Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History Read Online Free PDF Page A

confidence in himself and wrote to his fiancée, “I enjoy it because it sets my mind—all my faculties—aglow; and I suppose that this very excitement gives my manner an appearance of confidence and self-command which arrests the attention. However that may be, I feel a sort of transformation—and it’s hard to go to sleep afterwards.” Later, in an essay on the oratory of William Pitt the Elder, Wilson wrote, “Passion is the pith of eloquence.”
    And on delivery, caveat stentor: when preparing a speech, beware of undeliverable words. “Undeliverable” is one such tripword; it may look easy enough on the page, and it may be easy to pronounce in the mind when read silently, but when the moment comes to push it past your lips, such a word invites a stumble. And if you practice a tripword out loud, and put a check mark over it in your text, you will be all the more sure to stumble. As a young speechwriter, I drafted remarks for New York City’s official greeter, whose assignment was to welcome Syngman Rhee of South Korea. I referred to the visiting president’s “indomitable will”; the greeter, a bumbling former ambassador, knew he would say something like “indomatabubble” and asked for a synonym. When I gave him“indefatigable,” he fired me on the spot; somebody else had to slip him “steadfast.” In retrospect, I now see I was intransigent. (That’s my penance: in reading this aloud, I will surely stumble over “intransigent.”) Embrace the thin word; eschew the fat.
    Beware, too, of words that may vaguely trouble your listeners. A moment ago, I quoted Wilson saying, “Passion is the pith of eloquence.” I know what “pith” means—“nub, core, quintessence”—and so do you. But I would never stand in front of an audience and say “pith”; it sounds like a vulgar word being spoken with a lisp. Nobody would criticize you for it, but you as the speaker or speechwriter are responsible for preventing those little internal winces in the minds of your listeners. They distract attention from the message you want to get across. While we are on the subject of troubling vocabulary, observe how the great speeches steer clear of forty-dollar words. Big words, or terms chosen for their strangeness—I almost said “unfamiliarity”—are a sign of pretension. What do you do when you have a delicious word, one with a little poetry in it, that is just the right word for the meaning—but you know it will sail over the head of your audience? You can use it, just as FDR used “infamy,” and thereby stretch the vocabulary of your listeners. But it is best if you subtly define it in passing, as if you were adding emphasis—as I did a moment ago, with “cynosure, the brilliant object of guidance.” Who knows that a cynosure is a constellation in the heavens that sailors steered by, even among those who use the cliché “cynosure of all eyes”? Who will know what “deltoids” are, when I refer to them in a moment? The speaker will; if he subtly helps his audience, nobody should notice the medicine go down.
    I admit that what you have in your hands is a heavy book. Intellectually weighty, too, but the meaning I have in mind is “hefty”—2.4 pounds, to be exact—nothing to slip into pocket or purse on your way to a speech doctor’s office. “This I freely assert,” said the verb-conscious Franklin Roosevelt, “and I hope my friends in the press do not change that to ‘admit.’” The weight of this book is a boon to both mental and physical health. I once received a thick anthology from Sidney Perelman, the great humorist—it was called
The Most of S. J. Perelman
—and the inscription read, “To William Safire, together with a small jar of antiphlogiston to rub on his deltoids, should you read this compendium in bed.” That sent me to the dictionary: “the deltoids” are the book-holding muscles of the shoulder and Antiphlogiston was the name of a soothing ointment that was rubbed out