Of Company Speeches
whinyMost people wouldn't know this about me, but I spent all four years of high school as an active member of the Speech Team. I wasn't great, but I wasn't bad either; I even won tournaments. But at the very least, during those four years, I learned how to be an attentive listener (or at the very least, fake it extremely well), and I learned what types of elements make up good speeches.
Which is why I'm pained to tears every Monday when the company president delivers his little "beginning of the work week" speech.
Seriously, it hurts me physically. It's not just that the speeches are boring, or painfully repetitive, or in Japanese (although those factors certainly don't help), but they're not particularly good speeches, and it's starting to drive me up the wall. Although there are many many things that I could criticize, these are the parts that drive me up the freaking wall:
( A. The ability to talk for a long period of time does not correspond to good speaking skills. )( B. Be aware that, for better or worse, people tend to remember repeated ideas. )
In other language related news, I was reading up on some recent studies in the field of linguistics (fierce academic rivalries = so freaking hysterical), and I ended up finding a blog about recent linguistics gossip and stuff. It looked fun and not overly academic, so I was thinking about reading it on a more regular basis... until I scrolled down a bit and found an entry pondering the use of the phrase "an hypothesis". The author was actually waffling about whether it was correct or not. I nearly choked. [FYI, "an" versus "a" depends on pronunciation, not spelling, so unless you like to say, "an ai-pothesis", you should use "a".] And this was on a linguistics blog, written by a guy who was apparently studying for his masters. Needless to say, I didn't visit the blog again.