And, here we go again. You press play, and another podcast, another story, commences. And then, it just happens – you can be driving, exercising, you can be savoring a swallow of wine – it doesn’t really matter. So long as you can hear me and pay some attention, the rest seems effortless – you comprehend the sounds I make. Your mind’s eye orchestrates the play for you. These words, these ephemeral little sculptures of breath, set the stage and all the actors in motion in barely a blink, 300 syllables a minute, in fact – that’s how fast we comprehend the spoken word. The scaffolding of prepositions and conjunctions support the persons, places, and things of nouns, whose form and substance are specified by adjectives and enlivened by the action of verbs. We are surely some species of magician, you and I, to conjure such worlds of meaning from air.
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