THOSE PESKY CONSONANTS

by Jim Freund

© 2022

             Try to picture this scene. (It actually occurred in our bathroom earlier this month.) I’m in the shower, hot water engulfing my head. My wife Barbara is seated at her make-up table. Evidently she notices some movement on the terrace outside the bathroom window, and decides to remark on it.

             From the tone of Barbara’s voice, I know that what she has said is meant for me, although the steady beat of the shower water reduces its clarity – and what I do hear makes no  sense to me. So here is how I reply:

            “You’re telling me that those guys out on the terrace are fixing our urination system? I didn’t even know we had one. Is it something meant to control the regular eliminations from our six dogs?”

             “Not ‘urination system’, dummy”, she responds – it’s the irrigation system that delivers water to our flower boxes.

             The dialogue continues for a brief stretch, but I’ll leave off here before things get too painful. Still, I tell this tale to make a point that underscores the theme of this article.

             Barbara and I hold dozens of brief conversations each day, in person or over the phone, and for the most part we hear each other quite adequately. But where we sometimes have troubles is when we holler remarks and pose questions to each other from one room to another in our apartment. Although the listener can usually make out a portion of what’s being bellowed, a crucial element is frequently missing – often (as in our recent shower encounter) a mishearing of some key words.

             And guess what? More often than not, that mistaken element is an incorrect translation of one or more CONSONANTS in the words being uttered. Consonants – you know, all the letters of the alphabet except A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y.

             When I first came to this realization, I did a little Google research. I’m no expert in this stuff, and I certainly don’t mean to marginalize serious hearing loss, which is a most unwelcome condition. But let me offer a brief background primer on this lesser but common problem of “high frequency hearing loss,” so as to buttress my fixation on consonants.

             The ear apparently has three main parts. For these purposes, we can forget about the outer ear, whose connection to hearing loss usually involves an accumulation of too much ear wax. I’m also going to ignore the middle ear (which features such bad news as a perforated eardrum). So we’re focused here solely on the inner ear, and in particular on the damage resulting from the natural aging process – an impairment that usually can’t be treated through medication or surgery.

             High frequency hearing loss occurs when the tiny hair cells in the inner ear that send stuff to the brain for interpretation are damaged. Although deep voices and booming audio can be heard well at low frequencies – and here I quote from an article – “birds tweeting and female voices are heard at high frequencies,” which is precisely where we lose the ability to hear them.

             Well, I can handle with surprising aplomb the negative impact of being unable to hear birds tweeting – It’s those female voices emanating from humans that I have trouble with . . . . And since hearing loss involves not only the ears but also the brain where the sounds are translated into meaningful words, I often find myself thinking, “I can hear, but I can’t understand.”

             Okay, now we’re ready for the specific subject of this essay. According to the experts (who I’m now quoting), “In speech, the vowel sounds (A ,E, I, O, and U) are low in pitch while consonant sounds like S, F, Th, Sh, V, K, P and others are high in pitch . . . It’s the consonant sounds that give speech meaning and help you distinguish one word from another . . . . That is why so many people with age-related hearing loss . . . have difficulty understanding even when they know sound is present.”

            And by the way, if you thought that my mistaking “irrigation” for “urination” was a long shot, listen to these simple pairings that one article cites as being difficult problems to understand: “cat” and “hat” (thus reducing the title of Dr. Seuss’s famous book to an almost illiterate, “The Hat in the Cat”); “parrot” and “ferret” (notwithstanding the difficulty of holding an intelligent conversation with a ferret – what is a ferret anyway?); and “show” and “throw”, (suggesting you exercise caution when telling someone to “show” you the new toaster so that it doesn’t end up hitting you in the face).

             Hey, listen up – don’t even think about patronizing me. This is serious stuff. You doubt it? Well, just read this paragraph I’m quoting from one of the learned articles:

             “Family members, friends and work colleagues can get frustrated and feel you aren’t listening to them when they speak to you. Your spouse [not mine, of course] may accuse you of having ‘selective hearing’. You may accuse others of mumbling. Sometimes you will answer questions inappropriately and miss the punch line of jokes. Other times, you may resort to smiling and nodding when someone speaks to give the impression you are listening when in fact, you do not understand what was just said. . . . Untreated hearing loss can take a toll on relationships, careers and your daily life.”

             Okay, so now that I obviously have your full attention, forget the textbook and just listen to your blogger Jim. Although most of the misunderstandings that result can be cleared up without undue long-term negative effects, there are times when that just may not be possible. Forget “cat” and “hat” – how about this fictional dialogue during a lull in a serious marital spat.

             Husband: (trying to soften the situation) “I want you to know that I consider the harsh words about me you’ve just uttered as strictly accidental on your part.”

             But that’s not the way his wife hears what he has just said. To her, the “c” sounds like an “n”, the “d” comes across as a “t”, and here is how she replies:

            Wife: “Oh yeah, so you think that what I said was strictly intentional on my part. Well, the hell with you – and you’ll be hearing from my divorce lawyer in the morning.”

