The REALLY serious pronunciation issue facing the country today: Do "bat" and "bet" sound the same?

[smalll]

By God, they shouldn't!

The other two issues at large in the Lounge today were settled a good while ago: "Pen" and "pin" don't sound the same, except for many Southerners ("get" becomes "git" for example.) This short-e-becomes-short-i thing is a long-standing pronunciatory regionalism.

"Don and Dawn" also DON'T sound the same, in the non-frontier, more established parts of the country, and over in Britain (and Ireland) as well. Californians pronounce them interchangably however. We all know it was a long hard slog for those wagoneers through the Rocky Mountains to get to the West Coast, and once they finally reached the end of their epic journeys on the beaches of the great Pacific under the happy rays of left coast sunshine, well, lets just say I'll cut them some slack for going slack-jawed in exhaustion and relief.

What about this "BAT" and "BET" issue though? They SHOULD sound different. Bat takes a short-a, bet takes a short-e. Not too difficult. Now of course, there was that old Recieved Standard upper-class English accent of half-a-century ago or more that turned its short-as into short-es -- perhaps a little affected, but pretty nonetheless.

But now, over the past couple of decades, FAR TOO MANY young American women from all regions have taken on a sort of STRANGULATED, stuck-in-the-throat duck-quack version of the old Valley Girl speak, and are converting all their short-es into short-as! For example, a "sure thing" (to them) is not a wise wager or even a shrewd move -- it's the BAAAST BAAAT! (best bet.)

Whence this galloping uglification of the voices of young American women? Really, where is it coming from?