Televangelism

So I haven't written in this blog for over a month, but I encountered something at work to make me dust off the keyboard once more and get to bloggin'.

One of our clients is a health-and-wealth gospel church, and they put out a number of televangelistic programs aimed at helping people get success by means of prayer.

Theological objections aside (too obvious to merit analysis), I find this program fascinating. As a caption editor and occasional transcriber, I'm forced to repeatedly analyze what people say and accurately reflect it in the written word. (This is the goal of captioning, as opposed to subtitling, which is to reflect the meaning of what people say without necessarily being exact.) So this makes me attentive to the rhythms and cadences of particular kinds of speech.

For example, "classic" Hollywood movies from the '30s to the '50s are remarkably easy to transcribe. People speak in complete, grammatically correct sentences with few anomalies (even with westerns, it's only a matter of taking the g off of -ing verbs and including the occasional "y'all). In contemporary Hollywood films, which try to capture realistic/slangy patterns of speech, there's more non-standard English.

But the cadences of this televangelist is a whole nother story. From his accent, he appears not to be a native speaker of English. However, he is quite the orator. He has the unique ability to appear to make sense when, in fact, he's saying nothing meaningful. He'll often switch gears entirely in the middle of sentence, or he'll say something so convoluted that, once you've written it, you're not sure exactly how he managed to sound like he was saying something. Take for instance the following:

"I almost had an experience where I was providing advice to a lawyer, and, uh, and this lawyer was telling me that his problem was advise him and showing what the Bible was speaking about his particular problem."

Now, this gets his point across: a lawyer sought his advice, and the preacher directing him to the Bible. But grammatically, this sentence makes no sense whatsoever. I'm a little bit in awe of this guy.

As a service to the hearing impaired, I've started trying to undermine what the guy has to say by captioning all his stuttering (which is theoretically part of our goal, but a lot of people clean it up to make things more legible) and by ending more sentences with exclamation points. I feel oddly subversive when I do this, even though it's an entirely subjective notion of what makes a speaker credible.