People's Pilot, Volume 6, Number 22, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 November 1896 — BLUNDERS OF SPEAKERS. [ARTICLE]

BLUNDERS OF SPEAKERS.

A Well Known Orator Point* Oat Some Homoroaa Instances. Mr. Joseph Malins, himself a well known public speaker, gives The Woman’s Signal some amusing instances of the hnmors of public speaking. It is, he thinks, a lack of fluency that causes the speaker so often to blunder. Mr. Malins has listend to a temperance orator deploring the fact that a friend resorts to “the frequent use of the daily glass. ” He heard a notable lady speaker speak of slum children “brought into the world with no more idea of home comfort than the children of negroes in Africa. ’ ’ One speaker said, “I rise emphatically, ” and another said, “I stand prostrate with astonishment.” Yet another feelingly told bis audience that it was “not the platform speaker, but the house to house visitation and the utterance of the silent word by the caller which did the most good.” The statements that “the previous speaker’s suggestions were very suggestive” and that another speaker’s remarks were “miscalcnlated to mislead” Mr. Malins also mentions. Then there is the speaker who always misplaces his “h’s” and who prays “that we might be brought to the halter. ” There was a flight of fancy when the speaker asked, “Suppose if a modern balloon dropped upon an uninhabited island, what would the natives say?” The scientific lecturer said of his coming experiment that “all depends upon the present condition of the body about to be created. ” A town councilor spoke of “the rivers and streams that abut on the borough boundaries.” Among Mr. Malin’s other examples is the speaker who began with saying, “The proper study of mankind in general is the—the Btudy of mankind in general,” whereupon an archin in the audienoe cried out, “You’re a-goin in at the same hole you came out at. ”

No less embarrassed was the old gentleman, who, stumbling through an after dinner speech, said, “I—l have no more to say, and so—and so—l’ll make a few more remarks. ” The builder frankly declared he was “more fitted for the scaffold than the platform.” Sometimes the chairman errs in welcoming the speaker. A chairman was heard to welcome a speaker as one “who is always with us, and we wish he would come oftener. ” Kind was the announcement that “there will be two more opportunities to hear the lecturer once more. ” It was when the meeting ended that the chairman asked the audience to “close by singing just one verse of the doxology. ”