Bullshit. You're mumbling when I can't understand you. Calling it "data compression" is polishing an indecipherable turd.<p>Of course people make their language more efficient when using common words and phrases. "D'ja do it?" "Yeah." "K." "No prob."<p>But that's not mumbling.<p>I think of mumbling as generally being an expressed disinterest in being understood. Sometimes because the speaker doesn't understand what they're being asked to speak about, sometimes because they're shy and insecure about their words. Sometimes mumbling is a way to express derision or disinterest in the information or the person someone's speaking to. Lots of reasons.<p>Not clever. Kind of the opposite of clever. It's a time-waster compared to just flat-out saying "I don't know" or "I'm not sure" or "I don't care" or whatever.
> <i>"We also don’t know how well speakers tune their data-compression algorithms to the needs of individual listeners. Accurately predicting the information that a listener can easily recover sometimes requires knowing a lot about his previous experience or knowledge. After all, one person’s redundancy can be another person’s anomaly..."</i><p>I'm glad the article recognises this (and the example immediately following the quote is instructive). It's a natural habit to do this kind of 'data-compression' when you're working with the same people all the time but this is <i>also</i> the reason that communication is difficult across different groups and cultures. It requires you to make an effort to listen and <i>check your own assumptions</i> if you want to actually communicate effectively, rather than talking past each other (or worse, walking away with <i>different</i> ideas about what was decided).
I knew a guy who mumbled so much you could never understand him. It was really irritating, but also the secret of his success. His job was to liaison with a number of governmental/bureaucratic organisations - involving customs clearance and things like that - and he was incredibly successful. No one knows for sure how exactly he managed it, but a leading school of thought was convinced that it was his mumbling. The bureaucrats just gave him whatever the hell he wanted as quickly as possible so that they could get him out of their offices asap.
When I was growing up, I had a cousin named Eddie, and he was a "lazy talker" or at least, as I recall, that was the name they had for his speaking style. Eddie would not mumble, he would just not say the whole word. For example (and it is hard to convey here in the written word) he might say "Hi, my name is Eddie and I am a lazy talker" but it would come out "H, m na Edeh, an I lah tak". Again, not capturing it here, but it was not mumbling. I have met other lazy talkers, and they are not mumbling. I think the article was maybe referring to lazy talkers and not mumblers. Mumbling to me denotes an actual corruption of the words, lazy talking is just not saying the whole word completely, which is more like lossy compression while mumbling to me, means a bad Signal to noise ratio, low volume and garbled words.
The robustness principle comes to mind:<p>"Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others."<p>You can save yourself a headache if you communicate as clearly and accurately as possible. At work, with friends, with a partner. I don't care what mumbling is a sign of, I care about its result. Don't optimize the wrong thing. Just like nobody likes seeing ugly JPEG artifacts, nobody likes to recognize mumbling.
Some people over-compress, though, until the point where the data becomes corrupt and the antivirus (our social attention span) quarantines it as a mild threat.
People also mumble when they're deliberately talking around something. For example, see this section from the audio recordings that brought down Nixon. There's no doubt that both parties knew exactly what they were referring to and could have expanded on it if needed. It's more clear if you listen to it: they mumble as an obfuscation tactic, likely as an ingrained habit when talking about such matters.<p><a href="http://watergate.info/1972/06/23/the-smoking-gun-tape.html" rel="nofollow">http://watergate.info/1972/06/23/the-smoking-gun-tape.html</a><p>>Haldeman: .../only way to solve this, and we’re set up beautifully to do it, ah, in that and that…the only network that paid any attention to it last night was NBC…they did a massive story on the Cuban…<p>>Nixon: That’s right.<p>>Haldeman: thing.<p>>Nixon: Right.<p>>Haldeman: That the way to handle this now is for us to have Walters call Pat Gray and just say, “Stay the hell out of this…this is ah, business here we don’t want you to go any further on it.” That’s not an unusual development,…<p>>Nixon: Um huh.<p>>Haldeman: …and, uh, that would take care of it.<p>>Nixon: What about Pat Gray, ah, you mean he doesn’t want to?
I'm a chronic mumbler -- I try not to be, but when I speak, it feels very loud (to me), but comes out quiet and mumbly; when I speak up so friends can hear, it feels like I am yelling.<p>Definitely not about compression, though.
I have always liked the noisy-channel model of language. It appeals to me because I think of the human as an extremely good pattern recognition "device".<p>In my opinion, it gives a satisfying explanation as to why many languages (about half of them) divide their words in noun categories or genders, which are rarely sex-based. It's a system of redundancy, which allows for noisy or compressed speech (either mumbled, or at a party, or fast spoken), to still be understood, because the gender endings give clues to what the original word was
These aren't different things! If you compress data by saying less, you're expending less energy.<p>It seems like the author is arguing that in order to be lazy about sound production, you need to expend energy picking out which sounds you need and which can be safely left out. That's all well and good, but in the middle of the article, the author herself refers to mumbling as a kind of "strategic laziness"!<p>Curse these headlines!
Kolmogorov complexity theorem states, in a very naive interpretation, that information is as complex as the ammount of symbols you need to represent it...
I have more trouble understanding what my daughters are saying than my son. My daughters are in Spanish Immersion programs while he's in Japanese. My oldest says that she's just used to using Spanish and that's why her English isn't more clearly enunciated.<p>My son does mumble at times but I've always thought it was when he was saying something he knew he wasn't supposed to.
Am I completely off base here or is this mumbling equals laziness thing something unique to the English language?<p>I'm German and I really wasn't aware of this association at all. I associate mumbling with shyness … and that's about it. And what's more that association to laziness seems positively weird and non-sensical to me.
So drunkards are better at data compression than the non drunk population?<p>And forget about southerners who speak English as if it were French. Eass for east. Repore for report. Assed for asked, etc. (really you 'assed' me a question?) It can quickly make a conversation ambiguous as this tendency results in lots oh homonyms.
My father-in-law and one of my daughters are both mumblers. But my father needs hearing aids.<p>Best way to make sure father-in-law speaks up is to have my father around.<p>Downside is it physically wears my father-in-law out. He just can't handle expending that much effort into speaking.
this reminded me of an interesting New Yorker summary of a study on 'filler words' and how our ability to speak and explain efficiently develops:
<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/conscientiousness-kidspeak" rel="nofollow">http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/conscienti...</a>
The purpose of speaking is to convey information to another person. As long as you are accomplishing this, your volume, enunciation, tonality, etc. doesn't matter.
I hate it. This, txting talk, bastardizing the way we converse with one another, it's all happening so unmanageably sudden that repercussions will take a generation or two to manifest. The Internet doesn't help. I know, I know, each generation loves to make a pastime in being armchair harbingers of doom regarding successive generations, but seriously maiming the way we communicate is on another plane of concern I think.<p>Ok, off my soapbox.