If you are a fan of British TV like I am, then you will appreciate the importance of watching programs like Shetland and Peaky Blinders with closed captioning. I subscribe to both Britbox and Acorn, so a major portion of my television watching is from the U.K. The accents often sound like a foreign language and I’d never be able to capture the nuances of the dialogue without being able to follow the written words along the bottom of the screen. Without closed captioning I would totally miss the essence of what I’m watching.

Being of a certain age, I also wear hearing aids. When I got my latest ones (great buy at Costco, by the way) I also purchased a little Bluetooth box that attaches to my television. Thanks to a handy dandy little app on my Android phone, the sound on the TV is sent directly to my hearing aids and I can hear everything clearly with my own volume control. The same feature is also available for telephone calls but I’ve been told my cell phone is not equipped for such a feature.

Even with the sound piped directly into my ears, it is often difficult to discern conversations on television programs. So many actors and presenters these days obviously did not attend the Lorne Greene Academy of Radio Arts. Dialogue is mumbled, spoken too quickly, or whispered, which makes it difficult to hear everything. Projection, modulation, and enunciation which are so valued in live theatre are largely ignored on the small screen. Even certain American and Canadian programs are difficult to decipher so I rely on a steady diet of closed captioning. American slang and colloquialisms definitely require translating.

There’s an added fun bonus to having closed captioning. Whoever does the “translation” must sometimes be someone who does not speak English as a first language. Sometimes the written interpretation of words is hilariously wrong or misspelled. The other night I was watching a British series and the tartan carpet was captioned as tarting carpet—an entirely different and hilarious meaning, which could lead to rug burns. Or, in one of the many British mysteries, A lot of people seem to dye in this village. You would think that by the time the program reached the air, they would have proofread the text, but errors abound. Sometimes I have to translate the translation to get the meaning.

Not only is interpreting words a challenge, but the intermittent internet service from Bell means the picture sometimes freezes for a few seconds or even minutes. When that happens I have to rely on whatever written captions I can visually grab during the flickering to follow the “plot”. Consequently, I leave closed captioning activated full-time on all programs so I don’t miss anything. Technology does have its challenges.

I’ve been watching some Scandinavian programs lately and I’m learning how similar so many of their words are to English. I think with a little dedication and a bit of bookwork, I could perhaps learn a few basic Norwegian or Danish words and expand my linguistic repertoire.

I should also use the closed captioning feature to improve my French but I’ll never get the hang of understanding French as long as they speak so quickly. It doesn’t help that I never learned how to properly conjugate French verbs. While I can generally make myself understood when I visit France, I always have trouble understanding what they rattle off to me in rapid-fire speech.

Radio shows are another source of poor diction and enunciation. Often, the interviewer’s or interviewee’s repetitive use of verbal tics such as “like“, or “you know?” interspersed in speech patterns drives me batty so I have to change the station. It’s too bad there isn’t a way to close caption radio programs. Whatever happened to being able to understand the spoken word, with or without hearing aids?

According to Netflix Canada, the majority of subscribers watch their programming with subtitles. I get it—literally. The bottom line on my TV screen is this old boomer’s special little helper. Are you as ear blind as I am?