Much as we love NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers, someone needs to tell Seth to cool it a bit with his rapid fire “Closer Look” monologues — he’salmostsettingmytvcaptionsonfirewith his ridiculously fast delivery. Yeah, rapid speech can gives a nice sense of urgency and humorous banter…
…but it can also make your ears hurt.
As an example, our research team took a closer look at a 31-second segment of his March 11, 2021 CL segment and, based on captions, estimated that he was able to grind out 165 words, or 330 words per minute (wpm)*
Now, to put this in perspective, the average conversation rate for English speakers in the United States is about 150 wpm. (Virtual Speech)
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- Radio hosts and podcasters: between 150-160 wpm
- Auctioneers and Commentators: between 250-400 wpm
A study reported by Forbes shows that the fastest TV news speech segments (WPSG-Phila) came in 185 wpm and the CNN average is 154 wpm.
Meanwhile, Steven Woodmore, a British electronics salesman and comedian known for his rapid speech articulation has been clocked at 637 wpm, a speed four times faster than the average person.
So, maybe Seth is getting paid by his word count and figures the Sea Captain isn’t paying rent anymore; but really, Seth, can ya just slow it down to at least lower-auctioneer levels?
Your cue card holder will thank you too.
* Admittedly our research team is not exactly Max Planck, Annenberg School or MIT-level but we stand by our estimates. What we did was clock a particularly furiously paced segment that ran 31 seconds. We couldn’t keep up with actual word count in our captions (and freezing the screen makes the captions disappear) so we counted the number of lines and assumed an average of 5-word-per-complete-line. That gave us a total of 165 words for the studied portion, which, due to our less than exemplary algebra skills, we rounded to a half-minute. Multiplying by 2 we get 330 wpm or 5.5 words/second (wps). The CNN average is a mere 2.57 wps and the slowest TV newscast in the 2019 Forbes report was 1.28 wps.
It has been said that John F. Kennedy sometimes talked fast, very fast–enough to make it into the Guinness Book of World Records for rate of speaking. During a December 1961 speech, he supposedly spoke 327 words in just one minute. Of course these records don’t always take into account filled pauses (“uh”), or whether the speaker continued the rate for the entire speech. And the Kennedy feat has some questionable aspects to it (see the U Penn “Language Log” if you really want the wonky details)
Words in Action: The Blog 