Thursday Afternoon Diversion: A Failure to Communicate

By Kevin Robinson in Arts & Entertainment on Apr 19, 2012 8:20PM

As we wrap up language week here at Chicagoist, we take a look at two videos that illustrate failures to communicate, one humorous, one tragic.

In the first video, we see a dramatization of a common experience among speakers of American English when listening to British accents, as heard through the ears of a citizen of the United Kingdom.

In this second video, a medical training film from the 1950's, we see a woman presenting symptoms of Broca's aphasia, a disorder marked by agrammatism, or the inability to speak in a grammatically correct fashion.