COMMENT: Time for schools to give elocution lessons?

Don't worry, this isn't going to be a rant about accents. It's not even going to be a rant about long or short vowels. What's concerning me is the noticeable increase in the number of adults who seem totally incapable of pronouncing "th" in words.

It's absolutely awful.

Guilty

Words beginning with "th" are pronounced as if there's an "f" there instead.

Words ending with "th" are pronounced as if there's a "v" instead.

Most of the time it doesn't interrupt the flow of speech - the speaker just sounds like an under-educated child who hasn't been taught how to speak properly - but there are times, when there are a lot of such mispronunciations, that it becomes increasingly hard to understand what is being said.

Don't these people realise they are making them sound stupid? Like a 3-year old still learning to speak properly?

Schools, as far as I am aware, have ignored such problems over recent decades, deciding it's accents, and regional and individuality is good. It's not, if it makes communication difficult.

Schools need to offer elocution lessons to those who don't speak properly and clearly and it's the duty of society to highlight adults who are destroying the language with their infantile babblings.