Learn English – Speak At/Into Microphone

idiomsmeaningprepositions

For these two sentences:

  1. He spoke at the microphone.
  2. He spoke into the microphone.

, are they the same, or is one more poetic than the other?

Best Answer

  1. The ordinary idiom is 'speak into the microphone'. Occasionally you will find a voice professional or sound engineer talk about 'speaking across the mic' (which is a technique for avoiding 'pop' or for dealing with an unusual mic setup) or encouraging an amateur to 'speak to the mic', meaning to speak as if the mic were a human listener. 'Speak at the mic' addresses the position at which the speaker stands.

  2. In contemporary English 'poetic' is not usually a desirable stylistic quality. When ordinary people today speak of 'poetic' language what they usually have in mind is language marked by a high degree of sonic patterning, by conventional metaphor, and by a highly emotional tone. But English poetry itself abandoned the use of a distinctly 'poetic' diction more than a century ago, and this sort of language is now generally regarded as self-indulgent or meretricious. When sophisticated critics speak approvingly of 'poetic' qualities they are more likely to mean that a passage is intellectually and emotionally complex and suggests far more than it explicitly says.

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