Harvard Archives - Richard M. Langworth

Churchill-Syria Analogies: A “Syrious” Situation

8 September 2013 Comments 0 Comments

Interesting Churchill-Syria hits on Google Alerts for September 8th:

Will Durst, in “Pied Piper of the Potomac” (Summit Daily):

Everyone pretends not to be knee-deep in the icky, tricky, sticky Syria situation. You might say Washington is in a Semi-Syrious mode right now. And a Semi-Not-So-Syrious mode. Simultaneously. Because this whole affair is riddled with enigmas and mysteries enough to make Winston Churchill spin his conundrums right off. And rumor has it, he harbored huge conundrums.

He has that right. I don’t know if Will Durst is a Churchillian, but he certainly has Churchill’s knack for coining words.…

Churchill’s Speech Problem: A Lisp, not a Stutter

5 April 2011 Comments 1 Comment

What many thought was stuttering was a prop, not a handicap.

Churchill’s speech problem was a lisp. He could not pronounce the letter “S” and never really learned to do so—so he turned it into a prop, exaggerating words like his famous “Narzzsseess” for “Nazis.”

What some people thought was stuttering was his habit of turning over a word or phrase in an undertone before settling on the final words. He often used this technique in speeches, because he found that it would stir people to renewed interest in what he was about to say next.

Example is a quote from his speech at Harvard University, 6 September 1943:“Man has parted company with his faithful friend the horse, and has sailed into the azure on the wings of eagles—eagles being represented by the infernal….uh,…