Pop 89: It Starts In the Language

By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com

My friend Page emailed me the other day to point out the misuse of a word in a recent column. I just wish you’d let me edit it before it went to print, he said. To save you the embarrassment.

The word I misused was prevaricate. I meant to say deliberate. I have suffered all these years under the illusion that I was using the right word. I was trying to describe the way Page kept moving his camera from spot to spot in order to find an ideal position from which to view the night sky.

However, prevaricate means: “to act or speak evasively, swerve from the truth” and is often used to describe someone who is deliberately trying to “dodge or transgress.” Prevaricators make sham accusations in order to shift responsibility away from themselves, making it an apt word for people, among them politicians, who refuse to take the rap for the messes they’ve created or lies they tell. However, we needn’t assume that every word out of a politician’s mouth is nefarious. And yes, I looked it up. Nefarious means “not rightfully, or lawfully spoken.”

The mistaken use of an incorrect word in place of a word with a similar sound, resulting in a nonsensical or humorous utterance, is a malapropism. The word itself comes from the French mal à propos, or “inappropriate.” Malapropisms are perfectly understandable when one is learning a new language or is three years old. Often we deliberately use malapropisms as puns or inside jokes. We are being creative.

One reason for using the wrong word might also be “aphasia,” when a person has difficulty with their language or speech due to damage to the left side of the brain. Symptoms can range widely, from getting a few words mixed up to having difficulty with all forms of communication.

Or perhaps the speaker is not speaking in their first language. As one who spent eleven years in Quebec City, where the first language is French, I can tell you I made some very interesting, not to mention embarrassing, errors in word choice. For example, I once asked some friends to “cross their fingers” for me, as I’d just applied for a new job. They smirked and giggled and then explained that I had said: “masturbate your fingers.”

In my case, pronunciation was the culprit. It’s easy to make make the subtle error between a soft hissing “s” sound and a more “zzz” sounding “s,” but the consequences can be humiliating. Suffice it to say I didn’t speak much in my first years in Quebec. But I learned to listen and to appreciate the slight, enormous difference between the right and wrong word.

There was another reason I was reticent to speak in French- I take great pride in my ability with my first language. Perhaps too much. Language is for communicating, not showing off. But it’s also very disheartening when you are trying to share an insight or make a point, or even give directions, and you end up sounding like a five-year-old with a speech impediment.

I also learned to be careful about “faux amis” (false friends), words that look the same in English but mean something entirely different in French, like blesse (wounded) vs blessed (meaning graced). My daily errors gave me empathy for my English students. It was only as a teacher of English that I realized how fickle the English language truly is.

English’s advantage is that it is a sponge language. It is able to expand and morph and hybridize, making it durable and expandable. However, its students are at a disadvantage because rules are constantly broken - especially rules of pronunciation.

For example - when words like fear and gear rhyme with steer and cheer, you can see how it would follow that when a student gets up in the middle of the night because of a ruckus outside, he calls the cops because: “There’s a beer in my back yard!” He hears bear as rhyming with dear. Wouldn’t you?

One winter evening, as we were all leaving the classroom, a student pointed to the floor and said: “You dropped your shark.” It’s a short hop from shark to scarf.

It’s also a short hop from “killing the enemy” to “servicing the target,” both examples of how the military and media, over history, softened the ways they spoke about death in war. Every day we choose words that either clarify or obfuscate, wound or heal and incite anger or joy.

When a grown person in a position of power is given exposure on myriad platforms, with the opportunity to incite fear or malign reputations for purposes of personal gain, they should know the right words for things—especially when addressing serious concerns like fake meat and police surveillance.

Sadly, there are some who seem completely unaware of their lackadaisical understanding of the tools of communication. And they couldn’t care less. But doesn’t it behoove congressional candidates to know the difference between a secret state police squad and an innocent tomato soup whose only crime is that it is served cold? In a world where science advances at a breathtaking rate, critics of such progress might be taken more seriously if they understood what a petri dish is. Hint: It’s not a peach tree dish.

The Russian poet Joseph Brodsky once told his American students: “You are naive to think that evil will come into your houses wearing big black boots. Look at the language. It begins in the language.”

It behooves public persons who demand free speech to use language correctly. Media personalities claiming to deliver the important and relevant news of the day should know better, but instead, the cameras and microphones chase the worst abusers.

Or maybe, everybody’s deliberately prevaricating, intentionally diverting attention from truly serious matters. Which makes them much like the Elizabethans, when, instead of taking a bath, just covered the bad smells emanating from their persons with perfume. If that is the case then, sadly they are “fragrantly” abusing the English language.