rfect freedom of voluntary
gesture.[10] Our rigidity in articulation is the price we have had to
pay for easy mastery of a highly necessary symbolism. One cannot be both
splendidly free in the random choice of movements and selective with
deadly certainty.[11]

[Footnote 10: Observe the "voluntary." When we shout or grunt or
otherwise allow our voices to take care of themselves, as we are likely
to do when alone in the country on a fine spring day, we are no longer
fixing vocal adjustments by voluntary control. Under these circumstances
we are almost certain to hit on speech sounds that we could never learn
to control in actual speech.]

[Footnote 11: If speech, in its acoustic and articulatory aspect, is
indeed a rigid system, how comes it, one may plausibly object, that no
two people speak alike? The answer is simple. All that part of speech
which falls out of the rigid articulatory framework is not speech in
idea, but is merely a superadded, more or less instinctively determined
vocal complication inseparable from speech in practice. All the
individual color of speech--personal emphasis, speed, personal cadence,
personal pitch--is a non-linguistic fact, just as the incidental
expression of desire and emotion are, for the most part, alien to
linguistic expression. Speech, like all elements of culture, demands
conceptual selection, inhibition of the randomness of instinctive
behavior. That its "idea" is never realized as such in practice, its
carriers being instinctively animated organisms, is of course true of
each and every aspect of culture.]

There are, then, an indefinitely large number of articulated sounds
available for the mechanics of speech; any given language makes use of
an explicit, rigidly economical selection of these rich resources; and
each of the many possible sounds of speech is conditioned by a number of
independent muscular adjustments that work together simultaneously
towards its production. A full account of the activity of each of the
organs of speech--in so far as its activity has a bearing on
language--is impossible here, nor can we concern ourselves in a
systematic way with the classification of sounds on the basis of their
mechanics.[12] A few bold outlines are all that we can attempt. The
organs of speech are the lungs and bronchial tubes; the throat,
particularly that part of it which is known as the larynx or, in popular
parlance, the "Adam's apple"; the nose; the uvula, which is the s