Speech Introduction Quotes

Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations.

I was astonished, bewildered. This was America, a country where, whatever its faults, people could speak, write, assemble, demonstrate without fear. It was in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. We were a democracy... But I knew it wasn't a dream; there was a painful lump on the side of my head... The state and its police were not neutral referees in a society of contending interests. They were on the side of the rich and powerful. Free speech? Try it and the police will be there with their horses, their clubs, their guns, to stop you. From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country--not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black people, but something rotten at the root. The situation required not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society--cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian.

The hearer must be of one mind with the speaker, my son, and of one spirit as well; he must have hearing quicker than the speech of the speaker.

The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.

What fetters the mind and benumbs the spirit is ever the dogged acceptance of absolutes.

Preserving freedom of speech maximizes the chance of truth emerging from its collision with error and half-truth.

Milton's learned vocabulary [...] and his distant perspectives, represent the authoritative unintelligibility of the parents' speech as heard by the child.

Then he read the first sentence from the introduction: Without question this modern American dictionary is one of the most surprisingly complex and profound documents ever to be created, for it embodies unparalleled etymological detail, reflecting not only superb lexicographic scholarship, but also the dreams and speech and imaginative talents of millions of people over thousands of years—for every person who has ever spoken or written in English has had a hand in its making.

Professor Osterweis taught us how to structure a speech: introduction, three main points, peroration, and conclusion.

Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions, and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols.

Even if I believe my opinion to be true, and am highly confident about its truth, unless it is ‘fully, frequently and fearlessly’ discussed, I will end up holding it as a dead dogma, a formulaic and unthinking response.

In a speech at Bar Ilan university, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the first time endorses the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Free speech does indeed cause hurt—but there is nothing wrong in this. Knowledge advances through the destruction of bad ideas. Mockery

Human knowledge progresses when people recognize that they may be wrong even on issues that seem certain to them. Wisdom involves openness to those who disagree with us. It is only when our ideas have been subjected to criticism and all objections considered—if necessary seeking these objections out—that we have any right to think of our judgement as better than another’s.

Central to Mill’s approach throughout On Liberty is his ‘Harm Principle’, the idea that individual adults should be free to do whatever they wish up to the point where they harm another person in the process. Mill’s principle is apparently straightforward: the only justification for interference with someone’s freedom to live their life as they choose is if they risk harming other people.

Propagandists reveal themselves through their use of tricks such as "name-calling", employing "glittering generalities", "plain folks" identifications, "card stacking", "bandwagon" devices, and so on. Such devices could be identified easily in many religious and political speeches, even in academic lectures, and this approach to propaganda analysis led to a kind of witch-hunt for propagandists.

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.

One reason why false and offensive speech is permitted in most liberal democracies is precisely because the best answer to bad speech is good speech, rather than censorship.

The totality of utterances that can be made in a speech community is the language of that speech community.

Free speech is one of the core values in a democracy and it should be championed with a vengeance.

Anyone who silences someone else because they believe the other person’s opinion is false assumes infallibility. They must be absolutely certain that they are correct on the matter.

Job was comfortless before the speech of Jehovah and is comforted after it. He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told.

The idea that religious beliefs but not others should receive special protection is bizarre: all types of belief should be open to scrutiny, criticism, parody, and potentially ridicule in a free society. Indeed,

If you only know your own side of a case, then your belief is likely to be inadequate. You need to be able to refute counter-arguments to your position otherwise you aren’t justified in your belief even if it happens to be true.

I am your darkest nightmare. I am your death.” Wow, someone had definitely given him the Introduction to Sounding Like a Poncy Asshole seminar before sending him out into the world. I rolled my eyes at his speech, which reeked like an old Lugosi movie.

If we silence those who utter falsehoods, we run the risk of becoming dogmatic, of believing without understanding, or feeling passionate about the evidence supporting our beliefs. We also run the risk that such false beliefs will be given greater credence by the very fact that they are suppressed rather than openly refuted.

I hope that we can start to see what Jesus was about in a rather richer way. One of the things that Jesus was about was that he was creating faith. He was doing something so that we could believe. Effectively he was saying “I know that you are susceptible. I know that you find it very difficult to believe that God loves you. I know that you are inclined to be frightened of death. And because of that you are inclined to run from death, mete it out to others and engage in all sorts of forms of self-delusion and self-destruction. You find it difficult to imagine that things really will be well and that you are being held in being by someone who is utterly trustworthy. All this I know.” “What I want to do is to try to nudge you into being able to trust that the One who brought you and everything into being is actually trustable, not out to get you. You can believe him. Believe in him, believe in me. I am going to act out in such a way as to make it possible for you to believe — I am setting out to prove God’s trustworthiness for you.” In fact, in John’s Gospel the very phrase appears “Believe in God, believe also in me ... and now I have told you before it takes place, so that when it does take place, you may believe.”1 John actually frames Jesus’ speech before the Passion as a discussion by which Jesus explains how he is inducing belief.

