Arriving at and departing from Wellington Railway Station was until just recently akin to emerging from a slimy sea of slovenliness on to an island paradise of sparkling clarity and excellence. I refer to the announcements of impending departures over the PA system, beautifully elocuted by a mature-sounding woman whose identity was/is unknown to me, and the contrast between her and moronnial women the world over afflicted with fry-quack—a civilisation-threatening combination of what is already formally identified as "vocal fry":
and the additional atrocity I personally refer to as "the quack," embodied by all women in this video but most execrably by adenoidal airhead and Democratic Party strategist Jessica Tarlow at 2' 56":
Mindful of the latter-day preponderance of fry-quackers, I have said for some time to anyone who cared to listen that my Wellington Railway Station heroine surely could not be much longer for the job, since her dulcet tones were a reproach and an affront to the crass cretins who run the world now. All trace of such beauty as her voice and delivery epitomised, reminiscent of a time when sanity, decency and the pursuit of excellence were unremarkable, would have to be expunged. Sure enough, I arrived at the station a few days ago for my latest outing to be assaulted by "Quack! Quack! Quack! Fraaaaaaaaaaaaaeeeeeeeeeeee" through the speakers. The dreaded changeover from class to excrement I had long predicted had indeed occurred.
I wrote to Metlink, who operate the area's rail services under contract to the Wellington Regional Council—an alarming assortment of veteran socialists, taxi chit-abusers, state tit-suckers and down-dumbers—asking why this plunge into barbarism had been perpetrated (I was a tad more polite than that, in the hope of eliciting a response):
Dear Lindsay
Thank you for taking the time to provide us with your feedback regarding the new on board announcements.
With the new Wellington rail operator starting from 3 July 2016, this was seen as an opportunity to modernise the on board announcements and to address a long standing issue regarding the incorrect pronunciation of Maori station names, which has been the basis of a number of complaints from local Wellington commuters over the years.
We appreciate your feedback about the new announcements. Your feedback has been forwarded to the appropriate team within Metlink for their consideration regarding any future changes to announcements.
Kind regards,
Now actually, my feedback was not about the on-board announcements, which have been fry-quacked from Day One, but those at Wellington Railway Station, where only one destination with a Maori name, Waikanae, is mentioned. My heroine pronounced that perfectly well (I'd be surprised if she didn't attend the same NZBC Announcer Training School that I did, where we were taught proper Maori pronunciation long before it became Politically Correct). That aside, I am at a loss to know why it is unacceptable to mangle Maori but admirable to mangle English?! Well, I'm not really at a loss: the degradation of spoken English has been the deliberate and very diabolical policy of our broadcast media, Air New Zealand, the Ministry of Education, linguistics professors and others in academia, our politicians et al for years. Metlink is merely the latest to climb aboard, if you'll pardon the pun.
Ubiquitous fry-quacking makes it seem as though someone has grabbed all our women by the very noses through which they emit their hideous duck-noises and ordered them to "speak" in such a way as to sound as dumb as they possibly can, with the quacking to be exacerbated by a seemingly endless series of upward inflections and the frying to kick in when there's finally a downward inflection. And, like, every second, like, word must be, like, "like." (The men are not off the hook, but their pathetic bro-speak sounds like Benedict Cumberbatch next to female fry-quacking.) It is a sign of a civilisation that has lost its self-respect. It is a crime against our own humanity. It is a self-contrived Weapon of Mass Destruction, an act of aesthetic terrorism against ourselves every bit as evil as the acts routinely perpetrated by Muslims. No, it doesn't kill people directly the way Muslims do, but it will assuredly help kill civilised Western culture, exactly as it's intended to—and that, ultimately, will mean a lot of deaths.