is acoustically distinct from it, so sensitive has the human ear become to the nuanced play of the vocal mechanism.  Another reason for our lack of phonetic imagination is the fact that, while our ear is delicately responsive to the sounds of speech, the muscles of our speech organs have early in life become exclusively accustomed to the particular adjustments and systems of adjustment that are required to produce the traditional sounds of the language.  All or nearly all other adjustments have become permanently inhibited, whether through inexperience or through gradual elimination.  Of course the power to produce these inhibited adjustments is not entirely lost, but the extreme difficulty we experience in learning the new sounds of foreign languages is sufficient evidence of the strange rigidity that has set in for most people in the voluntary control of the speech organs.  The point may be brought home by contrasting the comparative lack of freedom of voluntary speech movements with the all but perfect freedom of voluntary gesture.[10] Our rigidity in articulation is the price we have had to pay for easy mastery of a highly necessary symbolism.  One cannot be both splendidly free in the random choice of movements and selective with deadly certainty.[11]

[Footnote 10:  Observe the “voluntary.”  When we shout or grunt or otherwise allow our voices to take care of themselves, as we are likely to do when alone in the country on a fine spring day, we are no longer fixing vocal adjustments by voluntary control.  Under these circumstances we are almost certain to hit on speech sounds that we could never learn to control in actual speech.]

[Footnote 11:  If speech, in its acoustic and articulatory aspect, is indeed a rigid system, how comes it, one may plausibly object, that no two people speak alike?  The answer is simple.  All that part of speech which falls out of the rigid articulatory framework is not speech in idea, but is merely a superadded, more or less instinctively determined vocal complication inseparable from speech in practice.  All the individual color of speech—­personal emphasis, speed, personal cadence, personal pitch—­is a non-linguistic fact, just as the incidental expression of desire and emotion are, for the most part, alien to linguistic expression.  Speech, like all elements of culture, demands conceptual selection, inhibition of the randomness of instinctive behavior.  That its “idea” is never realized as such in practice, its carriers being instinctively animated organisms, is of course true of each and every aspect of culture.]