Knowing colloquialisms

Colloquialisms

The King’s English gets kicked around between the stilted style of His Lordship and the cusswords of a cavalryman. Language needs a lot of loop to cover both Adlai Stevenson’s eloquence and the lingo of a court clerk telling the bailiff:

“You got a bite on the whozit. It was a dame. She wouldn’t come clean so I says you was corkin’ some rats in the bride.” That’s quite a colorful way to relay a telephone message about a girl who wouldn’t leave her name, so she was told that her friend was busy incarcerating prisoners at the Bridewell prison.

Between the grammarian’s formal style and the foregoing lingo there is a means of communication called colloquial English, which mean the language used in speaking. Earlier prejudices against this colloquial English are passe since the American College Dictionary now says: “That English is good English which communicates well the thought of a given speaker to a given audience.”

For effective public speaking, simple shirt-sleeve words are better than fancy expressions because shirt-sleeve, colloquial English is the language most folks use in speaking privately and it is the language they are most likely to grasp. Today shirt-sleeve English is used in writing as well as in speaking; many an author swells with pride when he’s told that he has an easy breezy style because he writes as he talks. Shirt-sleeve English sticks to simple words and expressions, and makes much of popular idioms and very little of grammatical rules.

Keywords: Public Speaking, Public Speakers, Public Speaking Tips, Public Seminar Speaking

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