A Speech Lesson

An extract from Children of the Void

She opened the up-to-date little electrical box, and it transpired to be a portable tape-recorder with small reels. Not quite a dictaphone, but the very smallest of real tape-recorders. And the girls, who, in another world, had been familiar with every manner of electronic home sound-making were as entranced by the appearance of this magical toy as any true child of Quirinelle. Miss Blue, in her wonderful way, conveyed the special magic of the thing while all the time treating it as the most matter-of-fact and worky device imaginable. She plugged it in and turned it on and the girls heard a group of Quirinelle drama-school children singing nursery rhymes, then a lady from the B.B.C. announcing a programme, then a little girl announcing, then some narration from Bill and Ben, then a snatch of a panellist from Twenty Questions, and several other female Quirinelle voices the girls could not identify.

Miss Blue switched off the tape recorder, paused for a moment as the delightful sensation was absorbed and then asked. "Now, girls, what did you notice about all those voices?"

Jane put up her hand.

"Yes, Jane?"

"They were all ladies, miss."

"Yes, indeed, Jane, they were all ladies. What did you expect in Aristasia? Talking fish? Now who else has noticed a very important thing that is common to all the voices?"

There was a pause as no one quite wished to risk a further attempt; but Miss Blue was brisk as well as bright. It would not do to keep her waiting. After a few seconds Susan put up her hand."

"Yes Susan?"

"They all spoke properly, miss."

"Yes, Susan, they all spoke properly. That is quite correct. A goal for the brunettes. Now, I shall forgive the others for failing to remark upon this point, because it ought, of course, to go without saying that they all spoke properly. How else should they speak when they are broadcasting on the wireless or the television -- unless, of course, they are performing in low comedy? It is incumbent upon broadcasters to maintain the highest standards of speech; to set the best possible example; to raise the general standard. And until the Eclipse, the general standard was rising very noticeably.

"However, that was not the case in the dark depths of the Pit. There people aspired not to speak as well as possible, but as badly as possible, and the example set by the broadcasting services was quite deliberately a low and corrupt one. Even the members of their strange, vestigial 'royal family' were trained-specially trained by instructors-to flatten and coarsen their voices lest any should think they continued to uphold some superior standard. In their universities, where the 'Oxford accent' had reigned supreme, that accent was destroyed in a few short decades; rooted out of the mouths even of the majority of older dons who had been speaking it all their lives.

"Why was this, dear children? There were no doubt many excuses and justifications, but the real reason was this: Good English was the mark of a superior caste — of the leaders. But no caste in the Pit was any longer truly in command. The new rulers of the pit were the manipulators of international capital. Monetary control was a great pyramid that overrode and controlled all other forces from governments downward. In that New World Order, every one was reduced to the position of a proletarian except a tiny handful, and every one must be trained to act, think and speak like a proletarian.

Executives of international companies, leaders of intellectual opinion, Prime Ministers of nations — all of them were waged employees, dependent for their livelihood on the same pyramid of financial control. They no longer belonged to a financially independent class of free, civilised, classically-educated people. They belonged to a mass-media-fed lumpen class of dependent employees; and it was important that, in countries where speech was a symbol of status, that their speech should be re-modelled to reflect their new status as dependent proletarians and inferiors.

"The change was extraordinarily sweeping. It affected every one from leading politicians, university professors and broadcasters down to every girl from a good family who, a generation ago, would have spoken in crisp, good English and now talked with contorted vowels and a proletarian slur. Of course the girl herself could hardly hear it. She thought of the new serf-speech as 'normal' and decent English, her natural heritage, as affected. In any family of erstwhile good standing (for good standing meant next to nothing any more) one could almost guarantee that the grandmother would speak very well, the mother in a flat, middling voice and the daughter in bongo-neo-proletarian. A whole generation had been as successfully programmed and re-educated as if they had been a single person. It was chilling, my children. Positively chilling.

