According to the prognosticators, “The King’s Speech” will probably be a shoe-in for Best Picture, and Best Actor at the Academy Awards tonight.

I am secretly very pleased about this, because the King and I both share the same challenge in life — a speech impediment.  He stutters, and I am tongue-tied. I don’t share this secret with just anyone, but I know I can trust you.

The truth is that I’ve been suffering from being tongue-tied nearly all my life but I try not to look on it as a handicap, and in fact I like to think of it as a kind of an achievement in self-discipline, because I think this would be a far better and quieter world, let me tell you, if more people were tongue-tied once in a while because the fact is that most folks talk, talk, talk too much or else they talk at the wrong place, at the wrong time, or with the wrong talk, or with their foot in their mouth instead of having their tongue tied quietly in there minding its own business, because the fact is that it is when our tongue is UN-tied that it can bring us to the seat of ruination, for as that tongue-tied former president Calvin Coolidge once said, “I have noticed that nothing I never said ever did me any harm”,  and besides that, my friend and fellow movie-goer, it is patriotic to be tongue-tied . . . why, I can remember back when we were fighting the great World War II, and Uncle Sam would appear on billboards, on telephone poles, on mail boxes, with his finger outstretched to each and every citizen admonishing him that “Loose lips sink ships”, and I have always figured that anything that was good enough for good old Uncle Sam was good enough for good old yours truly, and on account of that, I am not ashamed, no indeed, I am proud to come before you today and to admit that I am, in fact, in short, and in brief, tongue-tied.

Yes, being speechless is a difficult handicap, but I cope with it with true grit. Maybe somebody will write a movie about me sometime.  Maybe they could call it “Lost”.  If so, it will be okay if you want to nominate it for an Academy Award.

I haven’t seen The King’s Speech yet but I hope King George learned to conquer his speech impairment as well as I have.  Apparently, his therapist has a big role in the movie. The following is my favorite fellow-tongue-tied victim, Fred, and what happened on his own less successful effort to get therapy.