If you want to be offended, just attempt to "help" folks with language, especially oral

Contributed By:Dorothy Nevils

Folks don’t give up easily that which they claim as their own. They hold onto it, resistant to change. It’s almost as if they think someone’s taking something away from them, sorta like the joke about the man getting on the bus, and someone reached up to take a piece of lint off his coat. Offended, he slapped at the person’s hand, and mumbled, “Cain’ even have a piece of cotton!”

If you want to be offended, just attempt to “help” folks with language, especially oral language. I grew up in Southern Illinois, and modeled myself after Mis’ Harrell, a fastidious English teacher whose language was as crisp and flawless as everything else about her. Not a sound was shortchanged, and the crisp sounds were music to my ears.

After a few years of teaching, I was introduced to a language from another place, “Līk-ah-wōn-ah,” in the state of “Tawk.” There were a few wrangles as students resisted my “taking the lint” off their language. Being more stubborn than wise, many held out as long as possible, then showed up the next year.

If you’ve noticed, the loudest people generally are the poorest speakers. It seems they talk loud to compensate for sounds running all over the place, like a car in the hands of a drunk. The problem, though, is solvable; but it takes a bit of work. It’s generally a case of “lazy articulators”: They haven’t been required to do what they were meant to do, but you cannot fix what you don’t know.

What in the dickens are articulators? Simply speaking, they are parts of the body that direct the air you use for talking or singing. In simple terms, they separate sounds. Air has to be directed, controlled. You don’t turn on an air conditioner and leave doors wide open, or turn on the water and let it go all over the place, rather than where it will do a job.

Your lungs are your source of air, and once your air starts that journey upward, different organs control it. For instance, the tongue goes up to your teeth and stops the air for a hot second so that you can say this, that, with, etc. When you say grow or tongue, you can feel a constriction that modifies the sound.

There are four articulation errors that distort the sound, and, believe it or not, some people seem to strive with almost every word! You can omit, add, substitute, or transpose.

Endings are popular things to chuck, and words that end in d, t, n, g, r are the real favorites, especially when they are at the end of a word. Folks also like to omit the d in kindergarten and the 's for possessive, and the r is dropped in so many words, if it were made of glass, it would be a pile of shards. Speaking of s, it’s the least favorite letter to show possession, or to put on the end of a noun or verb.

It seems illogical that people who just drop sounds from words for no reason at all would turn around and add sounds, but they do. Realtor becomes “rea-la-tor.”

Have you heard someone say ciddy instead of “city,” wint for went, or just about any short I sound for short e? Walmark for Walmart?

How many times have you heard someone say, “Ax him”? What they’ve done is transposed the sound, putting the k sound in front of the s sound, instead of behind.

The last error can be heard when people add sounds, writing (and saying) “preventative” (4 syllables) instead of preventive (3 syllables).

It’s difficult to get every darn thing correct, but if you remember just two things, improving your speech will make a lot more sense: (1) When you talk, you talk for others. You owe them! (2) Good speech makes people take you more seriously, and that benefits you.

(By the way, if you tighten up your speech, you won’t need to talk so loud because the ones to whom you speak can hear you a lot better!)

Story Posted:08/07/2017