A mandate for the masses

This is a number of years in the making. Have you all noticed a common characteristic among the recently popular movies of Troy, the Lord of the Rings and Gladiator (and I can go on...) Something about the way they talk. A proto-Shakespearean dialogue which distances reality leaving us in the story world.

But this isn't good. I recently learned that this way of speaking is referred to as "Stage English." Now if you ask me this is an oxymoron. The stage, or acting, is all about style. The way to express human experience without improvising. Well, improvising, but not the actual words. Stage English is designed completely to lack style and emotion, to distance the speaker from the audience. Yes, we get the fact that you exist in a fictional world. Is this a world without human experience? Without emotions? Apparently. All you do is fight for a religious good.

And apparently the American public cares about a world such as this.

Honestly, I don't have the time anymore.

So what precisely makes this English so bad? First, nobody speaks this way. No it's not American nor British, nor is it ancient. It's a joke; and every line delivered, once you have this mentality, is worse than the last. English vowels have style (there are 32 distinct vowel sounds in English--more than any other common language), but Stage English tries to eliminate many them. English uses a glottal stop, but due to its imprecision, it goes unused in stage English.

Secondly, everybody speaks as if he's Yoda. You're not Yoda. Tolerate any more sujects gratuitously added to the end of sentences I won't. And most importantly, "shall" should only be used in the first person. Never again shall the evil of Mordor plague our peoples.

And my third point is that the entire idea behind these movies is tthat they be legendary. And the way they try to achieve this seems to be only through stage English. The charachers are distanced from the audience just because they speak through a falsely official tongue. If I were to hear someone speak this way, be he a student or my boss or my professor, I'd seriously have to ask him if he were drunk. This language is a deception to the people. None of us should stand for easy answers or a false presentation of the official, the important, or the good. We should determine on our own what's important, then seek actors who can present it in the most genuinely human demeanor.

I noticed that some of the lines are just great to hear, because they're powerful or noteworthy or sound bite meriting. A simple solution is to listen to Tom Waits, because he's said it all before, with more style than any of these clowns.