Beauty Queens and Blunders

Of Beauty Queens and Blunders

            I recently read an article on the internet about famous beauty queen quotes. Two of the beauty queen quotes included there caught my eye: Melanie Marquez’ historic reply to the question: What part of your body would you like to change? (A: I won’t change my legs because I’m contented with my long-legged.), and Janina San Miguel’s oft-quoted answer to what role her family plays in her pursuit of the title: Well, my family's role for me is so important b'coz there was the wa- they're, they was the one who's... very... Hahahaha... Oh I'm so sorry, Ahhmm... My pamily... My family... Oh my god... I'm... Ok, I'm so sorry... I... I told you that I'm so confident... Eto, Ahhmm, Wait... Hahahaha, Ahmmm, Sorry guys because this was really my first pageant ever b'coz I'm only 17 years old and ahahaha I, I did not expect that I came from, I came from one of the taf 10. Hmmm, so... but I said dot my family is the most important persons in my life. Thank you." Apparently, content is more important and these blunders didn’t faze the judges from choosing these spunky Pinays as the beauty queens of the night.

            My thoughts immediately flashed back to a Speech class we had this semester. This particular session was extra pressure-filled because we were having an extemporaneous speaking exercise, and our teacher explicitly stated that we should avoid gap-fillers (the ahhmms, uhhs, errs, that we have) and try to make our speech as fluent as possible.

            And sort of like a flashback series in my brain, I remembered another class we had last semester on the strategies in teaching language. My mind specifically picked out this sentence from Wendy Y. K. Lam’s article Raising students’ awareness of the features of real-world listening input: …spoken language is not written language spoken aloud. And precisely because spoken language is NOT written language spoken aloud, we can now let our worried minds go easy on our speech, and rest assured that what we are saying, and how we are saying it, are all perfectly normal. Imagine (well, not really imagine, it’s more of recall) the anxiety and apprehension every one of us have had every time we had to speak and all we could manage were a few squeaky “ums”, “ers” or “uhhs”, not to mention the not infrequent times our mouths also came out with these words for lack of something to say. Now we can breathe a little easier, because these ‘blunders’ are necessary ‘evils’ – they are frequent, and they are normal.

            This is because this is what really happens in real-time conversation. We have gap-fillers, pauses, even fragments, because even if our brains are supermachines, sometimes the wires get tangled and we have a temporary communication breakdown. We utter these uhhs, ahmms, so as not to be filled with the deafening, not to mention awkward, sound of silence.

            While we admire the speakers who really speak smoothly without any gaps at all, generally speaking, real-time communication is a far cry from this formal speech. We make use of pause-fillers (that are awkward but give us time to think of what to say next), the stock phrases that show we have run out of something original to say (but fills unwanted pauses anyway), and we inadvertently repeat the speaker’s message to ourselves to allow us to interpret the message better all because real-time communication is spontaneous, and it all happens very quickly, fleetingly. We can’t really ask a friend to slow down talking so that we can remember what she says; we can’t ask the host to give us a few seconds more to think of what to say; well, we can, of course, but the essence of oral communication is urgency – it happens right then and there. The communication process here works so fast we do not realize it until the words are out. Because if we can after all ask for some time before we reply, hadn’t we better write and save ourselves the trouble of making a blunder? (Butof course speaking is quicker and will guarantee clearer meaning faster than writing does.)

            Now we can all take a break from being language highbrows and bothering about ‘fluent’ speech that doesn’t have any pauses. Hey, this is spoken language, and we’re not reading from a script every time we talk with someone, are we? US writer and columnist Emily Post remarked once that, “Ideal conversation must be an exchange of thought, and not, as many of those who worry most about their shortcomings believe, an eloquent exhibition of wit or oratory.” We’re not making inaugural speeches when we talk about the weather, school, work, or kids – we’re normal people, we ought to talk normally. And that includes non-standard language at the most, sentence fragments, and on-going alterations and self-corrections because believe it or not, this is immediate interaction, and we’re just going to have to deal with these inconveniences. The most important thing is that we exchange thoughts, not just vocabulary, and as Anderson and Lynch have noted, “The listener has the opportunity to indicate understanding or non-understanding, and to intervene when clarification is needed during communication.” If the speaker gets extra time to think of what to say next, then the listener also has extra time to get the meaning of what was said. And if there are any clarifications to make, then we can immediately alert the speaker to it, and thus try to negotiate and clarify meaning. We just have to understand that these pause-fillers are there to “facilitate the speaker’s production and the listener’s processing of speech, and NOT [emphasis mine] to distract the listener’s attention or to impede understanding”, according to Lam. It’s not saying that they’re there to show that we can imitate how native speakers talk and show off to other people; they’re there because they help in effective communication.

            Again, this is not to say that pauses in conversation should be avoided, and that this language is to be tolerated every single time, but this is to remind us that it can’t be helped sometimes and we should not punish ourselves for it. Come to think of it, we are not contestants vying for a crown; we are fledglings learning the feel of the English language. Accidents happen in a live show, a friend cleverly commented, and they really do. Now we know better to just leave them well enough alone, because they indicate effort on both the speaker’s and listener’s part to interpret, express, and negotiate meaning. Poor beauty queens, they are the ones suffering the brunt of our obsession with smooth, free-flowing speech that has to be impromptu, when they can after all use pause-fillers and repeat, reformulate, and rephrase. It’s good that we know the liberating truth of the matter and can share it to other people.