Mill sets out several related arguments for protecting freedom of speech, not just from oppressive government intervention, but also from social pressures. Underlying them all are the assumptions that (a) truth is valuable, and (b) no matter how certain someone is that they know the truth, their judgement is still fallible: they might still be wrong.

If the view is correct, then humanity misses the opportunity to exchange truth for error. If, however, the view is misguided, then we forfeit an opportunity to reinforce truth through its collision with error. Every opinion has value for us either because it is true, or else because, though false, it reinforces the truth and contributes to its emergence.

Through the teachings, the introduction by the master, the practice, and the blessings, you can gradually deconstruct and dissolve the karmic conceptual body and be introduced to another type of body and identity called the illusory wisdom body (yeshé gyumé lü). This second body is characterized by wisdom—realization of the truth—and by a positive sense of the illusory.

Mill is particularly concerned that minority opinions should not be silenced just because they are held by very few people. Unfashionable ideas have potential value for the whole of humanity, even if only held by one person: If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

I'm in the unique position of being able to call my brother, straight out, a non-stop talker - which is a pretty vile thing to call somebody, I think - and yet at the same time to sit back, rather, I'm afraid, like a type with both sleeves full of aces, and effortlessly remember a whole legion of mitigating factors (and 'mitigating' is hardly the word for it). I can condense them all into one: By the time Seymour was in mid-adolescence - sixteen, seventeen - he not only had learned to control his native vernacular, his many, many less than elite New York speech mannerisms, but had by then already cone into his own true, bull's-eye, poet's vocabulary. His non-stop talks, his monologues, his nearharangues then came as close to pleasing from start to finish - for a good many of as, anyway -as, say, the bulk of Beethoven's output after lie ceased being encumbered with a sense of hearing, and maybe I'm thinking especially, though it seems a trifle picky, of the B-flat-major and C-sharp-minor quartets. Still, we were a family of seven children, originally. And, as it happened, none of us was in the least tongue-tied. It's an exceedingly weighty matter when six naturally profuse verbalizers and expounders have an undefeatable champion talker in the house. True, he never sought the title. And he passionately yearned to see one or another of us outpoint or simply outlast him in a conversation or an argument. Аз съм стигнал до завидното положение да мога направо да нарека брат си кречетало — което не е много ласкателно — и същевременно да седя спокойно, сякаш съм пълен господар на положението, и без усилие да си припомням цяла редица смекчаващи вината обстоятелства (при все че „смекчаващи вината“ едва ли е най-подходящият израз в случая). Мога да ги обобщя в едно: по времето, когато Сиймор бе достигнал средата на юношеската си възраст — на шестнайсет-седемнайсет години, — той не само владееше до съвършенство родния си език с всичките му тънкости, но си беше създал и собствен, много точен поетически речник. Неговата говорливост, неговите монолози, неговите едва ли не прокламации звучеха почти толкова приятно — поне за мнозина от нас, — колкото, да речем, повечето от творбите на Бетховен, създадени, след като се е освободил от бремето на слуха; макар и да звучи претенциозно, тук имам предвид по-специално квартетите в си бемол мажор и до диез миньор. В нашето семейство бяхме седем деца. И нито едно от тях не беше лишено в ни най-малка степен от дар слово. Е, не е ли голямо тегло, когато шестима словоохотливци и тълкуватели имат в къщата си един непобедим шампион по речовитост? Вярно, той никога не се е стремил към тази титла. Дори жадуваше някой от нас да го надмине ако не по красноречие, то поне до дългоречие в някой спор или прост разговор.

