Not only did simultaneity of meanings have to go with the 
change from oral to visual culture, but pronunciation and pitch 
were flattened out so far as possible. Robert Hillyer writes in his 
In Pursuit of Poetry  (p. 45):

     For the most part, we Americans do not avail ourselves of 
     changing pitch. Unconsciously we avoid it as an 
     affectation and lose half the effectiveness of our native 
     tongue in one long monotone of drone, drawl, or growl. 
     The effect is flat and blurred, especially since we run our 
     syllables and words together, like a piece of prose without 
     any punctuation. We ought to let every syllable come out 
     round and full like a golden bubble! But we don’t. The 
     result is hard on poetry. The American voice is, in general, 
     far richer than the English. Leaving out Cockney—and 
     that super-Cockney, the “Oxford accent”—we mistakenly