How Television Affects the Way We Speak Essay

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Speech

Television has a significant influence on the way that we speak. Entertainment is a strong cultural influencer of how we communication, and television has for decades been among the most prominent entertainment mediums in our society. Our speech patterns are influenced by the norms of our society in that not only do we imitate the way we hear others talk, but we also learn from it. Stamou et al. (2012) note that television is often a leader in changing societal norms, and this influence extends not only to the way we talk but how those ways change our view of the world around us.

Profanity is a good example to use, because of television's longstanding ban on the use of profanity. Specific words were long-deemed obscene (a few still are) and were not allowed by the FTC on public broadcast. In that way, television essentially defined the line between "civilized" and "uncivilized" speech, and the utterance of any of those banned words was deemed to cross that line. In some societies with different television rules, those words might not be considered to be as offensive and might be more socially acceptable.

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Beyond profanity, television also influences speech coding and accommodation. Certain subjects were for a long time taboo on television, so addressing them directly was not possible. Coded speech would instead be used to describe issues of race or sexuality. That coded speech eventually became normalized in society, because of its use in television. When rules governing such directness, and profanity as well, were relaxed, these forms of speech became more socially acceptable. Now in polite conversation somebody's sexual orientation can be mentioned directly, albeit in specific accommodating language.

An interesting way that television does not affect speech patterns is that people do not replicate the perfections of television speech. Professionally written speech in programming is generally free from error, stutters, grammatical mistakes, malapropisms and other elements that….....

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