posted
Today while I was at work, I noticed a customer had a T-shirt with a logo on it that looked interesting, but because of his posture I couldn't read it. I asked him about it, and instantly, his tone of voice and word-choice changed (his accent got a little more Southern, he spoke louder and with more emoting, and used fancier words) as he told me the scripture behind it and all about the sermon he'd given, for which the shirt was something of a souvenir. This isn't the first time I've noticed that when religious people talk about ideas relating to their religious beliefs, they adopt a whole different diction and style of speech. My mother does the same thing. She slips into a thee/thou/-est sort of King James English when telling me about anything in scripture. And of course, we all know how the famous TV Evangelists sound.
My boyfriend was reading to me out loud from Atheism: The Case Against God a couple of weeks ago, but to be funny, he tried to read it as a redneck. Without realizing it, with all the talk of god and faith, he slipped into the same religious emoting and televangelist accent.
I recently heard a talk by Stephen Pinker where he explained that taboo words cause certain parts of the brain to light up when they're heard or seen, making those words carry more emotional punch.
I have often wondered why so many people seem to have such a different way of speaking about religion than they do other, strongly-held beliefs. I thought today that perhaps it was related to the idea of cuss-words lighting up certain parts of the brain, but I don't really know.
Has anyone else noticed this? Does anyone else have any theories?
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posted
I don't think I do. I know I change my diction when I'm in a "teaching" role, but that's true whether I'm teaching Sunday School or tutoring algebra. And I know I change it when I'm reading aloud, but that's true whether it's scripture or Fox in Socks.
And I can't imagine slipping into KJV English, but then I don't much use the KJV Bible. Except to read Psalm 23 at funerals. Of older people.
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As for myself, I notice it when I write about religion, but that is because it takes on a similar voice as when I am writing a paper. So there is a greater emphasis upon grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic than in my casual writing.
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This makes me think of my mother, who was the youngest of 9 children, most of whom were born and lived in Oklahoma. By the time my mother was born, the family had moved to Arizona, and my mother never even visited Oklahoma until she was an adult. My mother did not have a definable accent, unless she was speaking to one of her sisters. Then she absolutely sounded "southern" to my California ears. We could always tell when one of my aunts was on the phone because Mom started twanging away.
It had nothing to do with religion. I'm not sure what it did have to do with to be honest. But as others have mentioned, I take on a different tone when I speak in public - whether I'm addressing a group of RNs to present an infectious outbreak, or when I'm teaching my Sunday School class. I've even noticed I get that "sound" when I'm answering my children's questions about their homework.
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My grandmother didn't sound southern but Preachery when she talked about religion. Hard to explain, it was like she was making a speech and preaching at the same time.
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I had a companion who DEFINITELY had a "church voice."
It wasn't "preachy", though. It was very quiet and soft and earnest and she'd lean forward and sound like she was smiling.
It was startling, because she was fairly loud and irreverant at all other occasions. The contrast was startling.
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I adopt a slightly different voice for many occasions. Nobody notices though because they rarely see me during more than one of those said occasions.
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quote:Originally posted by katharina: I had a companion who DEFINITELY had a "church voice."
It wasn't "preachy", though. It was very quiet and soft and earnest and she'd lean forward and sound like she was smiling.
It was startling, because she was fairly loud and irreverant at all other occasions. The contrast was startling.
That the one we call "primary voice" in my family.
We've got a missionary in our branch right now who has a serious church voice problem. It drives me crazy. A week ago he inviting me to a fireside the missionaries had planned. He sounded like he'd written out the schpiel and memorized it.
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quote:Originally posted by katharina: I had a companion who DEFINITELY had a "church voice."
It wasn't "preachy", though. It was very quiet and soft and earnest and she'd lean forward and sound like she was smiling.
I know exactly what you mean... I've heard this kind of thing among people at my dad's Unitarian church. They're very into it.
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I love prayer phrasing and intonation. Probably just a Mormon thing, but it's the habit of pausing on the "to" in "Please help us to be able to..." before thinking of something we need help with. And the intonation goes along with it. Totally different than normal speech.
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My voice, particularly my accent, changes depending on the people I'm with. I had a disorienting experience once where I was in the room with my biological father (who spoke with a Bremerton Washington accent) my grandmother and grandfather (who both spoke in a southern Illinois accent, which is kind of southern drawlish, to me, but their accents were not identical) and my uncle, (who spoke with a country western trucker style twang). Of course those four were related, and you could say they "all sounded alike," but really they had distinct accents. I was also on the phone with my then-girlfriend (now my wife) who has a Poughkeepsie accent.
