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The Voice and Diction of Conversation - part 1
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THE people who in conversation make me feel most desperate, who make me want to cry "fire" in order to get out of the conversation or to get pep into it, are the well-meaning souls who talk too slowly, who stop, look, and listen before every word. They talk as slowly and deliberately about having gone out and bought a loaf of bread as one would if one had at midnight stealthily placed a homemade atom bomb under Fort Knox. A runner-up to these is the person who talks to a roomful of people as if she were talking a baby to sleep, and then, just as one has given up trying to listen, suddenly appeals to one for confirmation of some point, asking directly, "Don't you agree with me, Mr. Smith?"
A few fundamentals of voice and tone, of time, pitch, and force must be observed by anyone who wants to be an acceptable conversationalist. Not essential for liveliness, but important for being respected is acquiring what for lack of a better word might be called a cultivated level of voice, diction, and pronunciation. This is a delicate, a touchy subject. Nevertheless a few helpful hints should be in place. Literature and history abound with illustrations of the importance of an agreeable level of pronunciation. In this chapter, though diction also means choice of words, we shall use it to mean the art or manner of speaking, the tone and vocal expression. One recalls that it was his manner of speaking, his diction, which revealed Peter to the bystanders at the trial as a follower of Christ. According to the Missal account of Palm Sunday, "the bystanders came up and said to Peter, 'Surely thou also art one of them, for even thy speech betrays thee.' " Usually the historical examples have reference to the often embarrassing factor of brogue or accent in speech, of speech peculiarities reflecting nationality or locality. Peter's speech was recognized as Galilean. The classical case of that sort is the word shibboleth. In Judges of the Old Testament, the Gileadites, trying to detect fleeing Ephraimites, made them pronounce that word. But every Ephraimite pronounced the "sh" as an "s," saying sibboleth, whereupon the Gileadites "took him and killed him in the very passage of the Jordan. And there fell at that time of Ephraim two and forty thousand" (Judg. 12:6). That was in the "good old days"! Now, except perhaps behind the Iron Curtain, an accent is not likely to lead to such serious damage. This is fortunate, for while everyone should of course try to conform his pronunciation to the national standard, the accidents of birth and background do not enable everyone to do so. A Bostonian in Chicago certainly should tone his Bostonian down and try to sound more like a refined Chicagoan, but try as he might he would not be likely to succeed entirely. In general, given a different background in youth, perfect conformity to the national standard can hardly be achieved. Nor need this be of too much concern, since some little differences and pecularities exist in the best of speakers. The scholar, Albert C. Baugh, in his History of the English Language, writes, "There is no such thing as uniformity in language. Not only does the speech of one community differ from that of another, but the speech of different individuals of a single community, even different members of the same family, is marked by individual peculiarities" (p. 19).
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