The assumptions that propagandists are rational, in the sense that they follow their own propaganda theories in their choice of communications, and that the meanings of propagandists' communications may differ for different people reoriented the FCC* analysts from a concept of "content as shared" (Berelson would later say "manifest") to conditions that could explain the motivations of particular communicators and the interests they might serve. The notion of "preparatory propaganda" became an especially useful key for the analysts in their effort to infer the intents of broadcasts with political content. In order to ensure popular support for planned military actions, the Axis leaders had to inform; emotionally arouse, and otherwise prepare their countrymen and women to accept those actions; the FCC analysts discovered that they could learn a great deal about the enemy's intended actions by recognizing such preparatory efforts in the domestic press and broadcasts. They were able to predict several major military and political campaigns and to assess Nazi elites' perceptions of their situation, political changes within the Nazi governing group, and shifts in relations among Axis countries. Among the more outstanding predictions that British analysts were able to make was the date of deployment of German V weapons against Great Britain. The analysts monitored the speeches delivered by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels and inferred from the content of those speeches what had interfered with the weapons' production and when. They then used this information to predict the launch date of the weapons, and their prediction was accurate within a few weeks. *FCC - Federal Communications Commission

INTRODUCTION TO GENDER AND SOCIETY The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir A classic analysis of the Western conception of the woman. Feminism Is for Everybody by bell hooks A primer about the power and potential of feminist action. We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Feminism redefined for the twenty-first century. QUEER THEORY AND INTERSECTIONAL FEMINISM Gender Trouble by Judith Butler A classic, and groundbreaking, text about gender and the boundaries of identity. Gender Outlaw by Kate Bornstein A 1990s-era memoir of transition and nonbinary identity. This Bridge Called My Back ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa A collection of essays about the intersections between gender, class, sexuality, and race. Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde A landmark collection of essays and speeches by a lauded black lesbian feminist. The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston A memoir of growing up as a Chinese American woman. MODERN HISTORY How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective ed. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor A history of the Combahee River Collective, a group of radical black feminists operating in the 1960s and 1970s. And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts Investigative reportage about the beginning of the AIDS crisis. A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski An LGBT history of the United States, from 1492 to the present. CONTEMPORARY QUESTIONS Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus by Vanessa Grigoriadis An exploration of the effects of the sexual revolution in American colleges. The End of Men: And the Rise of Women by Hanna Rosin A book about the shifting power dynamics between men and women. Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay Essays about the author’s experiences as a woman and our cultural understanding of womanhood. All the Single Ladies by Rebecca Traister An investigation into the lives of twenty-first-century unmarried women. GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN FICTION Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown A groundbreaking lesbian coming-of-age novel, originally published in 1973. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin A classic of morality and desire, set in 1950s Paris, about an American man and his relationship with an Italian bartender. Angels in America by Tony Kushner A Pulitzer Prize–winning play about the Reagan-era AIDS epidemic. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson A coming-of-age and coming-out novel about a woman growing up in an evangelical household.

When it comes to speaking about sin, Paul is clear in his message to the Jews that the law cannot justify them, that moral effort cannot save them (Acts 13:39). In effect, Paul is saying to Bible believers, “You think you are good, but you aren’t good enough!” However, his approach with a pagan audience is to urge them to turn from “worthless things” — idols — “to the living God,” who is the true source of “joy” (Acts 14:15–17). In effect, Paul says, “You think you are free, but you are enslaved to dead idols.” Paul varies his use of emotion and reason, his vocabulary, his introductions and conclusions, his figures of speech and illustrations, his identification of the audience’s concerns, hopes, and needs. In every case, he adapts his gospel presentation to his hearers.5

When it comes to linguistic form, Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam.

Without free expression humankind may be robbed of ideas that would otherwise have contributed to its development. Preserving freedom of speech maximizes the chance of truth emerging from its collision with error and half-truth. It also reinvigorates the beliefs of those who would otherwise be at risk of holding views as dead dogma.

The object of this essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties or the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is that the sole end for which mankind are warranted individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise or even right.

If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

For Mill, the acknowledgment of his or her own fallibility is part of what makes someone a serious thinker. Human knowledge progresses when people recognize that they may be wrong even on issues that seem certain to them. Wisdom involves openness to those who disagree with us. It is only when our ideas have been subjected to criticism and all objections considered—if necessary seeking these objections out—that we have any right to think of our judgement as better than another’s.

