The rain in Spain

Even Professor Henry Higgins, who as far as we know had no interest in hydroelectric power, noticed that the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain. Those of us who remember the power cuts of 2024 would prefer that Ecuador’s rain fell mainly mountains in the watershed of a reservoir rather than on the coastal plain, but Higgins had other priorities.

The line was, of course, a drill for the English vowel sound in “rain,” “Spain,” and “plain,” and for Eliza Doolittle it formed one small part of a much larger project, which was to speak in a way that would persuade strangers she belonged somewhere other than a London street corner.

Most of us will know the outlines of the story from the Oscar-winning musical My Fair Lady, in which a professor takes a Cockney flower seller, rebuilds her speech and manners, and demonstrates that the supposedly reliable marks of aristocratic breeding are much easier to manufacture than polite society cared to admit. Underneath the songs sat a serious proposition, which was that if people judge you the moment you open your mouth, then changing the way you speak might change what they allow you to do.

George Bernard Shaw, whose Pygmalion supplied the story, took phonetic training seriously as a remedy for people whose accents obstructed their advancement, and he drew Higgins partly from the real-life phonetician Henry Sweet. Eliza’s own ambition was modest, a job in a proper flower shop, yet her existing speech was judged a disqualification. (This is fiction, so bear with me.) Her problem was not that she lacked the intelligence to sell flowers indoors, but that she sounded like someone who sold them outdoors.

We have our own flower sellers here, who set up on the Plaza de las Flores a few steps from the New Cathedral, and I have yet to see one of them lose a sale over a vowel.

In Britain the situation was different, because an accent could function as a verbal reference letter, and before you had explained your qualifications your vowels had already explained your place.

Alf Ramsey, who managed England’s soccer team to its 1966 first and only World Cup victory in 1966, is often cited as a man who took elocution lessons to improve his prospects.

The real truth is different, but interesting. Ramsey always denied having lessons, and his own accounts of how he smoothed out his Eliza Dolittle vowels credited copying army officers and BBC announcers, and reading books to improve his vocabulary.  Whether he learned it from a teacher or from the radio, Ramsey evidently understood that managing a football team involved conversations well beyond the locker room, and that the administrative echelons of the Football Association were listening to his vowels and vocabulary as closely as to his innovative tactical scheme, which became known as ‘Wingless Wonders’.

Sociologist Basil Bernstein later examined another relationship between language and opportunity. His distinction between “restricted” and “elaborated” codes concerned, broadly, how much a speaker relies on shared understanding and how much must be spelled out.

Among people who know the same circumstances a few words may do the job, while explaining those same circumstances to a stranger requires more, and Bernstein explored how such habits of communication could shape a child’s experience of school. His theory became both influential and controversial, particularly when it was read as declaring working-class language deficient, which it was never simply saying, and it certainly did not claim that posh pronunciation or using bigger words made anyone cleverer.

The documentary series that began with Seven Up! in 1964 and finished this September with 70-Up supplied a memorable illustration of how early differences in opportunity become visible. Some of its privileged seven-year-olds in Seven Up! could describe their intended route through school to particular Oxford or Cambridge colleges and professions, while Paul, a boy living in a children’s home, answered a question about his educational future by asking: “what does university mean”, a child’s phrase that subsequently became almost as famous as Oliver Twist’s “Please sir, I want some more.”

This showed that the contrast went much deeper than pronunciation, because some of the children already owned a map of their future, complete with college names, and another had never been introduced to the destination.

Paul later moved to Australia, and by 49 Up the series recorded his pride that his daughter was the first member of his family to attend university, which is a useful reminder that an educational hierarchy is an inadequate measure of a whole human life. An elocution teacher might have polished those children’s vowels back in 1964, but supplying them with comparable knowledge, expectations, and opportunities would perhaps have been more useful.

There is nevertheless an everyday distinction between knowing something and explaining it to someone who does not. Anyone who has tried to describe a plumbing problem in Spanish to the maestro who arrives to inspect it will recognize the difficulty, because you understand perfectly well that water is coming through the ceiling, yet your account of where it began, whose apartment is involved, whose balcony drain is blocked, and what needs doing may be considerably less useful than the mere sight of the unwanted puddles of water in your hallway.

