Re: terminal dialect?

Joshua Shinavier wrote:
> surely much of the difference consists of
> passing slang (luckily, terms such as "groovy" and "neat-o" didn't stick :)
Those have stuck, they're just not as common as they used to be.  I
still hear many people say "groovy", and even the occasional "neato".
And of course, there's always the example of "cool", which has remained
more-or-less in the slang department since the 1920's, over seventy
years.

> but I don't think that old recordings can have *that much* more influence on
> the way we speak than old books.  Just my personal opinion/hypothesis.
I would think that they probably do, for one thing, there's more WAYS
they can have influence, i.e., pronunciation differences.  Imagine if
recordings had existed before the Great Vowel Shift.  After that was
over, people listening to those old recordings would hear a very
different speech.  It COULD have an influence on their speech, bringing
back at least a few old pronunciations.  Just a hypothesis, but it seems
reasonable.

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