In a civilized society freedom to offend should be protected, but

To counter apathy, most change agents focus on presenting an inspiring vision of the future. This is an important message to convey, but it’s not the type of communication that should come first. If you want people to take risks, you need first to show what’s wrong with the present. To drive people out of their comfort zones, you have to cultivate dissatisfaction, frustration, or anger at the current state of affairs, making it a guaranteed loss. “The greatest communicators of all time,” says communication expert Nancy Duarte—who has spent her career studying the shape of superb presentations—start by establishing “what is: here’s the status quo.” Then, they “compare that to what could be,” making “that gap as big as possible.” We can see this sequence in two of the most revered speeches in American history. In his famous inaugural address, President Franklin D. Roosevelt opened by acknowledging the current state of affairs. Promising to “speak the whole truth, frankly and boldly,” he described the dire straits of the Great Depression, only then turning to what could be, unveiling his hope of creating new jobs and forecasting, “This great nation . . . will revive and will prosper. . . . The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” When we recall Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, epic speech, what stands out is a shining image of a brighter future. Yet in his 16-minute oration, it wasn’t until the eleventh minute that he first mentioned his dream. Before delivering hope for change, King stressed the unacceptable conditions of the status quo. In his introduction, he pronounced that, despite the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation, “one hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.” Having established urgency through depicting the suffering that was, King turned to what could be: “But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.” He devoted more than two thirds of the speech to these one-two punches, alternating between what was and what could be by expressing indignation at the present and hope about the future. According to sociologist Patricia Wasielewski, “King articulates the crowd’s feelings of anger at existing inequities,” strengthening their “resolve that the situation must be changed.” The audience was only prepared to be moved by his dream of tomorrow after he had exposed the nightmare of today.

For words and language are not wrappings in which things are packed for the commerce of those who write and speak. It is in words and language that things first come into being and are.

THE GRANDEST, MOST eloquent evocation of Depression-era populism came from the Lincoln biographer Carl Sandburg, whose 1936 offering was a book-length poem called The People, Yes. Aside from its iconic title, the work is almost completely forgotten today, a strange outlier amidst the last century’s highbrow taste in poetry. Sandburg’s verse is not abstract; it is not avant-garde. But let us put our cynicism aside for a moment. As the title suggests, The People, Yes was a full-throated celebration of ordinariness: the manners of the people, their dreams, their folly, their aspirations, and above all their speech, the “plain and irregular sounds and echoes from / the roar and whirl of street crowds, work gangs, sidewalk clamor,” as he wrote in the introduction. As with Ballad for Americans and so many other works of the time, there is a compulsive listing of identities, repeated efforts to name-check everyone. Sandburg gives us cantos that are lists of occupations, cantos made up of slang expressions and lines from folktales and popular jokes. There are strikers, angry farmers, tricksters, soldiers, armies, and, of course, a big fat rich guy, ordering others off his property. Naturally Sandburg attacks the elite, mocking the pretenses of aristocracy and reminding his Depression-era audience of something they knew all too well—that justice treats rich and poor differently. He reminds us that bank robbers go to prison but, if you’re a bank officer who loots the company, “all you have to do is start another bank.

Study Questions Define the terms deaf and hard of hearing. Why is it important to know the age of onset, type, and degree of hearing loss? What is the primary difference between prelingual and postlingual hearing impairments? List the four major types of hearing loss. Describe three different types of audiological evaluations. What are some major areas of development that are usually affected by a hearing impairment? List three major causes of hearing impairment. What issues are central to the debate over manual and oral approaches? Define the concept of a Deaf culture. What is total communication, and how can it be used in the classroom? Describe the bilingual-bicultural approach to educating pupils with hearing impairments. In what two academic areas do students with hearing impairments usually lag behind their classmates? Why is early identification of a hearing impairment critical? Why do professionals assess the language and speech abilities of individuals with hearing impairments? List five indicators of a possible hearing loss in the classroom. What are three indicators in children that may predict success with a cochlear implant? Identify five strategies a classroom teacher can use to promote communicative skills and enhance independence in the transition to adulthood. Describe how to check a hearing aid. How can technology benefit individuals with a hearing impairment?

Individuals who are hard of hearing are those in whom the sense of hearing, although defective, is functional either with or without a hearing aid. For these persons, the use of a hearing aid is frequently necessary or desirable to enhance residual hearing (Owens & Farinella, 2019). The extent to which persons with hearing impairment have difficulty developing speech and language is heavily influenced by the degree of hearing loss.

A prelingual hearing loss occurs prior to the development of speech and language while a postlingual impairment refers to a hearing loss manifesting itself after the acquisition of speech and language.

