Sign language for Mumblers

Bob's Blog

Sign Language for Mumblers

You sit in front of your tele, or at the cinema enjoying a film, only to suffer an actor's mumble, or actors' mumbles. You cannot understand a sentence or particular word. It spoils the enjoyment. If you are at home and have the benefit of a remote with a rewind, you may listen again, and again, and again. This infrequently clarifies the diction or annotation and you remain clueless, while losing the plot.

Some actors are renown mumblers and some productions have a claim to fame due to their unintelligible dialogue. In the UK, BBC Television drama Jamaica Inn would probably be our Oscar or TV Emmy nomination for Best Mumblers, Best Mumble and Most Mumbled production. Almost no viewers could understand the mumbled cod West County accents in Jamaica Inn. Subtitles were suggested by viewers, and they were English speakers too! For actors, a generic West Country English is arguably the easiest British accent to mimic. Just listen to Pirates of the Caribbean with Johnny Depp and his crew. But Johnny is a renown mumbler. He gets away with it. He's taken mumbling and made into an art form, and he remains very popular, even if we cannot understand a word.  

But there is a way of solving the problem. If you are lucky to have good hearing, seeing that animated person gesticulating in the corner of the TV screen signing for viewers with impaired hearing can be distracting. But the hard of hearing don't miss a thing. They don't miss one word of a conversation. They never lose the plot.

I have friends who sign and it can prove very liberating to have this skill - hard or hearing or not. So that's the answer: learn Signing. Never grumble about a mumble again.