Driving a car can make you seem younger than you really are

Free bus passes for senior citizens are all very well, but not for anyone who isn’t very keen on revealing their age to a wider public (e.g. me).

Our village bus stop is much busier than it was before free bus passes, but it’s also become like a rolling PowerPoint presentation, continually updating the list of who’s passed a certain birthday for all to see.

Familiar faces that have never knowingly been anywhere near a bus in their lives, let alone been seen getting on or off one, suddenly and shamelessly flaunt themselves at the bus shelter, openly advertising the fact that they too are now old enough to qualify for free bus travel.

And that’s precisely why I stubbornly insist on using my car, without regard for my carbon footprint or the ease with which I could avoid parking hassles by coming clean about my eligibility for a bus pass.

Planning to say 'um' and 'uh'

For non-native speakers of English, learning how to use our definite article must be an absolute doddle compared with the problems I’ve always had in handling ‘le’, ‘la’ and ‘les in French and the even more complicated ‘der’, ‘die’, ‘das’, ‘die’, etc. in German (for which I achieved my worst failure ever with a pitiful 7% at 'O' level).

English nouns don’t have genders so ‘the’ works fine for all of them – except, of course, when we’re speaking. Nouns beginning with a consonant are indeed preceded by ‘the’, but, if the noun starts with a vowel, ‘the’ is pronounced ‘thee’ – so we say ‘the pub’ but ‘thee egg’.

Interestingly, the definite article often comes before ‘uhs’ and ‘ums’ when we're speaking. Even more interesting is the fact that, when it does, speakers invariably use the ‘thee’ form: ‘thee-uh’. The fact that the ‘the’ is fitted to an upcoming vowel sound presumably means that we know that an ‘uh’ or an ‘um’ is on its way before we select ‘thee’ rather than ‘the’.

On the evidence of Mrs Clinton's recent ‘consequences’ statement, she does it quite a lot as you can see from the following video clips:

1. "It has chosen to violate thee u-specific language of thee uh UN Security Council Resolution 1718."

2. ".. discussions are going on to uh add to thee uh consequences"

3. "I want to underscore thee uh commitments that the United States has"



The interesting question for people who know more than I do about languages other than English is whether they too involve planned 'ums' and 'uhs' - and, if so, what form does it take?

For example, do German speakers project an upcoming masculine, feminine or neutral noun with 'der uh', 'die uh' or 'das uh'? And what happens in languages that don't have definite articles at all?

The ‘delicacy’ of Mrs Clinton’s ‘consequences’ for North Korea

First of all, thanks to those of you who took the trouble to make comments about Mrs Clinton’s ‘Consequences’ statement (posted yesterday) – not only because I found them interesting and agree with much of what you said, but also because it was a relief to discover that I wasn’t alone in thinking that there was something rather odd about it.

Some of you may have seen something I posted about the concept of ‘pre-delicate hitches’ a while back, where the general argument is that such hitches (e.g. ums, ers, pauses, etc.) occur when a speaker is about to say something that he or she knows is likely to come across as ‘delicate’ to their listeners.

On watching this sequence again, I realised that it was the first two paragraphs (reproduced and re-transcribed below) that were what had really caught my attention in the first place. In the course of 120 words, there are more than 40 such hitches (i.e. one every three words), not to mention the abstract vagueness of some of the language (‘violate the specific language’, ‘abrogated the obligations it entered into’, ‘consequences’, ‘behaviour’, ‘framework’, etc.).

The 'uhs' and frequency and duration of pauses bring down the speed of her delivery to about 92 words per minute (i.e. words other than 'uh' or 'um'), which is extremely slow compared with the ‘ideal’ speed for public speakers of somewhere between 120-140 words per minute (which is also much slower than normal conversational speeds of around 180 words per minute).

Interestingly, the number of 'hitches' diminishes once she moves on to the second part of the statement, which was delivered at the much more satisfactory rate of 130 words per minute.

Two factors may have influenced this. One was that the hitches came at their thickest and fastest when the key audience most likely to find what she was saying particularly ‘delicate’ was the North Koreans themselves.

The other was that, to be fair to Mrs Clinton, this was not a pre-prepared speech but came in answer to a question at a press conference taking place in Egypt, very soon after the news from North Korea had come through. So it’s possible that there hadn’t been enough time for her to get a full briefing from State Department specialists, which meant that she had no choice but to make it up as she went along (i.e. ‘busk’ it).

(N.B. This revised transcript uses a convention that’s also useful for marking up scripts of speeches before delivery that's described in Lend Me Your Ears, pp. 299-301, where a single slash indicates a slight pause of a fifth to half a second and a double slash indicates a longer pause of half a second to a second).

MRS CLINTON:
North Korea has made // uhh //a choice. // It has chosen to // violate the // u-specific language / of the / uh // UN Security Council Resolution 1718. // It has ignored the international community. // It has abrogated the obligations it entered into / through the Six-Party Talks. // And it uh continues to act in a provocative and belligerent manner / uh toward its neighbors.// There are consequences to such actions.//

In the United Nations uh as we speak / discussions are going on to // uh // add to the / uh / consequences that North Korea / will face // u-coming out of the latest uh // u-behavior / u-with the // uh / intent to // u-try to rein in / uh the North Koreans // uh and get them back into a framework where they are once again // uh fulfilling their obligations and moving toward denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.



For her more fluent continuation and the rest of the statement, see video and transcript on yesterdays posting.

P.S. And, thanks to a link from Charles Crawford, see HERE for a fascinating article on the Clintons' problems since Obama took over.