Ah yes.. accents
IMhO a large topic, often ignored in Murican culture as we kiddies grow up. The teeth get fixed; the voice moulders, y'know? she goes.. he goes.. Awk Awk {sheesh}
In my personal er lab.. I noticed that certain accents have proven magnetic. (And I think.. I perceived this early-on) This can be a problem of course - sow's ear in a silk purse? But more generally - that magic word mellifluous is, I strongly suspect, as large an attraction (for most folks) as our marketed tawdry visual Plastic-Beauty stereotypes, conditioned by the Ad Perfect-Specimen, all of which we encounter well before we can even talk, ourselves.
Groupthink again. Many great partners are elided over this inane mercantile blinder - hmmm that story may be the major sub-plot in many Murican stories: the bookseller woman w/glasses + Bogart in The Big Sleep (or was it the Other one?).
Conversely.. some Vision can quickly become a Sight.. after say, Valley-guhl patois comes out of that otherwise attractive voice box. I believe that this was better understood before our time - how very important is the sound, modulation, pacing. It's commonly supposed here (esp. re the upper-class Brit accent) that attention to voice is mainly a social-climbing affectation. Clearly one's motivation can be just this shallow, but I'm trying to address the pheromone aspect! not the banal money-association BS. (The poverty of imagination of the born-idle rich has been well explored - even w/o the sour grapes attached.)
I've noticed too, what I think a modrin affectation - a kind of falsetto, seemingly intentional, at least.. at first. I don't mean just the (other) execrable habit of a constant rising lilt to every sentence.. as if asking a question? [like here] but a permanently adolescent little-kid treble. This can be disconcerting in a grown woman whose vocal cords would seem to have er 'matured'. Even a natural soprano does not Have to sound this way; I've talked to enough to hear that as a fact. (Amelita Galli-Curci, a coloratura soprano of immortal status -- had a 'normal' speaking voice; a bit hard to glean from the few samples of her merely speaking)
Ah well, if not in Pygmalion, the original - then in My Fair Lady - was the better illustration of the whole phenom, given the 'elocutionist' ploy in the musical. And uh Men are not immune; women have expounded with comparable observations. IMhO 'mellifluous' sez it all - if ya can grok that and also get that.
Ashton
Poor Garbo; her famously sultry voice and a few comments taken too literally by the press jackals (she later revealed) enforced an isolation she did not desire. Speak UP! [beautifully] silly
