Word: speech
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...smooth out his jumbled syntax, Kennedy's staff has put together thick black briefing binders filled with direct, simple answers to questions that may arise. "I feel more comfortable on the podium now," says Kennedy and indeed he sometimes strikes a certain rhythm in his basic stump speech that can rouse an audience. "What we have now is not a malaise among the American people, but a malaise in the highest levels of leadership," he booms, slashing the air with one hand and flipping large note cards with the other. "A can't-do President...
Through five weeks of press briefings on the Iranian crisis, State Department Spokesman Hodding Carter III has shown himself a master of the diplomatic metaphor, using colorful figures of speech with a surgeon's precision. Last week the English language began to show signs of strain under Carter's constant hard use. When asked about what the U.S. would do next with the deposed Shah, the spokesman replied at different times...
...December 4, the Crimson printed an article by Monique Sullivan on the RUS faculty-student dinner. In summarizing my brief speech the reporter pulled the quote "I am at Harvard because of affirmative action" out of context. I became aware of this indiscretion because four students questioned me about the article before my Tuesday lecture. One woman implored, "Did you really say this? I don't believe it!" in a horrified tone which plagued me all day. Several women who attended the dinner were furious at the implication which could be drawn because the quote had been taken...
Romain and Speech Pathologist Anne Koeneke, who was assigned to Ginny, meanwhile began to use "play situations" to build up the twins' limited English. The girls could not easily arrange syllables into understandable words. They spewed out what English words they had with a machine gunlike rapidity. Given modeling clay (which they pretended was potato salad), kitchen implements, dolls and dollhouses, the twins would play and the speech pathologists would ask questions. Where should the doll go? "Inhouse," Gracie might answer. "Oh, in the house," Romain would reply slowly. Single words were expanded to phrases, phrases to sentences. Romain...
Whether it was developed from loneliness or as a rebellious game or was simply a neurological accident, the twins' private communication has turned out to be something less than a true invented language. Linguists Meier and Newport now call Gracie and Ginny's speech "deformed English." What had seemed to be a vocabulary of hundreds of new words, when slowed down and analyzed on tape recordings proved to be about 50 complex mispronounced words and phrases jammed together and said at high speed. There was also "substantial variation" every time the twins talked. Phonetic transcripts initially brought...