"Villainy"

Precise and tall among the nondescript brownstones off Manhattan's Gramercy Park stands the National Hospital for Speech Disorders, founded 23 years ago by an earnest laryngologist with the neat name of James Sonnett Greene. The hospital cannot pretend to serve all the 13,000,000 afflicted with speech disorders in the U. S., but it does its bit. In its time it has helped some 30,000, has guided a national move toward unfettered speech, once inaugurated a campaign which has pretty much driven stuttering comedians from the cinema. Its Ephphatha Club, named for the command ("be opened") by which Christ cured the stutterer, has loosened some remarkable tongues, including two opera singers and a young man who celebrated his emancipation with a soapbox speech in Union Square.

One mess Dr. Greene's clinic had to clean up was the havoc created among the wartime generation by the song K-K-K-Katy, which apparently started countless hundreds stuttering involuntarily. Then along came the Three Little Fishies, with a threat of a new generation of baby talkers. Against this tidal wave Dr. Greene could do little, but last week he set out to head off a "brand-new piece of villainy" before it gets too far. In a letter to 165 U. S. radio broadcasters, Dr. Greene protested vigorously against a tune entitled Stuttering in the Starlight./- It goes:

Each time the stars are shuh-shuh-shining

Up-up a btih-buh-bove you d-d-d-darling . . .

I-I-I-I do-do-do-do luh-luh-luh-luh-love you--

And I do-do-do mean you.

"I plead for the hundreds of little children whose nervous constitutions predispose them to stuttering and who need only some stimulus to 'set them off,' " wrote Dr. Greene. "A popular song, making use of repetitive sounds, which children love, is just the stimulus. . . ."

At week's end Dr. Greene had encouraging answers from 20 broadcasters, was already girding for another scrap--against double talk (idioglossia).* Says he: "If a comedian has to try to put his stuff over by making a fool of our good English, then let him not stay in the business."

/- Copyright, 1939, by Remick Music Corp. Used by permission.

* Example, by Double-Talker Murray ("Looney") Lewis during a Fred Allen broadcast about the New York World's Fair Hall of Pharmacy: "Ilfus on the bildad with just enough reticulation on the nostrum to allograph Ipana, Minit-Rub and Sal Hepatica."

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