And yet, people experience changes in accents during their own life; they hear recordings from themselves from the 70's and think "did I really talk like that?".

One thing though, take older movies with a grain of salt; in old movies, actors were taught a specific accent (called the Mid-Atlantic accent, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent).

It's a sequence of shifts. I guess, significant numbers of people get to experience maybe one shift in a chain.

Modern example. Router. Two forms, the British one rooter is being deprecated strongly for rowter.

Etc is etcetera. Now, its etsy.

> Etc is etcetera. Now, its etsy.

I can't say I've ever heard that, anywhere.

Definitely have heard a lot of "esetra" / "esedra", though.

/etc etsy has become more current in my (oz) community. there's still a divergence between /sbin (s'bin) and s-bin ess-bin

/tmp is pretty much temp to everyone. /var vahr not vair. and luckly, we all think soodoo is pronounced the same. Oh wait, soodough. Damn.