College Mentors (4)

As Long As You Pronounce It Correctly

In the My Fair Lady, Professor Higgins has a line in which he claims, “The French don’t care what you do actually, as long as you pronounce it properly.”  My Professor Higgins was a woman named Gaylynn Collier. Dr. Collier was a diminutive woman, who loved poetry, drama, literature and properly spoken English.  Unlike Dr. Barton, she was dynamite when she spoke.  I loved listening to her.  In terms of oral communication, she was unsurpassed in my books.  I even made the mistake of telling Dr. Barton that Gaylynn Collier was the best teacher in the entire school.  I took two semesters of oral interpretation from her and one semester of phonetics.   I didn’t do very well in phonetics largely because I was required to do three different dialect recitals, and the only one I could master was West Texas country boy which was my native tongue already. Nevertheless phonetics has been invaluable to be throughout life.

Most people don’t know that phonetics is a bit like Greek.  It has its own alphabet.  For example most of the vowels have three or four symbols.  The symbols tell you the way the vowels are to be pronounced.  With consonants a sound is assigned to the symbol.  The symbol that looks like a “g” is not called “gee.”  It’s “guh,” which is the way you pronounce most words that begin with “g.”   The phonetic alphabet enables a person to eliminate many of the common pronunciation errors.

Dr. Collier never tried get me to speak with a crisp British accent.  She didn’t even do that herself, although she could if she wanted to.  When she was in college herself, she worked at a telephone switchboard and answered the phone that way.  She encouraged what she called a “General American Speech Pattern.”   That’s what the people who speak on radio and television normally use.  She encouraged that because she thought we might not always live in Texas, and we would need to make ourselves understood.  It would be best if we sounded like the guy on the 6 o’clock news.  Of course she had no way of knowing that a Houstonian named Dan Rather would become the CBS news anchor.  He never completely eliminate the Texas influence from his speech.  Think back to the way he used to say, “Secretary of State Haig.”  He tended to use two syllables to says “state” and “Haig.”   As I’ve said before, my speech gradually changed.  I guess you would call it a sort of cosmopolitan Texas.   I don’t sound like the Chester character on Gunsmoke, but then I don’t sound like Jim Nantz either, even though Jim Nantz was also raised in Houston.

When I decided to preach, my dad said, “You need to learn how to talk right.  You don’t want to sound like me.” I can actually eliminate all trace of Texas from my voice if I work at it very hard.  After I moved to Cedar Rapids, I started doing radio spots.  At first I took the Texas out of my voice, but then the people from the radio station told me they would prefer that I leave it in.  Of course it was a country station.  I’ve also done a little TV work, and it played out pretty well for that.  I tend to speak more precisely when I speak publicly, but when I’m not on my guard, it’s pretty obvious that I’m not from around here, but people like to hear me talk, so I don’t really want to get rid of all my pronunciation peculiarities.