I would welcome language  training that improved that conversation, but YouTube has lately been offering me something more ambitious. Between videos I am informed that what people need is “articulation training,” nine minutes a day for 28 days, which comes to just over four hours in total. Higgins required six months and a wager with Colonel Pickering to produce his fake duchess, whereas the advertisement requires only a few minutes a day for four weeks and a credit card payment.

The advertisements often feature a disappointed employee who seemed to be a dead cert to be promoted–that is until someone else got the job, and the successful colleague then reveals the secret, which is articulation training. Experience, competence, and qualifications have apparently been defeated by approximately four hours of speaking practice. Who’d have thunk it?

There is an appealing, or maybe we should say appalling, simplicity to this explanation, because a missed promotion can have numerous causes, some uncomfortable, some unfair, and some entirely beyond our control, whereas the advertisement supplies one cause that we can remedy on our phones. You were nearly good enough, and all you lacked was the subscription.

One advertisement for an app called RiseGuide promises rapid improvement, culminating in being the best speaker in any room by day 14, and it also moves from nine minutes daily to fifteen, a small scheduling difficulty for a method presented with such numerical confidence. I would be interested to see the room, which presumably contains neither a trial lawyer nor anyone who has spent their life selling used cars. The app’s store listing names its developer as CELEB INNOVATIONS LIMITED and describes a broader self-improvement product covering communication, confidence, and other subjects, which tells us who sells it, but does not establish that any particular timetable produces promotions.

The characters dispensing these lessons have attracted an audience of their own. In one Reddit discussion, viewers describe apparently AI-generated people in simulated interviews and talk shows, instructing actual humans how to converse, and several Redditors object to the brisk dismissal of ordinary courtesies such as “nice to meet you” and “sorry to bother you.” In summary, viewers are being told how to get ahead in the workplace by gaslighting everyone they work with by using scripted speech.

Some of the advertisements go further and show Indian women being bullied in high school or mistreated at work, where white colleagues dump extra tasks on their desks and laugh about it, and the proposed remedy is articulation training. Showing racial prejudice does not necessarily endorse it, but when the story’s solution is to make the target more commanding, the burden of change lands on the person being mistreated, and the colleagues apparently need no lessons in behaving decently while she needs lessons in speaking up for herself.

Here the comparison with Higgins becomes uncomfortable, since Eliza changes her speech to overcome class prejudice and the woman in the advertisement is encouraged to upgrade her communication style to overcome racial bullying.

In both cases the gatekeepers’ behavior is treated as a workplace climate to be navigated, and the person outside the gate is handed the homework. Viewers worried about their own performance, their promotion prospects, or their treatment by others are then encouraged to model themselves on synthetic characters whose entire working lives consist of a script, so that the humiliation supplies the problem and the subscription supplies the solution.

These characters enjoy a considerable advantage over the rest of us, because they never have to discover whether their impressive answer is correct, carry out the work they have promised, or manage the consequences of being unpleasant to accounting. Their promotion is assured before the conversation begins.

There is, of course, legitimate speech coaching. Learning to stop mumbling, slow down, organize an explanation, or answer a question directly can be useful, and accent modification is a recognized elective service, although an accent is not itself a disorder. The relationship between speech and opportunity is real, but it is more complicated than the advertisement’s office drama allows, otherwise Andy Burnham, who speaks with a broad Lancashire accent, would never have been elevated to Prime Minister of the UK within the last few months.

My own forty-odd years working in government institutions in various countries left me with the impression that the best communicators were rarely the most commanding ones, because the skill that mattered most was listening long enough to understand what was actually being asked.

Higgins’s experiment with Eliza Dolittle exposed a society that confused pronunciation with worth, and the modern sales pitch risks encouraging its customers to make a similar mistake about themselves. Perhaps nine minutes a day would improve my Spanish, and I could certainly practice articulating plumbing issues more clearly, but before I decide to model my personality on an  AI executive I would like to know whether anybody has checked his or her references.

Meanwhile, if the rain would fall mainly on the Sierra, I think we could forgive it if it had a Costena regional accent.