The Epistle of Speech

I've always thought of the art of speech...the decorum that's attached to it and the assumption at one point in time in my life that it was an innate skill that was inborn.

Scene 1: The Angry Woman I had always known

An angry woman who has been angered in public and at that moment has to express herself, is seen to wear the mask of anger, is heard to raise her voice, will sometimes spew obscenities or sometimes her language would be coolly abusive, but most importantly, her mouth neither opens to wide nor too far and her voice modulation even while she raises her voice or even begins to shout is deemed acceptable to the rules guiding speech behavioural etiquette.

This had always been the norm in my existence until;

Scene 2: The Angry Woman I began to notice

A bus full of passengers suddenly has a flat or a mechanical problem. The bus stops on the side of the road. The conductor jumps down and does a disappearing act for 30 minutes (for the known fact he might be lynched lets say 10 minutes). While he was gone to God knows where, several other buses going to the same destination drive by, some empty, some with enough space for two or three passengers. He appears again out of the blues ready to give a refund but will give less than what they should get back.

A woman backing a baby becomes the advocate, the voice of the people, the defender of the poor and trampled. Her face takes a mild ugly twist which becomes uglier the angrier she gets and the faster her words jerk out from her. Then its not just the twist of her face that grabs my attention, its the fact her mouth has become wider and opens up further with each angry word as if this effect passes across the message faster. How the mouth suddenly becomes a widening gore is simply amazing.

Its an ugly sight to behold this disfigurement, which I hope is only tied to an expression of anger... I've seen it more often since the first time I discovered its existence and it never ceases to amaze me, just how far the mouth will open as it delivers speech.