FAILING SPEECH

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 2, 2 July 1938, Page 10

FAILING SPEECH

YOUNG PEOPLE OF ENGLAND

(From "The Post's" Representative.)

LONDON, June 8,

Secondary school teachers meeting in conference in London recently had some caustic things to say about the increase of bad speech in England. Their complaints included the lament that people are becoming more and more difficult to hear, that enunciation is growing worse, that words are mouthed1, swallowed, gabbled, but not pronounced. It was also lamented that public speakers are becoming as dependent on the microphone as a two-year-old on its nanny!

Mr. H. St. John Rumsey, who has been Speech Therapist at Guy's Hospital for the past 15 years, declares that a quarter of his time is spent in teaching what could be done in schools. He advocates that every school should have its own speech "expert."

"Mothers who talk badly themselves frequently bring children, of ten or twelve years of age to me because they cannot get them to make themselves understood," he said. "They simply won't pronounce. Very often they will hardly speak at all. Usually, of course, they are spoiled children who have been tied too long to their mothers' aproh strings. I point out to the mothers that if they will insist on treating their children as if they were Pekinese lapdogs they can't expect them to talk."