HOWARD RICHLER
from
CAN I HAVE A WORD WITH YOU?
Howard
Richler is the author of The Dead Sea Scroll Palindromes,
Global Mother Tongue: The Eight Flavours of English and,
most recently, Can I Have a Word With You? by Ronsdale
Press (2007).
BY
WAY OF INTRODUCTION
I wrote
Can I Have a Word With You? to convey the idea of the
importance of the single word. The Gospel According to John
begins with the advisory that “In the beginning was the
word and the meaning of a single word is at the heart of many
of our intellectual discussions. My book is comprised of 69
alphabetically-ordered entries that deal with some of the major
semantic and sociological dimensions of words such as how words
change meaning, political correctness and proper usage. As words
are also a source of recreation for me, I have including several
entries just for the fun of them. Here are three:
MALAPROP
Writing some years ago in Maclean’s magazine,
Anthony Wilson-Smith said that former Canadian Prime Minister
Jean Chrétien had a penchant for “cool,”
tumbling from malaprop to misstep to outright muck-up.”
Chrétien is guilty of charges two and three (in French
as well as English) but I found no evidence supporting the allegation
made by many commentator that he is guilty of committing multitudinous
malapropisms. This is probably because the term “malapropism”
tends to be misused. For example, on June 27, 2001, the Toronto
Star titled an editorial “Mayor Malaprop” in
describing the following infamous comment by former Toronto
mayor Mel Lastman: “Why would I want to go to a place
like Mombassa (Kenya)? . . . I just see myself in a pot of boiling
water with all these natives dancing around me."
A malapropism
(or malaprop) is not any kind of a verbal gaffe but specifically
an unintentional misuse of the wrong word. The Acoustical Society
of America defines a malapropism as “a whole word that
supplants an intended word,” and adds that the words involved
in malapropisms are related to each other in the way that they
sound but not in their meanings. Some examples of this phenomenon
include saying “illegitimate” instead of “illiterate,”
“monotony” instead of “monogamy,” and
“octane” instead of “octave.” The Oxford
Companion to the English Language dichotomizes between
“classic malapropisms, in which the mistakes are due to
ignorance, and cases when the speaker has inadvertently replaced
the intended word by another.” These “confusables”
have similar rhythms, such as “exhibition” and “expedition”
or “competent” with “confident.”
The
term derives from Mrs. Malaprop, mal a propos, (“inappropriate”
in French), a character in Richard Sheridan`s 1775 play The
Rivals who has a penchant for this type of gaffe. For example,
she declares one man to be “as headstrong as an allegory
on the Nile” (meaning alligator).
While
the word “malapropism” was an eighteenth century
invention, the concept predates this era. Shakespeare's comedies
employ characters who stretch for a word but only reach a reasonable
facsimile. In Much Ado About Nothing, Dogberry asks,
“Who think you the most desertless man to be constable?”
substituting “desertless” for “deserving.”
Other gaffes in the play include confusing “sensible”
with “senseless,” “comprehend” with
“apprehend,” and “suspicious” with “auspicious.”
Although Chrétien hasn’t been guilty of any memorable
malapropisms, other Canadian politicians have committed some
howlers. John Kushner, a Calgary city councillor from 1976-86
was prone to these mistakes. He once said to a colleague, “Don't
get your dandruff up” and once told an assemblage,
“I’m not sure many of you can understand all this
legal jargle.” Former Winnipeg City Councillor
Slaw Rebchuck once insisted, “Let’s get that in
black and writing.” Former Toronto mayor Allan
Lamport said, “I deny the allegation, and I deny the alligators,
“ and warned a group, “Keep this up and we’ll
have a vicious triangle.”
Canadian
newspapers have also been guilty of some howlers. For example,
when Don Gillis, a highly-regarded dean of the New Brunswick
legal community died in 2005, the provincial newspaper The Telegraph-Journal
ran a large front page article chronicling his distinguished
career. The article included quotes from several of the leading
members of the New Brunswick bar who commented on Gillis’s
accomplishments. One of the individuals quoted was Neil McKelvey,
also a dean of the New Brunswick bar, and the Telegraph-Journal
reporter who wrote the article when mentioning MCKelvey stated,
“And the platitudes continued with Neil McKelvey . . .
” The word he should have used was plaudits not
platitudes.
