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Hurry Up and Slow Down

By Mark Grueter

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Everyone has at some point noticed how people talk at drastically varying rates of speed. We all know fast-talkers and slow-talkers. There are those people who take an extraordinary amount of time to make a point (if they ever bother at all); they can be either talk shit a mile a minute or drone on at an airy pace. They don’t know how to be concise, are oblivious to a restless audience, or they simply don’t know when to shut up. And it seems to me that complaints about people talking too fast are much more common, for whatever reason, than complaints about people talking too slow.

There are extremes at both ends, with most of us falling somewhere in between. The questions are these: why do some people talk really fast or really slow and what does this say about that person, if anything? Does it have anything to do with genes, ethnicity, intellect, gender or even the environment we’re raised in?

Obviously, circumstances alter the rate at which we utter speech. Anyone on a caffeine, coke or Ritalin binge cannot fairly be compared to someone in a state of sobriety. Intense and frightening moments make us nervous and this makes us talk faster as well. Alternatively, exhaustion and too much smoke can make us talk slower.

TV Sitcoms have sped up their dialogues because focus groups think that fast-talking is both smarter and funnier. But what do focus groups know that I don’t? The earlier episodes of Seinfeld, which are slower, more deliberate and dependent upon the substance of the dialog, are much funnier than the high-tempo slapstick which characterize the later years. Commercials that are forced to address the potentially adverse side-effects of their products use rapid-speech for this part in the belief that nobody will really listen if the speech is too fast. I don’t know about you, but that’s the only part I ever pay any attention to.

All things being equal, I cannot think of any explanation or answer to my earlier questions. I know both smart and dumb people who talk both fast and slow. I think intellect has nothing to do with it. We can rule out gender without even making an argument. Some people believe foreign languages are spoken faster, but it just sounds like that. All languages have both slow and fast speakers. That leaves us with nature and nurture. If your parents talk fast, so you will you and vice-versa. If you grew up in a very social, urban area you’ll probably be a little quicker off the draw. Or, if all your friends talk fast, so will you. This, of course, is all debatable as well, but it at least seems like a working hypothesis.

A slow-talking friend suggests that fast-talkers usually don’t think things through; there exists little to no filtering process with these people and so their words should never be taken too seriously. “Intellectuals” use this logic to condemn political talk-shows, forums that reward people who talk fast, due to rigid time-constraints. It’s impossible to improvise any real, deep thinking in such a rapid-fire manner, they say. Casual forums that are featured on stations like C-SPAN or in universities are considered more useful for observers hoping to learn something. I’m not convinced of this. Any intelligent person who has watched Hardball with Chris Matthews must admit that the guy is effective at asking and thinking critically while speaking at a tremendous speed.

And of course, slow can be slang for stupid: “He’s slow-witted.” Retarded kids speak very slowly while child prodigies speak like Chris Matthews. So, maybe slow-speaking academics need to get with the program. We live in the media age now. If you want your views to be given a hearing you need to think on your toes, you need to be quick. When I go bar-hopping, I expect a lot of joking and fast, witty conversation. In group bar talks, there is nothing more boring than being subjected to some pretentious, slow-talker who has nominated him/herself to speak at a much greater length than everybody else.

But I really haven’t answered any questions here. For now, I merely raise them, in writing, so the reader has no idea how fast I am talking.

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Mark Grueter is pursuing a Masters in Liberal Studies at the Graduate Faculty for Political and Social Sciences. He is the Publications Manager and Web Editor for The Canon, the school's student publication and is a contributor to Stop Smiling. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.  Grueter may be contacted at grueter@methree.net.

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