"None of that, of course, has anything much to do with us. The Pit is the Pit and this is Aristasia. Whatever they did down there is dead and gone as far as we are concerned. But it is nevertheless important that we should ensure that our own voices are not infected by any creeping contagion from the foetid miasma that hovers above the Pit and occasionally drifts in noxious traces across the pure air of the Celestial Empire. In the matter of speech, this means that we must make very certain that we are speaking the Empress's Aristasian, true and unsullied, both in vocabulary and in pronunciation.

"So let us consider some principles of correct speech. A newspaper reporter once described Miss Marianne Martindale's voice as being 'full of vowels, like a Trentish actress'. She did not use the word 'Trentish', of course. But note where the comma falls in that sentence. She did not mean 'full of vowels like the vowels of a Trentish actress', she meant 'resembling the voice of a Trentish actress in that it was full of vowels'. A curious statement on the face of it. All speech is made up of vowels and consonants, and between every few consonants must fall a vowel or two, one would have thought — unless we were speaking Martian. But no. The reporter was quite right. Bongo speech is increasingly empty of vowels-that is to say, of clear, distinct, differentiated vowels. The lip muscles seem to atrophy, and all the vowels slowly lose their distinction — each one aspiring toward the neutral uh-sound. This is all part of the bongo identity: to appear to be as lax and casual as possible, to ignore distinctions and enunciation and to give the impression taking the least trouble over one's speech. Anything else might smack of superiority, and mind-serfs must never dare to seem superior.

"So where do we begin? First of all, we must listen to the voices of those who do speak properly, like the ones we have heard a moment ago. Listen to them again and again, practice enunciating our own vowels as they do, each one clear and correct and separated by crisp, well-formed consonants. We are going to do that together in a moment, and I want each of you to go home and do some more work of the same sort. Some of you require quite a lot of work, and some of you need only to polish the work you have already done. But those that fall into the second group must not sit back on their laurels. Dear me, no. You must polish, polish, polish. I want the clearest, crispest, most musical and lovely voices in Aristasia. I want fine control and well-modulated expression of every nuance of thought and feeling. Language is the window of our minds and souls, and that window must be clear and bright and beautifully adorned. Excelsior, children. That is the motto of Aristasians. The motto of the Pit is 'lower, ever lower!' But our motto is Excelsior! To the highest!

"Now, before we begin our practice, I want to consider some of the specific things we must listen for and correct in our speech. Above all, we must understand what is specifically Pittish in diction and pronunciation, and avoid it. Because there is, dear children, such a thing as the bongo-accent. It is not just a question of unrefined speech-indeed, even personæ for whom unrefined speech is desirable must learn to use real unrefined speech to replace bongo unrefined speech. So, can any one tell me what is the most salient characteristic of the bongo-accent in southern Pit-england?"

Annalinde's hand shot up.

"Yes, Annalinde?"

"Yeeth and byeety, miss."

"Very good, Annalinde. That is one goal each for the blondes and brunettes. Now I see that some of you are looking a little puzzled by Annalinde's somewhat cryptic reply. What Annalinde is saying is that the most salient characteristic of the English bongo-accent, affecting most of the young professional class, and spreading to much of the southern Pit-English population as a whole, is the thinning of the oo sound to the quality of ee.

"A little story. A short time ago I went down the Pit to a baker's shop where I bought a particular kind of bread. The shop-girl, a pleasant but deeply Pit-poisoned young thing asked me:

'"Would yi like t'cheese?"

"I thought she was saying 'Would you like the cheese?' and was wondering whether some loaves had actually been baked with cheese, or whether there were some cheese-filled rolls which she thought I might wish to buy. I asked her what she meant, and she merely reiterated, in a clearer voice:

"'Would yi like t'cheese?'

"After some consideration and a further repetition, I finally worked out that she was saying 'Would you like to choose?' She wished me to select the individual load I should take.