Almost any positive good [positive liberty] can be described in terms of freedom from something [negative liberty]. Health is freedom from disease; happiness is a life free from flaws and miseries; equality is freedom from advantage and disadvantage.. Faced with this flexibility, the theorist will need to prioritize some freedoms and discount others. At its extreme we may get the view that only some particular kind of life makes for ‘real freedom’. Real freedom might, for instance, be freedom the bondage of desire, as in Buddhism and Stoicism. Or it might be a kind of self-realization or self-perfection only possible in a community of similarly self-realized individuals, pointing us towards a communitarian, socialist, or even communist ideal. To a laissez-faire capitalist, it is freedom from more than minimal necessary political and legal interference in the pursuit of profit. But the rhetoric of freedom will typically just disguise the merits or demerits of the political order being promoted. The flexibility of the term ‘freedom’ undoubtedly plays a huge role in the rhetoric of political demands, particularly when the language of rights mingles with the language of freedom. ‘We have a right to freedom from…’ is not only a good way, but the best way to start a moral or political demand. Freedom is a dangerous word, just because it is an inspirational one. The modern emphasis on freedom is problematically associated with a particular self-image. This is the 'autonomous' or self-governing and self-driven individual. This individual has the right to make his or her own decisions. Interference or restraint is lack of respect, and everyone has a right to respect. For this individual, the ultimate irrationality would be to alienate his freedom, for instance by joining a monastery that requires unquestioning obedience to a superior, or selling himself into slavery to another. The self-image may be sustained by the thought that each individual has the same share of human reason, and an equal right to deploy this reason in the conduct of his or her own life. Yet the 'autonomous' individual, gloriously independent in his decision-making, can easily seem to be a fantasy. Not only the Grand Unifying Pessimisms, but any moderately sober reflection on human life and human societies, suggest that we are creatures easily swayed, constantly infected by the opinions of others, lacking critical self-understanding, easily gripped by fantastical hopes and ambitions. Our capacity for self-government is spasmodic, and even while we preen ourselves on our critical and independent, free and rational decisions, we are slaves of fashion and opinion and social and cultural forces of which we are ignorant. A little awareness of ethics will make us mistrustful of sound-bite-sized absolutes. Even sacred freedoms meet compromises, and take us into a world of balances. Free speech is sacred. Yet the law does not protect fraudulent speech, libellous speech, speech describing national secrets, speech inciting racial and other hatreds, speech inciting panic in crowded places, and so on. In return, though, we gain freedom from fraud, from misrepresentation of our characters and our doings, from enemy incursions, from civil unrest, from arbitrary risks of panic in crowds. For sure, there will always be difficult cases. There are websites giving people simple recipes on how to make bombs in their kitchens. Do we want a conception of free speech that protects those? What about the freedom of the rest of us to live our lives without a significant risk of being blown up by a crank? It would be nice if there were a utilitarian calculus enabling us to measure the costs and benefits of permission and suppression, but it is hard to find one.

Short and long bios Contracts Cover page and introduction to a proposal Engagement letter Quick blurb/elevator speech—what do you do? What are your focus areas? Letters of recommendation Logo and company graphic art Nondisclosure agreements Presentations of all sorts Progress reports Proposals and statements of work Publications list Marketing trifold (less important now than in the past) Work programs and check-off lists Examples of frequently requested spreadsheets. For example, you may be in a business that uses six sigma for quality control. Graphs, statistical reports, and so on can typically be modified quickly from one client to the next. Unless you are in the graphic arts or publications business itself, there is no need to be original. Inspiring ideas permeate the Internet.

An incapacitous patient who becomes pregnant may be forced, against her will, to have an abortion. The judgment will typically be expressed in the language of the best interests both of the mother and of the welfare (were it to be born) of the child. What’s happening here? The maternal best interests part of the analysis is fairly straightforward. This isn’t really an abortion against the mother’s will. She’s got no (rightly directed) will. But what about the interests of the putative child? A couple of points. First: it is given a voice in the debate (although for other purposes it has no legal existence) because it is convenient for it to have it. It will obligingly deliver a speech saying that it doesn’t want to exist, and will then shut up. It’s allowed no other speech. Second: in the law of the UK and in many other jurisdictions a child cannot bring a claim based on the assertion ‘It were better that my mother had not borne me.’ It’s regarded as offensive to public policy: see, for instance, McKay v Essex AHA (1982).

how to structure a speech: introduction, three main points, peroration, and conclusion.

1. “Whether a first impression is made by way of a mere glance, a warm smile, a visit to your website, your poise and speech, or a formal introduction, it sets the stage for your relationships, personally and professionally.