The
master of the political malaprop, however, is George W. Bush.
Bush’s “Bushisms,” aka “Bushspeak,”
aka “Bushonics” have been satirized by a host of
literate commentators. For example, Stanford linguist Geoff
Nunberg stated that “Bush's malaprops can make him sound
like someone who learned the language over a bad cell phone
connection.”
Here’s
a soupçon of some of Dubya’s malaprops:
Often cited as a malaprop is Bush’s statement, “I
know what it’s like to put food on my family,” but
being charitable by nature, I’ll give the President the
benefit of the doubt and assume that he merely omitted some
words.
Dubya
may have come by his propensity for malaprops naturally. His
Poppa announced to a crowd of 15,000 in Ridgefield, New Jersey,
in 1992, that “I don’t want to run the risk of ruining
what is a lovely recession.” This statement was
topped in 1991 by Bush Senior’s Veep, Dan Quayle, who
told a gathering that “Republicans understood the importance
of bondage between mother and child.”
The
humour in malaprops lies in the listener's awareness of the
mistake and the speaker's ingenuousness. Malaprops make us feel
superior for “we wouldn't commit such a gaffe
-- or would we? It also helps if the replaced word lends a certain
irony to the statement, as in replacing “bonding”
with “bondage,” or “monogamy” with “monotony.”
A friend related to me that his uncle once came into a stuffy
room and demanded, “Open a window; I’m sophisticating!”
Another friend mentioned to me recently that she grew up with
someone very prone to malaprops who once averred, “When
a child gets to a certain age the unbiblical cord must
be severed.” A former business associate told me that
after he gave a eulogy at a family funeral, his cousin told
him “that was the most touching urology I’ve
ever heard.” A friend told me that some years ago her
daughter was commenting on a news item where some terrorists
used gasoline bombs and referred to the ordnance as mazel-tov
cocktails At times, it is the particular context of a blooper
that makes us howl. A friend who is a history professor at McGill
received a term paper from a student that dealt with relations
between India and China. In it, the student wrote about the
“wonton aggression of the Chinese.”
It
is the very artlessness of malaprops that makes them endearing,
and aside from the joy of hearing someone screw up, malaprops
are entertaining because they reveal hidden connections between
words.
What is frightening about the verbal fumbling of George W. Bush
is that it has not prevented him from becoming President of
the United States and being widely admired by many Americans.
Linguist John McWhorter points out in his book Doing Our
Own Thing that “candidates bite the dust for being
untelegenic, dour, visible present-day philanderers, too strident,
or looking silly posing in a tank -- but both Bushes show that
having trouble rubbing a noun and a verb together is not considered
a mark against one in applying for the leadership of the land.”
This
will clearly not do. Or in the words of long-time Chicago mayor
Richard J. Daley, we should strive for “greater platitudes
of achievement.”
MONDEGREEN
Knock, Knock.
Who’s there?
Sam and Janet
Sam and Janet who?
Sam and Janet evening, you may see a stranger.
As
every puerile individual like me knows, some words and phrases
resemble other words and phrases. In the above example, the
tandem of “Sam and Janet” sounds like “Some
enchanted.”
The
French have raised this tendency to an art form by way of the
holorime, a two-line poem in which both lines are pronounced
identically but use different words:
“Par le bois de Djinn, ou s’entasse de l’effroi”
“Parle! Bois du gin, ou cent tasses de lait froid.”
This
loosely translates as “When going through the Djinn woods,
surrounded by so much fear, keep talking. Drink gin or a hundred
cups of cold milk.”
Far
less poetically, the English riddle – “How do you
prove in three steps that a sheet of paper is a lazy dog?”
also conveys how phrases can sound similar; the answer: 1) a
sheet of paper is an ink-lined plane; 2) an inclined plane is
a slope up; 3) a slow pup is a lazy dog.
Usually,
however, the similarity of sounds is not contrived and we simply
mishear phrases.
Growing
up in the drug-hazed ‘60s, I pondered the identity of
the enigmatic Leslie referenced in the popular song “Groovin”
by the Young Rascals:
“You and me and Leslie”
Leslie, however, was a figment of my imagination, or more precisely
of my imagined hearing. The lyric, I found out in later years,
was “You and me endlessly.”
I had
been “mondegreened.”
