Let’s make some noise for the love of language | Whale’s Tales

Published 1:30 am Friday, April 17, 2026

When I was a kid, my father took to calling me, “Gerald McBoing McBoing, the Noisemaking Boy,” after a character in an old animated short film adapted from a short story by Dr. Seuss about a boy who only communicated in sound effects and weird noises.

Apparently, I made weird noises, too, though not all the time. I mean, I could speak the Kid’s English. But I always loved making sounds and imitating what I was hearing.

I believe my early fondness for playing with sounds was the earliest form of the love of languages that would overtake me in my early teens. The key moment for me was my successful translation of a passage from a collection of Goethe’s essays in German. I couldn’t believe I was able do that, and it taught something crucial about who I was that evening. I wanted to do it again. I learned that for some reason, it came easily to me. From there, as the years merrily rolled along, I tackled other, mostly Indo-European languages, including French and Italian. It was a lot of work, but I was hooked for life.

Crucially, for this column, an offshoot of that was a growing fascination with dialects, which helped me with the mechanics not just of creating the sounds, but of shaping the vocal passage correctly. From that I learned about the Strine dialects dialects of Australia, one of which requires a nasality I found challenging. And I absolutely fell in love with Old English, Middle English and, of course, modern English.

The thing for me is that I know how much effort I put into all of it. For a time, when I toured with an acting company, I thought of doing the whole shebang professionally. Ultimately, as you can see, I went into journalism.

That’s one reason, albeit a minor one, that I hate AI — too often because it mangles the language. But chiefly because it means someone out there, perhaps with the same love of languages and sounds I had as a kid, someone who worked as hard as I did to get the nuances of dialects down as I did, did not get that particular job. And the people who posted a particular rendition, say, of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How Do I Love Thee,” simply cannot hear how AI destroys it, mispronouncing the words, misplacing the stress. I must admit, however, it sometimes comes with comical effect, but more often leaves me wanting to kick the offenders in the backside for being such clods.

I know that’s the dream of the fat cats who run things, who would prefer to do it without paying employees. Who’s going to buy the things industries make when so many people are unemployed?

I think that with AI, for many reasons, we may one day outclever ourselves into ruin and collapsed economies that benefit only a few.

Just the tip of things.

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Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@soundpublishing.com.