             That’s bad enough. But it can be even worse when the consonant in play is an “s” – which may well be the worst of a bad lot. Let’s say that the husband is about to light a cigar, to his wife’s evident distaste. The wife bitches loudly, causing the husband to unlock his desk drawer and pull out a gun. The wife, ignoring the gun which she views as an empty gesture, resumes her challenge about the foul odor likely to emanate from his cigar.

             Wife: “You don’t have the guts to pollute me.”

             But what the husband hears isn’t “pollute” – to him it sounds like “shoot” – and since he’s unwilling to have his manhood threatened, guess what this challenged man does next . . . .

             Okay, back to the research. The articles also point out that people with high-frequency hearing loss, while having problems understanding speech even in a relatively quiet environment, may find it nearly impossible to follow a conversation when background noise is present or several people are talking at once.  The unwanted noisy sounds can be soft (an air conditioner or a purring motor), or moderate (the atmosphere inside a plane, or what is heard on radio or TV that interferes with concentration). It can also consist of extremely loud noises, such as a jack hammer or the firing of a gun. Excessively loud noises can cause hearing loss, damaging the inner ear; and since those inner ear hair cells cannot be repaired or regenerate, this may result in permanent hearing loss.

             Since high frequency hearing loss cannot be reversed, the obvious best way to protect your hearing is to avoid high level noises. Keep your personal electronics turned down, wear hearing protection like earplugs when in noisy environments like concerts and sporting events, or engaged in noisy hobbies, like riding a motorcycle or shooting a gun.

             On a personal note, I take particular umbrage at the noise emanating from nearby tables in a restaurant. If you possess a similar simmer, I’m going to let you borrow for the evening a dignified contemporary female friend of ours. I’ll never forget the night that our group was being battered by loud voices – shouting, laughing etc. – emanating from a nearby table of big tough looking guys. While the rest of us quavered in our boots, this woman pushed back her chair, stood up, walked over to the offending table, and spoke to them quietly for thirty seconds. She then returned to our table, and resumed the conversation we’d been having and now could more easily discern. We heard no more from that offending table for the rest of the night. I wish I could pass along what her message was to the offenders, but we were too embarrassed by our own inaction to ask her what she had said on her foray over to the noisy guys – although once we dropped her off at home that night, there was endless speculation.

             Okay, so once your high frequency hearing problem has surfaced (and you may want to consult an audiologist to confirm your own diagnosis), what can you do about it? One possible solution is to use a lot of vowel-heavy words like “adieu” – recently popularized as a opening gambit in the New York Times game, WORDLE. Another is to provide irrefutable clues to any possibly offending letters. So for instance, the wife might have said, “Pollute” – that’s “p” as in “pilgrim.” (Or, as Elaine May used to say, “P”, as in pneumonia.” – or if the key word were “kill,” Mike Nichols might have said that’s “k, as in knife”.) But although this works to remove some of the enjoyable vitriol, it does tend to slow down the conversation.

            None of this half-way stuff for Barbara, though. She was unhappy at the need to repeat stuff to me and felt she knew the definitive answer to the problem. Citing my lack of consonant control, she whisked me off to an audiologist, who tested me and confirmed that I could really use a hearing aid. I wasn’t surprised, since admittedly those voices on television (especially ones with an English accent) were escaping me, at least when the words weren’t simultaneously displayed on the screen.

             I didn’t fight about it, bought a pricey pair that fit behind the ear in a way that only a skillful eye could detect, had them keyed in to my cellphone so I could fine tune the operation to different environments and listening angles, and employed my wife’s manual dexterity to insert the tiny batteries into their holders.

             Well, I have to admit it works. As the text tells us, “Hearing aids can amplify the high pitches you’ve been missing without amplifying low-pitched sounds.” I was assured by experts that I would notice improvement in term of understanding speech. (But then they just couldn’t resist going a little over the top: “You may even notice you’re hearing sounds that have long been forgotten. For instance, some new hearing aid wearers are pleasantly surprised to hear the soft chirping of song birds for the first time in years.” It’s those damn birds again – count me out on the avian score.)

             My continuing problem though, is that I don’t like to wear the damn things, and they tend to stay pouched in my pocket (or even at a greater distance) most of the time. Perhaps I’d be more responsive if they were easier to fit into the ear (am I the only one who has trouble with this?) Perhaps if the now-amplified background noise that the aids manage to pick up didn’t bother me so much. Perhaps if I were still actively practicing law, where missing a sentence or two could prove costly (while in private life, it just doesn’t seem to matter so much and can generally be handled with a languid, “Please repeat that”.

            And so, I’m still at risk – especially with the D-T’s (That’s not short for delirium tremens but rather for the much too-close soundings of the letters “d” and “t”. Here’s an example. The following message has been left by the school on the voicemail of the parents of a 5th grade student: “Please pick up your kid an hour later today. He was so tendentious in class that he is being punished by detention after school.” Well, that may have been what the teacher intended to say, but what the parent hears is that the school nurse has detected tendonitis in their little darling, and he will probably have to be brought home in a wheelchair . . .

             Now, where did I put that hearing aid . . . ?