The
term “mondegreen” was coined by writer Sylvia Wright.
As a child she had heard the Scottish ballad “The Bonny
Earl of Murra” which she interpreted thus:
Ye
Highlands and Ye lowlands
Oh where hae you been?
They hae slay the Earl of Murray
And Lady Mondegreen.
Sylvia
Wright was wrong in thinking that a double homicide had occurred.
The “Lady Mondegreen” was a projection of her romantic
imagination, for the last line in fact was not “Lady Mondegreen”
but “laid him on the green.”
Children
are particularly prone to this type of mistake, where an unfamiliar
word or phrase is changed into something more familiar. This
process has created some memorable “religious” personages
such as “Round John Virgin” (instead of “round
yon Virgin”), “Harold be thy name” (instead
of “hallowed be thy name.” And “Gladly, the
cross-eyed bear” (instead of “Gladly, the cross
I’d bear”).
Many a familiar phrase has been mondegreened. A “dog eat
dog” world has been rendered as a “doggy dog world”;
“for all intents and purposes” has become “for
all intensive purposes”; “duct tape” has turned
into “duck tape”; and “no holds barred”
has been phrased as “no holes barred.”
The
majority of mondegreens seem to occur in the lyrics of songs.
William Safire years ago cited an American grandmother who interpreted
the Beatles’ lyric “the girl with kaleidoscope eyes”
as “the girl with colitis goes by.” The lyric “Excuse
me while I kiss the sky” from Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple
Haze” was interpreted by some as “Excuse me while
I kiss this guy.” Hendrix was aware of this misinterpretation
and sometimes during a performance he would help perpetuate
the misunderstanding by kissing a male associate after saying
the line.
The
obscure lyrics and indistinct pronunciation of many songs facilitates
misinterpretations. On a website dedicated to misheard lyrics,
I noticed that in Sarah McLachlan’s "Building a Mystery,"
her lyric “you strut your rasta wear and a suicide poem”
was interpreted as “you stretched your ass to where in
a suicide home.” In the Aerosmith song "Dude Looks
Like a Lady," the titled lyric is somewhat squealed and
I interpreted the lyric as “Do the funky lady.”
This website confirmed that I was not the only confused listener.
Others had misheard this line as “Do the shockalayley,”
“Do the rock-a lady” and “Doodoos like a lady.”
When the lyrics to some songs are incomprehensible it is not
surprising that mishearings occur. I haven’t the foggiest
idea of the meaning of the lyric “Revved up like a deuce,
another runner in the night” by Manfred Mann’s Earth
Band. Small wonder that someone heard this line as, “Wrapped
up like a douche, another rumour in the night. ”
Some
song lyrics are almost impossible to decipher. I suspect few
people know that the lyric that follows “Willie and the
Poor Boys are Playin’" (by Credence Clearwater Revival)
is “bring a nickel tap your feet.” This lyric has
been misheard as “singing pickles can’t be beat.”
Also misinterpreted by this musical group is the lyric “there’s
a bad moon on the rise” which has been heard as “there’s
a bathroom on the right.” Unilingual troglodytes claim
to have heard the Beatles’ “Michelle, ma belle,
sont les mots qui vont tres bien ensemble, tres bien ensemble”
as “Michelle, my bell, some day monkey play piano song,
play piano song.”
Some
mishearings are somewhat incredible. Dylan’s line -- “the
answer my friend” -- in "Blowin’ in the Wind"
has apparently been interpreted entomologically as “the
ants are my friends”; Crystal Gayle song "Don’t
it Make Your Brown Eyes Blue" was misheard as “Doughnuts
Make Your Brown Eyes Blue” and at the aforementioned website
somebody claims to have heard the lyric from Pink Floyd’s
"Another Brick in the Wall," -- “no dark sarcasm
in the classroom” -- as “no Dukes of Hazzard in
the classroom.”
Stephen
Pinker in The Language Instinct says that the “interesting
thing about mondegreens is that the mis-hearings are generally
less plausible than the intended lyrics. He relates the anecdote
of a student who heard the Shocking Blue song "I’m
Your Venus" as “I’m your penis” and thus
was amazed that it wasn’t censored.
