Speak the Speech

 "Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue."

-- Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2

And I wish I could still pull that off at a significant level. Alas, were it so. But it just "ain't so, no mo'." And that is a somewhat recent and strange development. It is not that I am aphasic, or have developed a stutter late in life, it's just that I am not as glib as I used to be. Let me explain.

Words have always been incredibly important to me. I suspect it is a genetic thing, as my family was always awash in words. Books seemed to frame the home in which I was raised. Reading at the dinner table was not required, but was blithely tolerated. Later, I swear my older daughter popped out of the womb talking. The words were not quite there, but an endlessly babbled string of syllables was. Today she is a lawyer. Need I say more?

It is not surprising then that my life has been molded by the word spoken or sung - and occasionally written. During my high school years my major activities were drama and choir. We had a less-than-stellar athletic program, so I never tested those extra-curricular waters. I appeased my father’s athletic expectations instead by running gym classes weekends at the local Y. Left me more time for our spring musical, class plays, and choir concerts and contests.

As a undergraduate I was a theater major at Kalamazoo College - doing mostly acting. So learned a lot about character make-up and costume design. Kind of a klutz as a techie. Had a cool scene design class. My master's degree focused on sharing words and action via the then hot medium - TV, with a touch of film tossed in. The Ph.D. - in the then "speech communication" department at Wayne State - culminated in a dissertation that sought to test whether we think in words or pictures. It featured many words that drew a mostly uncertain conclusion. Still a fun study. I then spent about a half century lecturing in various university classrooms, 42 years in the Communication Department at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

So singing, composing and "speaking the speech trippingly" dominated much of my life. And for the most part it was done well enough to receive a slew of the teaching awards available at NC State. I don't report that to blow my own horn, but rather to emphasize, and bemoan, the fact that the glib ad-libbing prof of days gone by is more than a little rusty these days.

It is the speaking part that seems on the wane. The words are all still there - there just seems to be a bit of a log jam between the composition and the articulation. The cluster of appropriate words is there, they just no longer naturally assert the best choice. So "spatula" becomes "the pancake flipping thingy." And "drive-in movie" becomes "big screen place you went to in your car."

Perhaps you can now better understand why, despite my having done online lectures at State for 4 or 5 years, The Wall has no podcast partner. Talking to a camera back then was not really all that different from doing a live lecture. Except, of course, you did not see the students dozing. Nowadays I fear that a video version of The Wall might contain "those weird glitches that happen when you can't find just the right word" yeah, "pauses."

So should we actually have the opportunity to converse face-to-face, and I tend to take a bit of time to respond, do me a favor: Pretend to think I am processing what you just said, and not trying to find just the right word to express my inclination to disagree - "balderdash,” or agree, “bravissimo!”