CHAPTER XV

THE UNPARDONABLE SIN

"Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it

as lief the town crier spoke my lines."

I had

-SHAKESPEARE.

AN audience will forgive a speaker for almost any sin except one-speaking indistinctly, or speaking in such a way that he cannot be heard or distinctly understood. Sloppy articulation, careless enunciation, faulty voice production, resulting in a jumbling of syllables and a mumbling of words, a mutilation and massacre of the English language-this is the thing which is absolutely unpardonable. Any one who commits this crime cannot be too severely condemned. It matters not a whit how perfect his personal appearance may be, or how fine his thought may be, he must speak so that he can be clearly understood. If his hearers cannot hear what he says, it matters little what he says. It is lost, anyway. All his efforts are useless-his message in vain.

He has wasted—yes, worse than wasted-his own time and that of his would-be hearers. There is absolutely no excuse for it. It is the result of indifference, carelessness and downright laziness. Any one can learn to talk clearly and distinctly, so that every word can be easily heard and understood.

Henry James, in a remarkable address delivered before the graduates of Bryn Mawr some years ago, discussed the tremendous importance of this question of

our speech. A brief quotation will suffice to give the view-point of this distinguished thinker. "Of a degree in which a society is civilized, the vocal form, the personal social accent and sound of its intercourse have always been held to give a direct reflection. It is the line of differentiation between man and the brute. Of course it is easier to overlook this question of our speech than to give attention to it but it is also easier to grunt and whine and growl than it is to articulate and enunciate."

Surely any one who has an ounce of appreciation of the English language or a spark of pride in his personal expression will be very careful to keep on the right side of that "dividing line that separates man from the brute." If not, he is probably on the side of the line where he rightly belongs.

In the July issue of the American Magazine, 1920, is an article entitled, "Agitophasia," which shows how this fault is often allowed to develop in such a pronounced form that it becomes an actual disease. The following extracts make clear the general trend of the article.

AGITOPHASIA

Dr. James Sonnett Greene is the founder of the New York Clinic for Speech Defects. His slogan is that "Speech, not bread, is the staff of life." He is doing great work for hundreds of children, and adults who are handicapped by such infirmities as stuttering, stammering, lisping, and all manner of speech defects. In this article he shows parents the need of taking more interest in speech than they commonly do. He points out that there are few grown-ups whose

speech is not defective to some extent and that these speech defectives are in reality suffering from different stages of a disease. This disease he calls "Agitophasia," which he defines as "A condition of excessive rapidity of speech in which sounds or syllables are unconsciously omitted, slurred, mutilated, or swallowed, while at the same time the natural speech is distorted. In everyday language, Agitophasia is spluttering, cluttering, tumultuous speech." Stutterers, harelips, and people with cleft palates are not the only ones who have trouble expressing themselves. Stenographers testify that three-quarters of the men whose dictation they take mumble their words. Practically none of us can make a public address, or even talk extensively to an associate without displaying faults in speech that need to be corrected.

If a stenographer could stay with you all day long and take down your words just as they fall from your lips, the probabilities are that when you read her report you would bow your head in shame.

But this report would show only how you form— or fail to form-your sentences, how you hesitate, stumble, repeat yourself, and again and again get your meaning all mixed up.

To make your shame complete, a phonograph would have to record the way you habitually articulate, that is, the way you slur, swallow, mutilate, and often omit altogether the syllables which represent the fundamental sounds of language.

The man or woman whose speech is not defective in some way is indeed "a rare bird." Amazingly few persons seem able to say what they want to say clearly, distinctly, straightforwardly. Just watch

yourself and see how inadequate, and sometimes unintelligible your speech is.

"Lisping or stammering," said Dr. Greene, "simply is defective articulation; sounds are mutilated, or omitted, or wrong sounds substituted for the right ones. It may be due to deformities in the conformation of the mouth, to paralysis of the tongue or of the palate, or simply to clumsiness in the use of tongue or lips. Stuttering, on the other hand, is a spasmodic action of the muscles employed in the production of speech.

"There are four factors concerned in speech: mentation or thought; respiration or breathing; phonation or the emission of vocal sounds; and articulation or the joining of syllables to make words. In normal speech these four factors are coördinated; that is, they work together harmoniously and smoothly. In stuttering speech, they miss and skip and jerk. We see practically the same thing in an automobile engine when its parts fail to coördinate.

"Thousands of persons suffer from agitophasia in some degree. This, in fact, is the most common form of speech defect. For good conversational speech, definite, complete thought is necessary before the speech organs are set in motion. Comparatively few persons do this habitually. We usually start in to speak before our thought is fully formed. Thus we hesitate, repeat, flounder around and splutter."

An engineer who was reorganizing the management of a large company addressed the office force one day on efficiency. When he had finished, he invited those present to send in suggestions for saving time and labor. One of the suggestions he got was this:

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"If you would be more efficient in your talk, would cut out your 'ah's' and stop saying Eh' so much, you would save a lot of time for those who are compelled to listen to you."

The engineer says that this frank criticism was a shock to him, but did him a great deal of good.

"The trouble may be summed up as lack of concentration. Through this lack, a wonderful power is lost. It is in speech that the personality is mainly expressed. And when the whole power of one's personality is collected and concentrated in one's speech there is nothing that is more moving, more influential."

THE CAUSES

Call it a sin, or call it a disease, or both-there are two things for us to consider, the cause and the cure. The underlying thing in the cause is carelessness, indifference, lack of attention, a don't-care spirit in regard to speech. This mental attitude is the chief cause the real cause. All other factors that enter into the case are merely contributing causes. Among these is faulty formation. In other words, the vowels and consonants which are the elements of speech are not formed, or produced in the right way. This takes us to the very root of the difficulty, from the physical standpoint, but we must first recognize the mental causation as already stated. Sometimes it is fear thought, instead of carelessness. Faulty formation is generally found in the production of the consonant sounds. These are the "closed sounds" of speech, as contrasted with the vowels or "open sounds," and require particular care and precision in their forma