NIGGARDLY
Some years ago my friend Norm was partaking in a traditional
Friday night family dinner at the home of his parents. While
trying to ingest a piece of bland tasting chicken, he blurted
out to his mother, “Ma, don’t you believe in using
condiments? ” To which, she replied, “Normy, we
will not use smut around the dinner table.”
Around
the same time, freelance journalist Harry Fleming wrote an article
in the Canadian magazine Atlantic Insight. He stated
that Donald Marshall, Jr., after having been incarcerated for
11 years for a murder he had not committed, “accepted
the government’s niggardly offer of $270, 000.”
This
comment drew the ire of Gillian D. Butler, the then chief adjudicator
of the Human Rights Commission of the Newfoundland Justice Department.
Ms. Butler felt the magazine should have been “sensitive
enough to human-rights issues to have refused to publish the
article in this form.” Fleming’s description of
the said offer was too close to the n-word for Ms. Butler’s
liking.
It
was only a matter of time until somebody got hurt or, as linguist
Steven Pinker phrased it in The New York Times on February
2, 1999, “niggardly” was “a disaster waiting
to happen.”
Pinker
designated the word as such because the month before Mayor Anthony
Williams of Washington, D.C. accepted the resignation of David
Howard, one of his worship’s top aides, Mr. Howard, a
Caucasian, had the politically incorrect effrontery to also
use the “n-word,” “niggardly,” in a
meeting, thus offending an Afro-American colleague. Mr Howard
had said, “ I will have to be niggardly with this fund
because it’s not going to be a lot of money.”
“Niggardly”
is an old English word meaning stingy or miserly, with no etymological
connection to its similar-sounding racial epithet. The OED
defines “niggard” as “a mean, stingy,
or parsimonious person; a miser; one who grudgingly parts with
or expends anything.” It says that “niggard”
is of obscure etymology but that an “earlier synonym nigon,
and the termination on both cases would normally indicate a
French origin.” The OED’s earliest citation
for “niggard is 1374. In Chaucer’s Troylus,
a character states, “ So parfaite joye may no negarde
have.”
Robert
Hendrickson writing in Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins
says that “so sensitive are people black and white to
the use of nigger that the word niggardly
(miserly) . . . is often avoided.” David Howard obviously
wishes he had eschewed the use of the word. In a statement of
contrition to the press he said, “I should have thought,
this is an arcane word, and everyone may not know it.”
Howard was about the only person who thought he had said something
wrong. Even chairman of the NAACP, Julian Bond, said that the
“precipitous acceptance of Howard’s resignation
was niggardly on Williams’ part.” Eventually, Howard
was reinstated but placed in a different department.
The
phrase “politically correct” was coined in 1975
by Karen Decrow, the president of the National Organization
of Women. It wasn’t until the early 1990s that the phrase
emerged in the context that we know it, and it took an overtly
pejorative tone. Some people see the whole issue of “political
correctness” as a veiled form of thought control. Others
(such as Humpty Dumpty) counter that language is controlled
anyway by dominant groups in society.
For
those people who find terms such as cerebrally challenged too
euphemistic, I remind them that it wasn’t that long ago
that words like “cretin” and even “moron”
were used in polite society without compunction. Given a choice,
I’d rather be oversensitive than not sensitive enough.
Increasingly, “ethnic” verbs such as “to welsh”
(to avoid payment); “to gyp”(to cheat) and “to
jew” (to bargain) are also avoided.
But
where does it end? Are we supposed to avoid using the word “fatuous”
when addressing the horizontally-challenged? If I say that I
find a “penal institution (and pronounce the first word
“penile”’) to be barbaric”, I’m
sure there’s somebody out there who thinks I have cast
aspersions on the practice of circumcision. If I use the word
“pithy” will someone feel I’m mocking lispers?
Must I avoid saying that I had a “whopping good time”
when in the company of people of Italian extraction, “judicious”
when among Jews, and “nervous titter” and “hoary
bat” when in the company of women? Might “enigma”
and “snigger” offend? Must everyone, except white
Protestants, avoid “waspish comments?”
The
mind boggles.
Title:
Can I Have a Word with You?
Author: Howard Richler
Publisher: Ronsdale Press, 2007
ISBN: 1553800494 : 9781553800491
For more
of Howard Richler at Arts & Opinion:
The
Significant Other Conundrum
Yinnglish-Schminglish
The
Oxfordization of Poutine