"Now I understand that this sort of confusion does not arise often in the Pit, because most Pit-dwellers have grown accustomed to the bongo-accent. Many Pit-born girls do not even know what I mean when I speak of this phenomenon, so, if you have the misfortune to go down the Pit, I want you to listen out for it. First familiarise yourself with real English, work on your own oo's especially, then listen carefully to Pit-speech, particularly that of young and ultra-bongo speakers. You will soon hear it in them, and then you will start to hear how, to a lesser, but constantly growing, degree, it is affecting the speech of most other Pit-dwellers. Some less-corrupted speakers say teeoo or tyoo for two, whereas the more corrupted really do practically say tee. Listen out for it.

"This thinned oo has long been current among the bulk of the Australian population, but, when grafted on to the sub-cockney of southern Pit-english proletarianised-middle-class speech, it is a purely bongo phenomenon. I rather fancy it made its first appearance in English universities in the late first or early second decade of darkness, among middle-class undergraduates who had been conditioned to want to stop sounding 'posh' like their parents but did not feel able to adopt fake Cockney accents. They adopted instead a strange, thinned, loose-mouthed speech that represented an uncomfortable and rather embarrassing compromise — a strange, drab, contorted diction that had not grown organically out of any class of English speech; a mutant argot born from the shuffling capitulation of a people robbed of their pride and freedom and commanded to abase themselves; a mongrel-speech that took nothing from lower-class English except its lowness and nothing from middle-class English except its triviality, leaving behind the true worth and beauty of both. Since then, through the mass-media, developments from this mind-serf speech have become Pit-standard, and have filtered back into the speech of the southern Pit-english working class.

"Now girls, pick up your pencils. No, not like that — you are not going to write with them. What are you going to do? You are going to put them in your mouths. Just like this, watch me." She put the end of her pencil about a quarter of an inch into her mouth and closed her scarlet lips about it

"Did you see? Put the pencil in the front of your mouth and form your lips round it. Now take it out and say oo. That is right. Oo. Oo. Ooooooooo.

"That is the way you must always say your oo's. With nice round lips. Don't let your muscles stay lax, make them work. Nice round mouths. Oo. Oo. Oooooo.

"Now say after me:

Who, who is looby loo?

Little rag doll who plays with you."

The girls repeated the rhyme in unison.

"Good girls. Now I want you to keep practising that oo sound. When you hum a popular song such as You're the Cream in My Coffee, don't go 'Deee de dee dee dee deee de' but 'Ooo oo ooo oo oo oooo oo'. Just practise those oo's and that nice round mouth. Think of Vintesse Pippsies and their boop-boop-a-doop.

"And remember: every round oo is a blow against the Pit; an arrow of light in the psychic war -- because that is where the war is fought, my children: in the mind, in the heart and on the lips. The fact that you are only a few, while millions are capitulating to the Octopus and speaking as he commands is of no consequence. Those millions are just baggage. They belong to whoever is in power. They are not warriors — they are the spoils of war. If we controlled their television stations they would speak as we told them. You, my children, the few who choose for themselves, who are not made and moulded by the Enemy: you are the only warriors, the only individuals. Go forth, then and send your shining oo-arrows streaking into the psychic twilight; let the bright blades of your sharpened consonants cut down the hordes of greyness; let the fusillades of your flighted a's fall like thunderbolts upon the gates of darkness. Not alone will they win the War, my children, but upon that lunary plane where the course of the world is decided, they will do more execution than perhaps you can yet understand."

Her eyes were brighter than ever, her cheeks flushed with the fervour of conviction, and as the lesson proceeded with reading aloud, there was an underlying fire in the whole class -- a sense that what might seem to be merely a routine lesson had in fact a deeper and nobler significance. Each girl read her passage with a sense that her vowels and consonants were shining weapons in the battle for light and good and purity against the troglodyte ugliness of the Pit.

For more on the ideas behind this extract, go to the Essay on Proletarianisation at the Harmony Point Penthouse Library