Or breaking out of that lumpen-tongued malaise to punch the air with a triumphant, celebratory Yes!It comes when "Bertie", aka King George VI - brilliantly portrayed by the increasingly impressive Colin Firth - hounded by a bad stutter and shackled into a kind of psychological subservience by this impediment, stands his ground against the forthright Archbishop of Canterbury. Against expectation, and in a moment of significant crisis, he finds the wherewithal to tell the cleric that he himself will decide who is to be his speech therapist and helpmate, and that it will continue to be his friend, and alleged fraud, Lionel Logue.
The scene has all the more force because it is preceded by one earlier in which "Bertie" is taunted into a painfully impotent incoherence by his elder brother, David, King Edward VIII, when he attempts to question the King's increasingly erratic behaviour.
Of course not all of us have to deal with the sort of burdens that George VI laboured under; but many of us have had occasion to wish that the connection between our brains and our mouths were less circuitous and better-oiled.
Whether in verbal jousting, friendly banter, formal debate or just everyday discourse who hasn't, after the event, dredged up the perfect response, the witty one-liner or deadly putdown that earlier eluded them?The art of effective verbal communication has long been prized, but today we appear to elevate it more than ever, particularly as it pertains to the public arena.
The art of persuasion, whether in local or national politics, the media, entertainment, the arts, seems so much more a dominating element of contemporary society.
In a broad sense, the diversification and accessibility of electronic and digital new media removes the often hierarchical barriers to self-expression that the more formal old media imposed.
And this has many positive aspects to it, including a very real democratisation of free speech.
In some cases it is proving positively revolutionary: witness the current gelling of forces challenging the dictatorships of North Africa, in Tunisia and Algeria, for example.
But however seductive, the proliferation of fluency, the rise and rise of the freshly articulate, the persuasive voices of those, for example, afforded newly privileged positions according at least partly to the influence and ideology of their backers - the radio shock jocks, the TV pundits, the bloggers, pressure groups and indeed newspaper columnists - present their own challenges.
There is another scene in The King's Speech which underlines that this, in fact, is not a new reality.
It comes when the newly crowned King George and his family are watching a newsreel of his coronation in 1936.
There follows footage of a Nazi rally - which looks to be at Nuremberg - and of the impassioned and formidable rhetoric of one Adolf Hitler.
If memory serves me correctly, it is one of the princesses who asks what the man is saying, and her father says something to the effect that "whatever it is, he's saying it rather well".
In the film, the scene exists in part because it lends context and drama to what is to come, but in the moment it ratchets up the challenges the new king knows he faces as he struggles to overcome his own debilitating inarticulacy.
For the rest of us, it is a stark reminder that fluency is by no means in itself admirable or a force for good.
This may seem blindingly obvious, but today as the louder, more persistent voices in our midst hold sway, it sometimes seems we have come to worship willy-nilly at the altar of form rather than content.
In the midst of this "revolution" the persuasive ruminations of talk-back charlatans, snake oil pundits, YouTube gurus and compulsive "twitterers" should be scrutinised with renewed rigour.
Nobody is recommending, or for one minute advocating, the virtues of speech impediments, but when the superficially attractive but ultimately vacuous pronouncements of certain influential "opinion-makers" are heard, one does on occasion sigh and silently wish.
- Simon Cunliffe is deputy editor (news) of the Otago Daily Times
