| First published in STATNews, vol. 4 no. 11, January 1995. |
Reading this transcript of the 1991 Memorial Lecture, I was surprised just how vividly the memories of that evening came to mind. The evening had been fun and entertaining and I realise, in retrospect, that Paul’s virtuoso performance set off a train of thinking for me that greatly increased my understanding of the whispered ‘ah’ and its relevance to good use.
Paul is an actor, Assistant Head of Training at the Essex School and an enthusiastic word-smith. The style of his lecture (it is written in verse) is well suited to conveying the sense of multifaceted concepts. Aspects of words, themselves, are considered: their use to clarify or disguise the speaker’s intent, their transient nature and their abstract symbolism that enables them to be rearranged to communicate new ideas. But one soon realises that Paul’s main concern is the biological matter that surrounds words: the speaker.
This lecture still has much to offer both the new reader and those of us who found its complexities difficult to fully take in at the end of a long day.
© Malcolm Williamson. Reproduced with permission.
|
This edition © Mouritz 2005. All rights reserved. |