I discovered that in the course of the same conversation, my accent changed distinctly and abruptly depending on who I was talking to. I could not control it, even after I realized it was happening, and it was so weird that I found myself getting almost dizzy, because I became acutely aware of who I was looking at each time I switched.
Since then I've been very aware of this tendency, and although I don't do it all the time, I've found it happening in embarrassing places, such as mimicking a black person's speech, such that I could have been accused of "mocking" the person.
In any case, I can certainly see how people could develop distinct voices for particular situations, and religion would certainly fit.
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I know exactly what you mean and I do the same thing to a degree. When I'm in Germany, I speak English with a slight German accent. ( When I speak German people think I'm Dutch.) I never noticed it until my husband asked me why I did it. I pick up a bit of an English accent when I speak with people from England. Here in Trinidad I'm constantly changing my accent without realizing it. People are constantly asking where I'm from because I don't sound like I'm from the states, I don't sound English and I definitely don't sound Trini.
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I've never heard the Southern drawl phenomenon you described.
I've definitely noticed the "church voice" when people from my church pray, and I don't much care for it.
As for myself, I definitely have a sympathetic accent depending on how long I am exposed to a group of people. But it's only a light touch, and I tend to adopt the vernacular of the region as well.
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I sound the same when I'm talking about religion as, for instance, when I used to be in Speech and Debate Club, or when I was competing in an extemp translation contest at a JCL event. I think it is just more composed, putting more thought behind grammar and the WAY I express things than I might normally. It's different, but no accent or anything, and I don't think I get "Primary Voice."
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I wonder if it's simply a matter of using a different voice for "presentation," which I think most of us do. That raises the interesting question of whether religious discussions and prayers are actually a form of performance.
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Christians speaking to other Christians of the same denomination often use familiar jargon. I don't think it is very good communicating to speak this way to others. I try to cultivate better communication skills.
As a Christian apologist, I have long made an effort to bring all my religious views into a logical system that I can relate to the totally non-religious. Sometimes I may come off sounding more philosophical than religious, but I am trying to explain why the religious things that I believe are valid in the context of the real world.
I do believe in quoting Scripture itself where it says something directly on the subject, to show this is not just my personal belief, but the teaching of Scripture, objectively interpreted. Verbally, I may quote from the KJV, since most of the texts I have memorized are from the KJV; but in writing, I always select the translation that seems to be the clearest, and easiest for a modern person to understand.
Probably the one time where I will admit I often lapse into KJV English is in public prayers, offered in front of the congregation. But even the very modern New American Standard Bible resorts to the use of archaic construction when God is being addressed directly, and in certain Psalms. For example: "And in the greatness of Thine excellence Thou dost overthrow those who rise up against Thee; Thou dost send forth Thy burning anger, and it consumes them as chaff." (Exodus 15:7; NASB) And: "Willingly I will sacrifice to Thee; I will give thanks to Thy name, O Lord, for it is good." (Psalms 54:6; NASB)
There seems to be something about the language of the KJV, with its 16th century vocabulary, that strikes many people as being especially reverent and respectful. I don't think it is the language we will be speaking in Heaven, however.
[ February 13, 2008, 11:05 PM: Message edited by: Ron Lambert ]
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There was a TV preacher on tonight, and I was imagining him talking to his wife about ordinary stuff in his TV preacher voice:
And when you GO . . . to the STORE . . . you will BRING . . . to me EGGS . . . and MILK . . . and BACON . . . so that we might EAT and find FAVOR!
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On a related note, when I left my flat this morning my 2 year old neighbor and his nanny were sitting on their porch. I greet them and spoke briefly to both of them. In doing so I noticed that I raised the pitch of my voice when I addressed the 2 year old.
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I've noticed, among fundamentalist friends, a tendency to speak in smaller words than they would otherwise use and say "I just wanna" a lot while praying. It always seemed a conscious attempt to avoid the formality and "religiosity" of, say, a typical Catholic prayer in an effort to, I suppose, be more intimate and, perhaps, humble.
I, on the other hand, merely use too many commas and parentheticals when online. Posts: 3846 | Registered: Apr 2004
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quote:That raises the interesting question of whether religious discussions and prayers are actually a form of performance.
That's why I refuse to pray out loud unless it is a written prayer. If it's a performance, I would like a script. If it's an attempt at personal communication, I would like to avoid eavesdroppers.
Jim-Me, I have notice similar behaviors. Also common is using "Jesus," "God," or "Lord," every few words.
