Long before talking heads and hosts of newscasts proliferated the airwaves with multiple superfluous insertions in every sentence, or began a remark with "So," educators promoted Shakespeare's plea to "speak the speech trippingly on the tongue" through elocution classes. They heralded the ability to communicate in grammatically correct sentences devoid of hesitation with appropriate inflection, pronunciation, and knowledge of the topic as paramount to one's success in life. I was a third-grader at Concord School in Pittsburgh when my mother trotted me off to the King School of Oratory to cure my shyness and fear of speaking with adults. By the time she learned about the miracles its founder, Byron W. King, had accomplished, among them curing himself of a speech impediment, the nation's most celebrated elocutionist had been dead many years, but his wife Inez, a renowned actress of the Chautauqua circuit, still trained actors, businessmen, lawyers, clerg...