As a Gospel, Matthew is an ancient biography, and the information treated in the introduction to the Gospels in general also applies to Matthew. But just as other ancient biographies differed from one another even when they described the same person, so do the four Gospels. Of the four Gospels, Matthew is the most carefully arranged by topic and therefore lends itself most easily to a hierarchical outline. Along with John, Matthew is also an emphatically Jewish Gospel; Matthew moves in a thought world resembling that of the emerging rabbinic movement (the circle of Jewish sages and law-teachers) more than do the other Synoptic Gospels. (Our sources for rabbinic Judaism are later than the NT, but later rabbis avoided early Christian writings, so the frequent parallels—sometimes even in sayings and expressions, for which see, e.g., Mt 7:2; 18:20; 19:3, 24; 21:21; 22:2; 23:25—presumably stem from concepts, customs and figures of speech already circulating among sages in the first century.)

An introduction to a speech should have four components. First, you should introduce yourself. If you’re speaking to a large external audience, provide one paragraph about yourself for someone else to read as an introduction. Résumés are too long and detailed; select the specific facts to be included in a one-paragraph introduction. If you’re speaking to an internal meeting, make sure that everyone knows who you are—your formal position as well as your role in whatever endeavor you will be discussing.

In an ironic counterpoint to God’s voice, Mark next uses the speech of a demon to reveal Jesus’ hidden identity. When driven from a man he has possessed, the demon angrily declares: “I know who you are—the Holy One of God” (1: 25). Whereas Mark’s human characters fail to recognize Jesus’ true nature until after his death, supernatural entities, including “unclean spirits,” know and fear him. In a typically Markan paradox, human opponents accuse Jesus of being an agent of Beelzebub, “the prince of demons”—allegedly the source of his supernatural power—while the demons themselves testify that Jesus is “the Son of God” (3: 11, 22–28). Mark draws further on the questionable testimony of evil spirits when describing the Gerasene demoniac: The satanic “Legion” boldly announces that Jesus is “son of the Most High God” (5: 1–13).

The DUCE diverted funds intended for the Fiume adventure, and used them for His own election campaign. He was arrested for the illegal possession of arms, sent parcel bombs to the Archbishop of Milan and its mayor, and after election was, as is well-known, responsible for the assassination of Di Vagno and Matteoti. Since then He has been responsible for the murders of Don Mizzoni Amendola, the Rosselli brothers, and the journalist Piero Gobetti, quite apart from the hundreds who have been the victims of His squadistri in Ferrara, Ravenna and Trieste, and the thousands who have perished in foreign places whose conquest was useless and pointless. We Italians remain eternally grateful for this, and consider that so much violence has made us a superior race, just as the introduction of revolvers into Parliament and the complete destruction of constitutional democracy have raised our institutions to the greatest possible heights of civilisation. Since the illegal seizure of power, Italy has known an average of five acts of political violence per diem, the DUCE has decreed that 1922 is the new Annus Domini, and He was pretended to be a Catholic in order to dupe the Holy Father into supporting Him against the Communists, even though He really is one Himself. He has completely suborned the press by wrecking the premises of dissident newspapers and journals. In 1923 he invaded Corfu for no apparent reason, and was forced to withdraw by the League of Nations. In 1924 He gerrymandered the elections, and He has oppressed minorities in the Tyrol and the North-East. He sent our soldiers to take part in the rape of Somalia and Libya, drenching their hands in the blood of innocents, He has doubled the number of the bureaucracy in order to tame the bourgeoisie, He has abolished local government, interfered with the judiciary, and purportedly has divinely stopped the flow of lava on Mt Etna by a mere act of will. He has struck Napoleonic attitudes whilst permitting Himself to be used to advertise Perugina chocolates, He has shaved his head because He is ashamed to be seen to be going bald, He has been obliged to hire a tutor to teach Him table manners, He has introduced the Roman salute as a more hygienic alternative to the handshake, He pretends not to need spectacles, He has a repertoire of only two facial expression, He stands on a concealed podium whilst making speeches because He is so short, He pretends to have studied economics with Pareto, and He has assumed infallibility and encouraged the people to carry His image in marches, as though He were a saint. He is a saint, of course. He has (and who are we to disagree?) declared Himself greater than Aristotle, Kant, Aquinas, Dante, Michelangelo, Washington, Lincoln, and Bonaparte, and He has appointed ministers to serve Him who are all sycophants, renegades, racketeers, placemen, and shorter than He is. He is afraid of the Evil Eye and has abolished the second person singular as a form of address. He has caused Toscanini to be beaten up for refusing to play 'Giovinezza', and He has appointed academicians to prove that all great inventions were originally Italian and that Shakespeare was the pseudonym of an Italian poet. He has built a road through the site of the forum, demolishing fifteen ancient churches, and has ordered a statue of Hercules, eighty metres high, which will have His own visage, and which so far consists of a part of the face and one gigantic foot, and which cannot be completed because it has already used up one hundred tons of metal.

