Hello, Father Gregory here, Assistant Director of the Tomistic Institute.

My old title used to be Assistant Director for Campus Outreach, which was longer, but somehow easier to say.

Regardless, this is an off-campus conversation, and I am delighted to be joined by Sister Anna Rae.

Thanks for joining.

Thank you for having me.

In this off-campus conversation, we are going to talk about human speech, not all of human

speech or the various uses of human speech, but a particular use of human speech, we might say a misuse

of human speech. You gave a lecture about Balderdash, which you defined as using a word in the

appropriate manner or in the correct way, but not knowing it or not knowing that you're using

the word in the appropriate manner, the correct way.

Slight clarification.

Thank you.

Using a word correctly without understanding its meaning and not recognizing it.

So really three conditions. First, which makes Baldur dash so difficult to identify is that we use words correctly, even when we don't know the meaning of the word.

And that's just kind of a fascinating phenomenon that you find first in small children, but we never really let go of that fascinating capacity to speak correctly without knowing

what we're saying.

Ordinarily, when we're young, we recognize that we don't know things.

And we can become inured to that not knowing or that recognition that I generally don't

know what's happening.

So we become more and more competent,

and then we can fail to recognize our misunderstanding

or our just not knowing a word.

...