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Improving Our Talking Life - part 3

In theory they could have read two novels during the week in the time they listened to you, but not in fact. Life is so arranged that, in part at least, they had to listen to you or someone like you if they wanted to live at all. You, in the same way, have to listen to others. You can hardly buy a loaf of bread without talking or being talked to. Since talking is so integral, so inescapable, so throbbing a part of life, one can understand why St. Paul begged his Christians to learn to talk graciously and readily, and with an "edge of liveliness."

My reason for quoting Johnson, Swift, and Agnes Repplier right at the outset was not so much to overwhelm you with their rules as to make you feel that conversation is a subject that has agitated the best minds of many lands and ages. It should also agitate us. We should try to raise its level in ourselves and in others. Seeing the great writers trying to do so gradually led me to think that improving conversation was more important than slum clearance, for if a people's conversation is worth while enough and Christian enough, slums will get in its way. And in a contest between the slum and the word, the slum will lose. If the pen is mightier than the sword, then Christian talk is mightier than slums or white slavery or even war.

My first contact with the talk of the world outside my home was with the boys in a rural school. It was not pleasant. All the boys were too bashful to talk with the girls. And even among the boys, the younger and possibly also the nicer boys were usually too bashful to participate in the general talk sessions. And the talk of the others, the older boys, was not only painfully silly and repetitious but shockingly indecent. People simply will not bring themselves to believe this — but it is literally true — and I fear the same is still true in most nondenominational schools. I say this because when later many of us were transferred to a parochial school, even the rascals who were the most foulmouthed in the public school, directly after being under the constant shadow of heaven and hell, cleansed their speech.

Related terms include improve vocabulary and how to speak well.