I’m told that we learn to talk by imitating our mothers, and that disturbs me. I don’t think I sound much like my mother, nor do I want to. I thought I sounded like air naturally passing through my larynx and past my tongue and lips. Maybe that isn’t so.

I’ve found that most movie dialogue from the 1940’s seems unnatural to me. Actors spoke too clearly and sonorously. Then I noticed that even in “man on the street” interviews from the 1940’s, people didn’t talk the same as they do today in my country, even if they lived in my own country.

Since the discovery of the “younger generation” in the 1950’s, many actors and their audiences have reacted to previous generations by taking up the practice of mumbling. Enunciation became affectation and they chose to be ‘real” instead (while becoming a little harder to understand in the process).

Maybe nobody is real unless God works a miracle in them.
Maybe everybody imitates somebody else. Maybe our choice needs to be who to imitate.