Being Grammarian
As Grammarian, you count the “um”s, “ah”s and “er”s speakers make throughout the evening, along with pauses, words such as “so” and “and” which speakers will overuse to buy themselves time to think. Speakers are often completely unaware they’re making these noises.
So as Grammarian you sit there with a clipboard watching for all these little mistakes.
Earlier this month, I got my first chance to try it out.
In addition to finding mistakes, it’s a good idea to look out for interesting phrases, and pretty much anything else involving clever use of language. For example, I was able to award the (worthless) accolade “best heckle” for one particularly witty outburst.
Perhaps the hardest part about being Grammarian is breaking it to them gently. Inevitably, someone will make a large number of “um”s or “er”s. If you include them all, they can end up with an um-count way ahead of their peers.
Some Grammarians like to dodge this by not being specific. They will say “Bob had a lot of ums and a couple of ahs”, rather than tell Bob he really said um 22 times in a five minute speech. (Come on, sort it out, Bob!)
I started off by reminding everyone I’m the least qualified person for the job. You need to pay attention to be Grammarian, and yet I’m so inattentive that, when I was timer, I let poor Norman talk for five minutes on a two minute table topic - because I’d forgotten to start the clock.
So, I told them, if you have a low um-count, it might be that I wasn’t paying attention. And if your um-count is high, it could just be that you were so interesting I actually took note.
posted in Learning to Speak | 4 Comments
