I do not know whether this is correct and have nothing with which to back it up, but it is too long to go in a comment, so it’ll have to be an answer.
Personally, I would suspect that this is perhaps a usage that has spilt over from Hiberno-English.
In my experience, a more or less semantically void ‘at all’ is often used in Ireland as a fairly generic closing statement in questions (much like ‘right’ or ‘innit’ are used to make statements into questions). “Do you see him at all?” just means, “Do you see him?”. If ‘at all’ should be taken literally, it is sometimes doubled: “Do you see him at all, at all?”.
As far as I am aware (though again I’ve nothing to back it up with), the Irish usage comes originally from the way the phrase ar bith (meaning both ‘any’ and ‘at all’) is used in Irish, which differs somewhat from English ‘at all’. Overuse of an expression common in one’s native language when speaking a non-native language is very common, and this is originally one such case.
An bhfuil airgead ar bith agat? = Do you have any money?
Ar chodail tú (ar chor) ar bith? = Did you sleep at all?
An bhfaca tú ar bith é? ≈ Did you see him any?
An bhfaca tú ar chor ar bith é? = Did you see him at all?
From these examples, where ar bith sometimes means ‘at all’ and sometimes ‘any’, it is fairly easy for an Irish speaker learning English as a second language to overuse ‘at all’, leading to cases where ‘at all’ really just means ‘any’, or even less than that (“Did you see him any?” is not a very natural phrase, and English would just have, “Did you see him?”).
Ar chor ar bith (which unambiguously means ‘at all’, never just ‘any’) in Irish is a kind of ‘doubled expression’ in sound (ar X ar Y), so once ar bith was fairly solidly identified with ‘at all’ in English, I suspect it was rather a simple matter of simply creating a doubled expression in English to match the Irish one, and ‘at all at all’ was born.
The doubled expression has not (yet?) made it into British English as far as I know, but I don’t think it far-fetched to hypothesise that the weakened and seemingly improper use of ‘at all’ is something that comes from Hiberno-English.
Why is the grammatical category of "voice" so named?
Good question. I wondered about that, too, and figured it was Latin -- vox, vocis, after all -- so I checked Donatus. But he doesn't use the term at all, and doesn't even group active and passive in a separate category; they're called 'types of verbs' (genera verborum -- given the definitions, this seems to be like what we would now call "verb forms"). Passive and Active verbs are identified only by their endings, not by their uses or meanings, and they're classed with deponent and semideponent verbs, also by types of endings. So that's a dead end. Grammatical "voice" is not a Latin term.
The OED's first examples of the grammatical sense of voice in English are remarkably recent:
- 1382 Wyclif Prol. 57 A participle of a present tens, either preterit, of actif vois, eithir passif.
- 1591 Percival Span. Dict. C 2 By changing e of the future of the Indicatiue into ia, you make the third voice of the preterimperfect tense of the Subiunctiue.
(the OED adds that it was "used instead of 'person'" here; i.e, it's a typo)
- 1612 Brinsley Pos. Parts (1615) 20 b, Giue the terminations of the first Persons of the Actiue voice alone.
These appear to be discussing Latin grammar. Looking at related languages, German just says im Passiv, but French and Spanish both use reflexes of Latin vox.
So somewhere along the line, the term 'voice' got picked up and stuck with this meaning. Probly nobody had any use for the term any more, what with all this newfangled printing and reformation and renaissance and all that stuff going on.
English, of course, doesn't have any grammatical Voice; there's a Passive construction (transformation, rule), and a Middle alternation (which, incidentally, is what's going on with The book is selling well), but no Active construction, rule, transformation, or alternation. Or voice.
This is just linguistic terminology, used conservatively. I'm not a conservative person, but I use grammatical terms conservatively because when they're used liberally, they tend to smear across every topic we can possibly associate with language, which is pretty much everything.
Best Answer
low
It has, therefore, both the meanings.
The same dictionary defines husky thus:
A low voice can be loud! (click 'More example sentences' in the low entry to open)
[EDIT]
By the same token, lower your voice would also be ambiguous. However, there would hardly be an occasion to ask someone to reduce the frequency rather than the amplitude, other than maybe at an audition/ recording session.