs. Not sure how they found that out, unless someone time-travelled with a recording device.

But I'm still miffed. English developed very slowly over centuries, but this stuff has happened seemingly overnight. The internet is a great source of contagion, whether conscious or otherwise, so the whole process is enormously sped up.

Or something. But I'm shtarting to feel very shtrongly about it. And to be shtrictly annoyed.