1. From Uriah (@crimkadid):

One of the ways people born after the onset of the autism epidemic resemble autistics is in the dulled emotional tone of their voices: they have a hard time sounding genuinely threatening when they need to be or charming or…any emotion really.

There are generational changes that everyone notices but never really talks about. When you listen to tape recordings of even average Joes from the 50’s or 60’s it’s remarkable how crisp and clear their diction is, whereas millennials slur together syllables like drunks.

When people notice this they tend to say things like “we need to start emphasizing enunciation just like the old schools did”, but again I think this is actually a cohort effect and you can tell by looking at elite talkers: sports broadcasters, talk show hosts, etc.
 
It used to be that just about every famous broadcaster had this rapidfire auctioneer’s patter: Chick Hearn, Vin Scully, Bob Uecker, Hot Rod Hundley or the best known example Johnny Carson. They could speak at incredible speed while never sacrificing emotional inflection.
 
You can also come up with hypotheses tracing this to the tv/radio imposition of the flat broadcaster voice, and the dying out of the last sing-song accents. We -know- an Irish brogue is beautiful, but it is not as efficient, and we have moved away from community singing.

2. A new discovery of mine on Youtube: Sleazy P. Martini, manager of GWAR:

https://youtu.be/Fr8ABm2XjHA?t=6051

Sleazy addresses the Millennial Question from 1 hour 40 minutes and 52 seconds, to 1:41 and 42 seconds. It put me in mind of Uriah’s Twitter thread, and then I noticed the clarity of Sleazy’s enunciation.

There are numerous indicators of character & disposition, e.g. breathing patterns, gait, handwriting, posture; I’ve always found the voice to be very revealing, not so much what people say, or even the exact words, but the quality of their voice. It is a complex of several factors, including the pitch, the speed, the rhythm, sharpness, others that I can’t even put a name to. I notice that, increasingly, people lack the everyday sense of rhythm, the everyday eloquence I remember from my youth. I suspect it’s partly because nobody reads poetry anymore; in the past, even if most people didn’t read poetry, television and films were produced by people who had, by people who had studied Latin and Greek and memorised lengthy tracts of e.g. Tennyson and Shakespeare, and so the characters in an ordinary TV show might speak under the influence of the language.

Sleazy P. Martini is very much of the older generation: eloquent, funny, musical, wise. Young people could do worse than study his utterances.