Slovenly pronunciation results from either physical deformity or habit.  A surgeon or a surgeon dentist may correct a deformity, but your own will, working by self-observation and resolution in drill, will break a habit.  All depends upon whether you think it worth while.

Defective speech is so widespread that freedom from it is the exception.  It is painfully common to hear public speakers mutilate the king’s English.  If they do not actually murder it, as Curran once said, they often knock an i out.

A Canadian clergyman, writing in the Homiletic Review, relates that in his student days “a classmate who was an Englishman supplied a country church for a Sunday.  On the following Monday he conducted a missionary meeting.  In the course of his address he said some farmers thought they were doing their duty toward missions when they gave their ’hodds and hends’ to the work, but the Lord required more.  At the close of the meeting a young woman seriously said to a friend:  ’I am sure the farmers do well if they give their hogs and hens to missions.  It is more than most people can afford.’”

It is insufferable effrontery for any man to appear before an audience who persists in driving the h out of happiness, home and heaven, and, to paraphrase Waldo Messaros, will not let it rest in hell.  He who does not show enough self-knowledge to see in himself such glaring faults, nor enough self-mastery to correct them, has no business to instruct others.  If he can do no better, he should be silent.  If he will do no better, he should also be silent.

Barring incurable physical defects—­and few are incurable nowadays—­the whole matter is one of will.  The catalogue of those who have done the impossible by faithful work is as inspiring as a roll-call of warriors.  “The less there is of you,” says Nathan Sheppard, “the more need for you to make the most of what there is of you.”

Articulation

Articulation is the forming and joining of the elementary sounds of speech.  It seems an appalling task to utter articulately the third-of-a million words that go to make up our English vocabulary, but the way to make a beginning is really simple:  learn to utter correctly, and with easy change from one to the other, each of the forty-four elementary sounds in our language.

The reasons why articulation is so painfully slurred by a great many public speakers are four:  ignorance of the elemental sounds; failure to discriminate between sounds nearly alike; a slovenly, lazy use of the vocal organs; and a torpid will.  Anyone who is still master of himself will know how to handle each of these defects.

The vowel sounds are the most vexing source of errors, especially where diphthongs are found.  Who has not heard such errors as are hit off in this inimitable verse by Oliver Wendell Holmes: