What’s that you said?

What’s that you said?

Musings
Sonia Kelly

SPEECH is supposed to be a means of communicating, but there are people who don’t understand this. Mainly comedians. Most of them talk at such speed that it’s like some alien language – gobbledegook. Which is what Dustin the Turkey tried to communicate in (obviously unsuccessfully, if appropriately) when competing in the Eurovision.
For these people, speed seems to be mandatory, making it likely that they have actually practised communication in the farmyard, hopefully making more sense to the turkeys than to a human audience.
Singers (apart from fowl) often come into the same category of incomprehension, although this is due, not so much to speed as to slurred diction. It can seem like contempt for their listeners – is it too much trouble for them to activate their tongues?
Of course, there’s the problem of regional accents, too, which do sometimes amount to foreign languages. Would it not be a good idea to teach English pronunciation in the relevant schools? When I went to school (which was initially in Kylemore Abbey) elocution was part of the curriculum, irrespective of what region, or country, the pupils happened to be from. We learned to speak slowly and distinctly, which is an attribute greatly appreciated by all our current immigrants.
Which is not to say that we, too, would find foreign trips less stressful if those we met on our migrations would also slow down.
France is a case in point: Asking the way to somewhere in the native language is not too difficult, but the reply is something else – something that would make even turkey-speak comprehensible in comparison. You could say “that incomprehension to some degree is to be expected when one is abroad”
but it’s hard to understand why there are people who promote it at home, too.
These are the people who feel that we should all be speaking Irish, thus making ours a closed society, impenetrable to visitors. If communication is the name of the game, why obfuscate the issue?
Another problem arises when speakers mumble. As one ages, one gets progressively deafer, so mumblers can make life very hard for OAPs. (More so, of course, for VOCs). Meeting someone casually, for instance, and the person makes a remark. ‘What?’ you say. But you still don’t hear the repetition. This time, though, you nod and smile, or perhaps say, ‘Really?’ in what you hope is an appropriate response. Sometimes it becomes apparent that you’ve missed the point, due to either idiocy or deafness – regardless, it’s humiliating.
Mumbling can be caused by simply not opening the mouth while speaking and/or by too-low volume. Other frustrating situations caused by this speech defect occur on car journeys – it’s virtually impossible for a mumbler or a slurrer to be understood by a back-seat passenger (who might, of course, be somewhat deaf) if the speaker is in the front of the car.
Particular attention to diction should be paid by those speaking on tannoy, but unfortunately this is often not the case, so that vital information regarding train and plane journeys, say, emerges in the public domain as incomprehensible as if it was spoken in ancient Greek.And there’s not even anyone present to ask, “What’s that you said?”