Word: elocutionist
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...Harvard has not deserted rhetoric," associate professor Frederick C. Packard told the General Speech Association of Eastern States last weekend. "But rhetoric," he continued, "has deserted speech. The real trouble with speech courses is that they have been victimized by the elocutionist movement. Speech trainers are often mere coachers in a flashy showmanship...
...caustic Santayana, Charles Townsend Copeland was a mere "elocutionist" who provided a "spiritual debauch [for] many well-disposed waifs at Harvard." Copey's well-disposed waifs felt otherwise. A shrunken little man, with an actor's sense of staging, he brought literature to life for thousands of students. When the announcement went up for one of his readings, students would line the streets outside his hall. Then Copey would enter, order the doors to be locked, spend minutes adjusting his lamp, listen disdainfully for the audience to swallow its coughs, and finally begin. Over the years, those readings...
There he sat at table with a broken-down laboratory assistant, a lavender college student, a mousy-genteel kleptomaniac widow, a moth-eaten elocutionist, a stale bibliophile who dismissed all ideas with "forgive my sense of humor"—a gallery which should convince almost everybody that Wells, like Dickens, is no caricaturist of English life but a dispenser of literal and horrifying truth. And there Teddy ran foul of two "overripe virgins," bleached Miss Blame and malapropist Miss Birkenhead, who once spent six months in Paris, calls her Paris sugar daddy her faux...
When Gay MacLaren was a little girl she decided to become an elocutionist after she heard a Chautauqua performer recite The Bobolink. The high point of this performance was a trill: cheeeeeee, prrrrrrr, cheeeeeeeeeeeeee, which Gay practiced so hard her South Dakota neighbors asked her if she didn't know a piece with some other kind of bird in it. But Gay kept on practicing, studied elocution in Minneapolis, finally got her big chance at the New York Chautauqua. Thereafter she followed the Chautauqua circuit, along with chalk-talk artists, bell ringers, evangelists, yodlers, zither performers, magicians, bagpipe players...
...breasted dinner coat. When Joe Anton observes a fetching gilded youngster propping her face against his champagne glasses, he wonders who she is. He learns that she is a Miss Healy (Constance Cummings) and that the saloon which she patronizes, out of nostalgia, was once her private residence. The elocutionist (Alison Skipworth) whom Anton hires to teach him polite diction gets drunk with a blonde beautician (Mae West), while Joe makes love to Miss Healy. Competing 'leggers try to buy his establishment and one of his old friends (Wynne Gibson) tries to re-open their relations with a revolver...