The Science of Eloquence

Changing your life

“…the encouragement of people troubled with accents that cut them off from all high employment, I may add that the change wrought by Professor Higgins in the flower girl is neither impossible nor uncommon.”

Bernard Shaw. Pygmalion

My favorite musical is My Fair Lady. It is lovely, on its face, but underneath the wit, there is a strong theme. That theme is this; the way you speak can make your life.  It can also break it. That is the message of My Fair Lady. And the theme of the mother play, Pygmalion.

Pygmalion is the creation of the playwright, George Bernard Shaw. The title is based on a Greek myth about an artist that sculpts the perfect woman. He then falls in love with her. Move the action up two thousand years, and we find ourselves in Edwardian London. In this telling of the tale, Shaw gives us, as a lump of clay that has to be formed, a Cockney girl by the name of Eliza Doolittle. Eliza sells flowers on the streets. She is disheveled, dirty, and her language is awful. She is, however, ambitious. Her ambition? To work in a florist shop. To get such a job, Eliza will have to learn to speak well, and behave accordingly.

The action in the play begins when Eliza sees a Professor Henry Higgins taking down her speech. They argue over this. Higgins tells Eliza that he is a phonetician, and that, if she were an apt student, she could change her life by learning to speak, “…like a lady.” Burning with ambition, Eliza shows up the next day at the Higgins home. The professor takes her on as his student, and her journey begins.

Think hero’s journey here, because what Eliza really wants is to change her life by improving herself. She enters the forest of self improvement, and the guide will not go easy on her. Speaking like a lady is serious work, however, it turns her into a lady.

If the term, lady, bothers you, let me rephrase that statement: Speaking like a leader is serious work, however, it will turn her into a leader.

It’s the same difference for the guys who want to turn into men that speak with authority.

You may ask the question, can that be so? Can you change your life by improving your speech? Yes. But there is a hitch. You must desire this change so much, that you are willing to work at it, day and night. Because it ain’t easy to change the way you speak. Especially if you are an adult.

Throughout the ages, schools, and private tutors, corrected not only a child’s grammar, but their diction as well. The schools provided training in the art of good speech. They did this with classes in elocution. Elocution is a partner to the word, eloquence. Elocution teaches eloquent speech. It covers both diction and expressive language. Eliza, being a poor girl, may not have gone to school, or, if she had, she didn’t go far. What Professor Higgins will provide for Eliza is an education in elocution.

There will be more to Eliza’s education than learning the phonemics. Eliza will also need a broader education. Because she will need topics to talk about. We call that, having conversation. Make that, polite conversation. This necessity is discovered by Higgins, and his friend, Col. Pickering, when they take her to Ascot Races on opening day, to try her out. This is one of the most humorous bits in the play when Higgins discovers Eliza’s chit-chat, and conduct, need work. These issues are corrected before the big test presents itself. A grand ball given by a foreign queen. Eliza is dressed to the nines; she presents herself with such elegance the queen is taken with her. Curious as to who she is, the queen has one of her spies speak to Eliza. He is none other than a notorious phonetician, Zoltan Karpathy, who blackmails pretenders by discovering the faux pas in their speech.

After a lengthy conversation with Eliza, Karpathy declares that she is an Hungarian Princess!

Karpathy thinks Eliza is a foreign princess because she speaks English well. During that era, aristocrats from foreign parts learned English very well indeed. Not so much the English people. That fact is a part of what Shaw was telling us.

Methinks Shaw is rolling over in his grave with the dumbed down education happening in our schools. Would that stop Eliza Doolittle? No. Eliza was determined to change. She got lucky when she crossed paths with Higgins, but she didn’t let the argumentative encounter stop her. The light from heaven pushed her into the jaws of hell when she boldly asked Higgins to teach her. If anything demonstrates that she meant business, that is item number one. Item number two is she is willing to suffer to get to where she wants to go. It will cost her physically, because excellent diction is a physical endeavor.

Your mouth is a machine that forms sounds that can be understood by others. The articulators are your tongue, lips, teeth and hard palate. All these parts must coordinate for speech to take place. The more precision in the mouth, the better the speech will sound. The more you will be understood.

How does that change you?

Speech is at one with the brain. If you cannot achieve what you would like to, it is your thinking, your thoughts, that hold you back. Any victim thoughts in your brain? Your speech will reflect it. The timid voice is a dead give away. The flip side of that coin is the blustering voice with the mush mouth.

Whenever I teach the techniques of excellent speaking, the students are astounded with the differences these few adjustments make. Good diction combined with a voice full of focused energy makes a huge difference when they hear, and see, the timid turned bold.

Can you transform yourself?

You must want it badly enough to repeat diction exercises everyday. And learn new words every week. And exercise, not only for your body, but for your brain. You will not only feel the results, your friends will report to you the changes they hear and see.

I suggest you watch My Fair Lady.  Or read Shaw’s Pygmalion. And then, if you find you are an Eliza looking for Henry Higgins, look no further. It will not cost you a million bucks to bring eloquence into your speech. But you will sound like a million bucks, and look it, too

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