Observations, on December 25

Nothing to do with the holiday, today... except that I have time for a little abstract thinking.

We just removed all the carpet in our home - except for the bedrooms. Replaced it all with tile. The tile my wife chose is very pretty, and the men who laid it did a great job. I love the look, but there is, of course, some of those unintended consequences.

First, the tile has significantly hardened the acoustics. I am seriously hearing impaired, a condition which almost no one with good hearing can understand. Everyone thinks the problem is volume. So they talk louder, which does not help. The problem is intelligibility: I can hear them, I just cannot understand them.

I don't know how to explain what has happened between my ear drums and my brain, but the effect is very disconcerting. If two people talk over each other, I can understand neither. If people talk too fast, it seems my brain cannot process that jumble of words, especially if they are not clearly annunciated.

With our new tile, there is a slight echo effect. I'm sunk, unless I am close enough to the speaker for their voice to drown out the echo.

Watching television, I have great difficulty understanding anyone who does not annunciate like a professional announcer. Even then there are differences. I notice that speakers with a wider mouth annunciate more clearly than do speakers with a narrower mouth.

Sound weird to you? It certainly does to me, but it has proven to be true in countless observations.

As a radio announcer, especially when I went on the air at 5:00 a.m., I did various exercises to "wake up" my lips and tongue. I drove to work in the pre-dawn hours, repeatedly articulating the phrase How Now Brown Cow exaggerating each word, as I spoke.


There was another phrase that helped me to annunciate:
The cow moos, the kitten mews. Each day at noon, we read the news.

A cow never mews, a kitten never moos. We never read the noos... at noon, or at any other time. We only read the news!

Often I listen to TV commentators and wish they would take a break and repeat How now brown cow a few dozen times.

Most conversationalists do not like to be asked to repeat, so I wish I could avoid asking "What did you say?" It is often better to just smile and chuckle, but certainly not always. Sometimes they give you a puzzled look and say "I asked you to please hand me that pencil."  Oh! Sorry.

Okay, enough abstract thinking!