C2001-1 Speaking Indistinctly

            Sometimes, when I watch television with the captioning feature turned on, I see a message that says, “Speaking Indistinctly,” as if Indistinctly were a separate language.  In the USA, Indistinctly appears to be a cognate of the Indo-European family of languages because words and phrases frequently appear from a tangled nest of incomprehension that are nearly identical with standard English words and phrases.  They are just harder to understand.  And those words always emanate from the mouths of particularly lazy speakers, like the slushy, half-slurred words of a common lush.
            I suspect that such lazy habits are born sitting in front of computer screens or television sets in a childhood or adolescence devoid of any real conversation and dialog.  The inanimate nature of those electronic devices does not allow for inquiry when incomprehension occurs.  Instead, the passive nature of those devices encourages a tolerance for indistinct and unintelligible speech.  Later, when actual conversations take place between individuals, those bad computer and television habits make it unnecessary to understand exactly what the other person is saying.  One need merely wait until the noise stops coming from the other person and it is time for one to speak oneself: sequential monologues, unrelated to each other, occurring more-or-less contemporaneously.
            It is, in my mind, another failure of the U.S. educational establishment that they cannot turn out graduates who can write and speak as if they had been the beneficiaries of a genuine education.  Many cannot spell or write coherent sentences.  Many cannot stand up in front of a group of people and speak well or even be understood by others.
            But slowly, ever so slowly, I am beginning to understand why this is so.  Our local newspaper  today showed youngsters in the local high school fashioning a wedding dress entirely from toilet paper.  I’m sure many hours of classroom time were expended in this fruitless pursuit, where none was required to spell accurately, or compose coherent sentences, or even to speak with enough clarity that others could understand them at all: your education dollars at work.