Technical Talk

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 380, 4 October 1946, Page 10

Technical Talk

W HEN people tell me in no uncertain ' manner that classical music means nothing to them, I am inclined to reply tartly that there must be something wrong with the listener, for there’s nothing wrong with the music. By the same analogy, I daresay there was something wrong with myself the night I heard "Statistics in the Modern World" from 4YA, an address by J. Williams, M.Com., who is lecturer in something called Industrial Organisation at Otago University. Although as a general rule speakers should not insult their listeners by talking down to them, there are times when a little less technical language is helpful to the average listener, and this, I think, was one of those times, Certainly I understood what Mr. Williams was talking about, and found it very interesting; and I am sure I would have had no difficulty in following him if I had read him from a printed page. But 20 minutes of fluent speaking on a technical subject, couched almost all the

time in technical language, requires considerable mental effort if the listener is to grasp the talk completely. Such phrases as. population of events, procedure of drawing valid inferences from samples, normal law of error, price indices, pro-production function, marginal product, quality control, and so on, may be crystal-clear to those students to whom Mr. Williams lectures, but the tadio audience is composed of people like me, of average intelligence only, and we find it lowering to our pride to have to admit we couldn’t follow a talk without exerting our brains to the utmost. But cheer up, I said to myself; perhaps Mr. Williams’ students might feel the same if a musician lectured them about pentatonic scales and the use of secondary ninths.