Kol Ishah

Am I world famous in Sioux Falls? Not quite that provincial, but fortunately my visage is not on any billboards - or wanted posters at the PO for that matter. Still, it is funny in the Midwest, I'll have people come up and say, "I know you from TV."Most of the time, it's pretty funny, but also strange.

Many moons ago, I used to have a semi-regular segment on the radio - although not in this country. The irony of that it was an etiquette segment - and I was giving advice in the minority language of a European country, whilst the majority of callers belonged to the much larger majority population. Again, we had a majority of male callers, if I recall correctly. Maybe it was my voice - or some rampant social anxiety among Finnish guys.

That part of being in the media is very disconcerting - that you have no control over who listens to you or their reaction. And listeners - especially those of the male persuasion -can be very odd. One particular time, I was speaking on Estonian radio about some linguistic research I was doing at the time - speaking in English - and I had two different chaps just show up at the station. Apropos nothing. Just from my voice. That was pretty creepy - like some kind of low-wattage Lorelei.

But this leads back to the kol ishah thread of this post. Had those kinds of incidents not happened to me - and it wasn't the last, unfortunately - I might have thought the whole prohibition on hearing women sing or perform (depending, as ususal, on who you ask) for men was pretty bogus. While I still think it's essentially the burden of the listener to focus on the message, not the medium or the mediator, that experience of having seemingly normal people be so entranced by a not-so-very entrancing voice made me think a bit. I mean, my voice doesn't shatter glass or make dogs howl, but it's pretty generic. Is this more of a guy thing? Do women ever stalk guys because of their voices? And why can't some guys just get a grip?

When I first started out talking on the radio in a more serious way, I had to practice making my voice lower. Not Marlene Dietrich, but huskier than my usual speaking voice. I'd forgotten just how high my voice used to be until I started realizing that my voice used to sound remarkably like my 15 y/o sister's -
almost squeaky sweet. But 20 years ago, low voices projected better on the
radio, so those with high-pitched voices had to retrain their voices or get out of the ether. To this day, I tend to modulate much lower if I am dealing with a microphone.

On the other hand, my mother was absolutely underwhelmed when she heard me on a
BBC broadcast one day. I asked her what she thought, and she was just quiet. Finally, she burst out that she was suprised that I sounded so Midwestern! This was of course the radio standard for the US, and the norm I was raised with, might I add. I guess she thought that on the BEEB I should go all RP or affect Liverpudlian. Ah, if it's not one thing, it's your mother (may she enjoy a long and healthy life!).