The reality of archaic civilization was centralization of political power, class stratification, the magnification of military power, the economic exploitation of the weak, and the universal introduction of some form of forced labor for both productive and military purposes. As against these undeniable realities we must also cite the major achievements of archaic society: the maintenance of peace within the realm, more productive agriculture, the opening of markets for long-range trade, and significant achievements in architecture, art, and literature. But equally important was, with the help of a literate elite, a new effort to give political power a moral meaning. The archaic king was almost always depicted as a warrior, as a defender of the realm against barbarians on the frontiers and rebels within; as such he embodied a powerful element of dominance. But he was also seen, and probably increasingly as archaic societies matured, as the defender of justice, in Mesopotamia and Egypt as the good shepherd, in Western Zhou as father and mother of his people. Gods as well as kings were increasingly thought of not only as dominant but also as nurturant. The very appeal to ethical standards of legitimacy for both gods and kings, however, opened new possibilities for political and theological reflection. In the axial age a new kind of upstart, the moral upstart who relies on speech, not force, would appear, foreshadowed as we have seen, by voices already raised in archaic societies.

English is far from alone in its poor fit between speech and writing: all languages with alphabetic writing systems present inconsistencies of this kind to a greater or lesser degree. The reason, in a nutshell, is that pronunciation changes too rapidly for spelling to keep up, with the result that writing systems are often a better guide to the way languages used to sound than to the way they are spoken now.

Very broadly, empiricists were (and are) concerned with the recording and analysis of observable facts of language structure as revealed in speech and writing, while rationalists seek to account for language in terms of innate abilities or ideas. Linked to the latter is a concern with finding universals, i.e. features common to all languages rather than just to individual ones.

The relationship between spelling and speech can be ridiculously idiosyncratic, as seen in this example from English: 1 ought [ɔ:] 2 through [ʉ:] 3 cough [ɔf] 4 thorough [ə] 5 Lough [ɔx] 6 hiccough [ʌp] 7 though [əɷ] 8 drought [aɷ] 9 rough

Keynes’s ‘Open Letter’ to Roosevelt in 1933, sounded, writes Herbert Stein, ‘like the letter from a school teacher to the very rich father of a very dull pupil’. In Savannah, in March 1946, for the inaugural meeting of the International Monetary Fund, Keynes made a speech in which he hoped that ‘there is no malicious fairy, no Carabosse’ who had not been invited to the party. The reference was to Tchaikovsky’s ballet, Sleeping Beauty, but Frederic Vinson the US Secretary of the Treasury, took it personally. ‘I don’t mind being called malicious, but I do mind being called a fairy,’ he growled.

As you can see, the way Peter describes Jesus and the salvation he brings corresponds with the views that we found in the Gospel according to Luke. Jesus' death does not bring an atonement (contrast Mark's Gospel). It is a miscarriage of justice. Nor does Jesus' resurrection, in itself, bring salvation. It instead demonstrates Jesus' vindication by God. How then do Jesus' death and resurrection affect a person's standing before God, according to this evangelistic speech in Acts? When people recognize how maliciously Jesus was treated, they realize their own guilt before God—even if they were not present at Jesus' trial. They have committed sins, and the death of Jesus is a symbol of the worst sin imaginable, the execution of the prophet chosen by God. The news of Jesus' death and vindication drives people to their knees in repentance. When they turn from their sins and join the community of Christian believers (through baptism), they are forgiven and granted salvation. Thus salvation for Luke does not come through the death of Jesus per se; it comes through repentance and the forgiveness of sins.

The audience was confused. These meetings usually followed a predictable script: A new CEO would start with an introduction, make a faux self-deprecating joke—something about how he slept his way through Harvard Business School—then promise to boost profits and lower costs. Next would come an excoriation of taxes, business regulations, and sometimes, with a fervor that suggested firsthand experience in divorce court, lawyers. Finally, the speech would end with a blizzard of buzzwords—“synergy,” “rightsizing,” and “co-opetition”—at which point everyone could return to their offices, reassured that capitalism was safe for another day.

