{"id":8253,"date":"2015-12-27T18:30:00","date_gmt":"2015-12-27T18:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeiswhathappens.ca\/?p=8253"},"modified":"2026-01-15T20:02:47","modified_gmt":"2026-01-15T20:02:47","slug":"the-great-vowel-movement-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeiswhathappens.ca\/?p=8253","title":{"rendered":"The Great Vowel Movement&#8230;&#8230;."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In a puerile way, I have always been interested in the term &#8220;vowel movement&#8221; &#8211; not just because it rhymes with bowel movement &#8211; but that&#8217;s part of it. Yes, a lot of s**t comes out of people&#8217;s mouths, mine included, and people seem to use grunts, groans and &#8220;duhs&#8221; more than they do words to &#8220;enunciate&#8221; their feelings or views of the world, these days, sigh!<\/p>\n<p>As a person more interested in words, than, let&#8217;s say, punctuation, (the Oxford comma be damned) I was &#8220;gob-smacked&#8221; at dinner the other night, when our guest exclaimed in the delight of a Eureka moment, &#8220;Of course, didn&#8217;t you know, we are in the middle of the <a href=\"http:\/\/sites.fas.harvard.edu\/~chaucer\/vowels.html\">great vowel movement.<\/a>&#8220;<\/p>\n<p>Apparently, the movement started in the 11th century, but really picked up speed with Chaucer and literally &#8220;took off&#8221; with the arrival of the printing press &#8211; machines do make most things go a little faster \ud83d\ude42 I can&#8217;t remember the original comment that triggered the digression, but it must have been related to a New Zealand friend of ours, who had just visited us in Toronto. Maggie was worried that she might go home with a Canadian accent &#8211; there are worse things. Diptheria comes to mind \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<div class=\"separator\" style=\"clear: both;text-align: center\">\n<a href=\"http:\/\/lifeiswhathappens.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/stamps-1.jpg\" style=\"margin-left: 1em;margin-right: 1em\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" border=\"0\" height=\"226\" src=\"http:\/\/lifeiswhathappens.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/stamps-1.jpg\" width=\"320\" \/><\/a><\/div>\n<p>Anyway, the door opened to a discussion of vowels, always better than bowels at the dinner table. It wasn&#8217;t so much the topic, as the odd looks on the faces of the next generation, that provided the entertainment. If this is something that has been going on for over a thousand years, do we really have to worry about it in our\/their lifetime. In a world dictated by Kardashians and other puerile (there&#8217;s that word again) examples of what makes life important, our 20 somethings simply could not relate to the excitement of a change in the pronunciation of a few vowels.<\/p>\n<p>The eye rolling was priceless. Brenda&#8217;s elevated and animated description of the subtle change from &#8220;i&#8221; to &#8220;e&#8221; in some words was classic. And I could reaffirmed my belief, that the microcosm, rather than the macrocosm, is what enriches lives.<\/p>\n<p>The pictures? Not really related, but then when would I ever have had the opportunity to use them in a post. They were the stamps from my sister&#8217;s Christmas card to me this year and both musicians are\/were bards in their time and yes, would that we could all just freeze the moment, as their pictures have done, and never change. Then again a few paltry years measured against the evolution of a thousand or more is rarely enough to change anything&#8230;..or is it?<\/p>\n<p>Have a great day!!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a puerile way, I have always been interested in the term &#8220;vowel movement&#8221; &#8211; not just because it rhymes with bowel movement &#8211; but that&#8217;s part of it. Yes, a lot of s**t comes out of people&#8217;s mouths, mine included, and people seem to use grunts, groans and &#8220;duhs&#8221; more than they do words [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8254,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-words"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeiswhathappens.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeiswhathappens.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeiswhathappens.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeiswhathappens.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeiswhathappens.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8253"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lifeiswhathappens.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8253\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8255,"href":"https:\/\/lifeiswhathappens.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8253\/revisions\/8255"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeiswhathappens.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeiswhathappens.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeiswhathappens.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeiswhathappens.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}