HOW EMPHASIS AFFECTS MEANING

While listening to a radio show about Abraham Lincoln on WBUR's "The Connection" today, I heard a recorded reading of the Gettysburg Address. The speaker also referred to the Emancipation Proclamation.

All my life I have heard those words pronounced with either the accent on the second word, "proclamation", or no emphasis on either word. I didn't realize how flat, lifeless and meaningless the phrase sounded until the speaker spoke with a strong accent on the word Emancipation. That way, there's meaning, emotion and power.

Say it out loud both ways and see for yourself.

Similarly, the phrase "of the people, by the people, for the people" is always pronounced with the emphases on of, by and for. This reduces the phrase to some autonomic abstraction, again with no emotion or power. Say it out loud with minor emphasis on the of, by and for, but with major emotive emphasis in each case on the word "people.": "...of the PEOPLE, by the PEOPLE, for the PEOPLE..."

The difference is like day and night. It's as if I never heard these words before. I was as moved as if I had been there at Gettysburg.

It seems so obvious after the fact. Why does this happen? It may be our tendency when learning or teaching our history by rote--as so many of us did, and I bet still do-- to reduce famous quotes to some mindless rhythm with all the life and dynamism of iambic pentameter. "This is the forest primeval. The murmering pines and the hemlocks..."--daDUM, daDUM, daDUM, and on and on, ad infinitum. We carry this flatlined boredom with the phrases all of our lives, until that pronunciation becomes the commonplace, as does their meaning.

The inflection and accents define the concepts in ways the author surely never intended, and makes them not only boring, but deprives them of their passion, power and beauty. It's sheer luck, I think, that it also doesn't deprive them--so far--of immortality.

In a time when our leadership seems to be doing its best to subvert this profound concept, it's worthwhile to say this out loud a few times every morning. Maybe it could help convert that sense of political fatalism and despair many feel to confidence that "...a new nation, conceived in liberty... shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the PEOPLE, by the PEOPLE, for the PEOPLE shall not perish from the earth."