Besides the somewhat odd tone of voice that people use when praying, there's also the reading liturgy voice (which, granted, is generally used whenever people are saying something in unison). It always reminds me of the Borg. I have long fantasized about trying to sneak "Resistance is futile" into a liturgical reading.
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The teenage girls at church recite the "Young Women's Theme" every Sunday, and it is definitely, definitely Borg-like. There is an exact rhythm and cadence to it that is the same across the country, as far as I can tell. The real rebels would change the pauses and intonations as we'd recite the theme. I probably still could say the whole thing, but I'd have to start from beginning and not be interupted.
A line was added a few years that completely disrupted the established rhythm. It's very disconcerting.
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On the other hand, try to get a group of people born after 1965 to recite the preamble to the US Constitution and you will all be singing it by the time you get to "in order to form a more perfect union..."
edit to add: I laughed aloud at the concept of Borg-ing a liturgy, for the record.
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Talking high to children is a pretty deeply ingrained behavior, which I would call instinctual (granted, people have widely varying definitions of instinct).
The word that used to crack me up a lot when people would pray was "moisture". I mean, if it's raining pudding cake, then I'm down with that. Otherwise, can't we just call it rain, or thundersleet or whatever it was that just fell from the sky?
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I don't think I've ever heard "moisture" used in a prayer. It would makes sense in the winter, if you weren't particularly grateful for the 3 ft of snow in the driveway but did know that the ground needed the moisture.
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Moisture is very much a Mormon deal. It may be because the religion is headquartered in a desert, or it may be because we don't have a separation between lay and clergy, so our clerical speech is laity trying to sound like clergy. It's not certain.
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quote:Originally posted by Ron Lambert: There seems to be something about the language of the KJV, with its 16th century vocabulary, that strikes many people as being especially reverent and respectful.
It's simply because it's old, and old language tends to sound elevated.
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I think the "moisture" thing probably originated with Utah Mormons for whom your 3 feet of snow example would be rather apt, dkw -- it's often snow falling in the mountains that provides the, umm, moisture needed for the rest of the year.
But here in Georgia I hear the same phrase all the time, and it's like pooka said -- can't we just say "rain"?
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Jon Boy, you may be right--we use King James English to sound more reverent, just because it is old, and old sounds reverent.
But there is also the case, as others here have been alluding to, I think, that we tend to use the 10 cent words instead of the 5 cent words when we feel the need to speak more formally. This situation has developed because modern English is a train wreck between Norman French and Anglo-Saxon. It took the Norman French several centuries to fully pacify Anglo-Saxon England (following the Battle of Hastings in 1066), by which time the Norman French had all assimilated, with the Norman French tending to be the noble class, and the languages had merged, so that now we have two words for virtually everything. Typically, the 5 cent word is the Anglo-Saxon, and the 10-cent word is the Norman French, and is regarded as more "formal" because the Norman French were the nobility.
This is ignoring, of course, the manifest influence that Latin and Greek have had on all European languages.
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My people, when we aren't praying for rain, pray for dew.
Dew? Yeah. Dew.
And our liturgical prayer definitely has a rhythm to it, even when it isn't sung or chanted. It even has little dance moves. Kind of. In a Jew kind of way. The feet never move, are pointed straight ahead and are touching each other. Both hands holding the prayer book, head bowed over the prayer book, and the upper body bobs back and forth in a rocking movement reminiscent of an autistic kid.
It's the standard prayer move, and everyone is doing it, at their own rate of speed (no unison bobbing -- that would be weird).
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I was told by a ranger/guide a few years ago that Muir Woods, a giant Redwood forest north of San Francisco, is watered mainly by fogborn heavy dews during the summer.
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quote:Originally posted by Tante Shvester: My people, when we aren't praying for rain, pray for dew.
Dew? Yeah. Dew.
And our liturgical prayer definitely has a rhythm to it, even when it isn't sung or chanted. It even has little dance moves. Kind of. In a Jew kind of way. The feet never move, are pointed straight ahead and are touching each other. Both hands holding the prayer book, head bowed over the prayer book, and the upper body bobs back and forth in a rocking movement reminiscent of an autistic kid.
It's the standard prayer move, and everyone is doing it, at their own rate of speed (no unison bobbing -- that would be weird).
Yep. You get it.
I noticed I do the same imitating accent as well. I think it relates to the golden rule of "treat others as THEY would like to be treated".
Meaning, don't talk to a soft-spoken person in a loud voice.
I think it helps the connection when there's just a hint of the other person's style in my own speech. Just as long as it's a hint, and not something more obvious as to be interpreted as mocking.
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