Paul Doran - Speech within Reach

About

The primary purpose of speech is communication and our ancestors have bequeathed us various ingenious inventions to communicate with others, including oral speech, gestures, signs, signals, music, dance, facial expression, and body language. Limiting the definition of speech to the faculty or power of speaking, or the expression of thoughts in spoken words is no longer satisfactory.

Deaf people speak to each other, expressing all the complexity of human thoughts and emotions through signing. Sign languages are full-fledged natural languages with their own grammar and lexicon.

Social media has introduced several different platforms for distanced interactive social engagement. Grammarians argue that texting is more speech than writing, with the emojis as part of the language. Computer-generated speech enables nonverbal people to have a voice.

So surely whichever effective and inclusive communication tool a person uses is speech, making our complex thoughts easier to express and convey meaning to others. As such art, in all its creative formats is another form of speech.

Nowadays we can have a video call with someone on the other side of the world. Yet while we have developed the wonderful technology for interpersonal speech, we have evidently missed its point, communication. The outbreak and continuation of devastating conflicts and wars prove the catastrophic failure of communication at many levels. People feel helpless, some hopeless, as lives become increasingly unstable and perilous, and the world leaders seem unable to stem the killing, maiming, refugee crisis and destruction of countries and economies. Speech must be within reach as outright victory in a nuclear age is preposterous.