One man sets great value on fasting, and believes himself to be leading a very devout life, so long as he fasts rigorously, although the while his heart is full of bitterness;--and while he will not moisten his lips with wine, perhaps not even with water, in his great abstinence, he does not scruple to steep them in his neighbour's blood, through slander and detraction. Another man reckons himself as devout because he repeats many prayers daily, although at the same time he does not refrain from all manner of angry, irritating, conceited or insulting speeches among his family and neighbours. This man freely opens his purse in almsgiving, but closes his heart to all gentle and forgiving feelings towards those who are opposed to him; while that one is ready enough to forgive his enemies, but will never pay his rightful debts save under pressure. Meanwhile all these people are conventionally called religious, but nevertheless they are in no true sense really devout. When Saul's servants sought to take David, Michal induced them to suppose that the lifeless figure lying in his bed, and covered with his garments, was the man they sought; and in like manner many people dress up an exterior with the visible acts expressive of earnest devotion, and the world supposes them to be really devout and spiritual-minded, while all the time they are mere lay figures, mere phantasms of devotion. But, in fact, all true and living devotion presupposes the love of God;

Sociolinguists have now largely abandoned the notion of ‘natural speech’, on the grounds that all speech is designed with an audience in mind.

Diglossia may or may not involve individual bilingualism. In many diglossic situations, speakers control both varieties and use them according to the circumstances of the speech situation. Early-nineteenth-century Tsarist Russia, on the other hand, was a diglossic society with very little bilingualism: the French-speaking elite generally did not speak Russian (L) and the peasantry generally had little French (H).

A more ambitious law, passed in 1994 by the then Culture minister Jacques Toubon (inevitably dubbed ‘Monsieur Allgood’ in the French popular press), proved equally controversial. Parties of the right and far left, for different reasons, approved the measure, but objections from centrists and the Socialist party were upheld by France’s Constitutional court, on the grounds that the constitutional right to free speech could not be maintained if the state dictated the words in which it could be expressed. This left an awkward legal limbo in which public sector employees were obliged to use the prescribed terms, but restrictions were not extended to the private sphere.

Although independent of grammar, sound changes might well have important consequences for the grammatical system. A good example is the extreme erosion of final consonants in French, which has left singular and plural sounding identical in many cases. Labov (1994: 569) quotes a speech by Charles De Gaulle in Madagascar in which he states: ‘Je m’adresse aux peuples français – au pluriel’ (‘I address the French peoples – in the plural’), clearly feeling the need to add ‘au pluriel’ because singular au peuple and plural aux peuples [opæpl] are homophonous.

The feeling of complete, absorbing, unqualified love. The baby was a stranger, without speech, unknowable. It would be years before he could say what was on his mind. And yet, love did not wait. Love was there in the beginning--even before the beginning. Love needed no words, no introduction. Existence was enough.

Building the church with human wisdom or eloquent speech that circumvents the Cross is building with wood, hay, and stubble.

Introductions Matter If you want people to know that you’re a mind reader, particularly if you plan on trying to use your skills as a parlor game and show off what you can do, then you need to introduce yourself properly. Say things like “I can somewhat read minds, but tend to get “feelings” one way or another rather than clear specifics” or “I can try to read your mind, but it depends on how acute my powers are right now.” This primes them to not expect an exact answer. However, if you don’t want people to know what you can do, don’t say any of the above and simply say your name and shake their hands, while paying attention to their speech, handshake firmness and other details, of course.

Be careful of the person who insists, “You can’t legislate morality!” Whether that statement is true depends on what is meant by “morality.” If moral beliefs, motives, or intentions are meant, then those certainly cannot be legislated. In fact, the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of religion and speech, was written to keep the state out of the business of imposing beliefs on its citizens. That is, it was to protect the church from the state, not to protect the state from the church. A person’s genuine moral intent is changed by persuasion, not coercion, since intent has to do with one’s free choices. But if by morality one means “moral behavior,” then that can be, and is, legislated virtually every day around the world.

minority opinions should not be silenced just because they are held by very few people. Unfashionable ideas have potential value for the whole of humanity, even if only held by one person: If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

In fact, it is pretty certain that within, say, 20 or 30 years, local differences would have emerged, so that at minimum there were local accents. Given that the world changes, and that it changes in different ways in different cultures, there would be new words and expressions limited to particular places, but there would also be somewhat different local forms of speech. Within, let us say, 50 years, there would be clear local dialects, and quite certainly by the end of a century some of these would be so different from one another that speakers from some places would have considerable difficulty in understanding the speech of those from some other places. Depending on how those differences lined up with social and political realities, it would soon become common to speak of them as different languages.

Dogen tells us to “cease practice based on intellectual understanding, pursuing words and following after speech, and learn the backward step that turns your light inwardly to illuminate yourself.