Third.—Test your ability to surrender the jaw by placing your fingers on either side your head in front of the ears at the conjunction of the jaws, and first open your mouth with intention, noting the action; then think the word No, and surrender the jaw to the forming of the word, noting the action or absence of action again.
So much for the set jaw. Ten or fifteen minutes a day—yes, even five minutes a day of actual practice with the constant thought of surrender, will reward you. Try it.
And still the channel is not open. There remains that most unruly member, the tongue. Dora Duty Jones refers all faults of technique in speech to failure in the management of the tongue. Miss Jones bases her entire system upon the three words, "On the tongue," in Hamlet's injunction to the players: speak the speech ... trippingly on the tongue. That this organ plays a vital part in the presentation of speech is not to be questioned; that it is the chief actor may be disputed. But whether the tongue is to play a main or a minor part the training to which Miss Jones would subject it is most interesting, and The Technique of Speech[14] should belong to the library of every student of expression. The only danger of this training lies in that of making the tongue a self-conscious actor. What we require of the tongue is that it shall act as a free agent in modeling the perfect word. Many of the exercises given by Miss Jones can be safely attempted only after the preparatory freeing of the organ has been accomplished, but all of them will eventually repay investigation.
Meanwhile the following drill for freeing the tongue ought to develop the agility we desire:
First.—Combine l (which may be called the tongue's pet consonant) with ä and repeat the syllable la with constantly increasing speed to form the following groups: lä' ... lä lä lä' ... lä lä lä' ... lä' ... lä'.
Second.—Change the accent over the vowel and repeat the exercise until all the sounds of a are exhausted in combination with the l.
Third.—Change the vowel and repeat the exercise until all the vowels have been used in combination with l.
Fourth.—Change the consonant to d, then to t, then n, and repeat the exercise.
Fifth.—Follow these exercises on groups of syllables with work on groups of words of one syllable beginning with l, such as: late, lade, lane, lame; last, lack, lank, lapse, laugh; lean, least, leak, leap, lead, etc.
Remember, we are considering primarily speech-tone and not speech form, and that our aim in the exercise of the tongue is to keep it from interrupting the tone.