Number 19
Language is misused intentionally and accidentally; which is worse? As Oscar Wilde said, a gentleman never offends anyone unintentionally. But a wise woman once said that while sometimes you may think it's necessary to lie, you must never lie to yourself.
For bold-faced, audacious lying, see "Lunatic Counterfactual Art" below. However, a more common cause of language misuse comes from misthinking ~ which leads to misspeaking but is more insidious ~ and one way to do that is to assign something a wrong value or place it in the wrong context. For example:
From a TV talking mouth: "Saddam Hussein is now taking his place in the pantheon of failed, brutal dictators." Saddam Hussein had a pretty long run of power, passing the torch to his loathsome spawn, before failing. But is it possible to be successfully evil? Name a successful brutal dictator. Is it simply someone who dies in his bed? Note too "pantheon", which means a monument to all the gods. Maybe this is irony. This sentence is one big moral and theological muddle.
Iraq's envoy to the UN, Mohammed Al-Douri, said "The game is over" when cornered by a reporter after the fall of Baghdad. Sounds like the villain in a second-rate thriller.
Another poorly thought-out war metaphor: Recently a TV reporter apologized for using the word "show" to refer to the war. I didn't catch her original remark so I don't know if it was a careless reference to videotapes of the war, or to the war itself, or to something else. This is cognate with the increasing tendency of people to applaud for things that are not entertainment or performances, such as music or other elements of church services, for example. To quote Miss Manners, " . . . try and explain that to people who recognize no greater authority than entertainment, and therefore know of no higher show of reverence than applause." (Judith Martin's Miss Manners column in The Washington Post) (And with a nod to Judith Martin's usually impeccable English, let's remember that it's preferable ~ well, it's correct ~ to say "try to" rather than "try and".)
MSNBC screen slogan: Tomorrow's Headlines Tonight. Considering how impatient most reporters have been from the beginning of this war to know exactly when it will be over, I'm expecting Tomorrow's Headlines Yesterday. Reporters aspire to predict the future, not just report the past, to the point where it's become a problem in elections. A certain reporter whose initials are in "egregious" even tried to jump ahead of the game by drawing battle plans in the sand on TV.
It's an ill wind that blows no one good. We're lucky to have had Baghdad Bob briefly as comic relief. Sadly he's unavailable now to update us on the war in Iraq from the "over there" vantage point, but check out www.welovetheiraqiinformationminister.com. "This site is a coalition effort of bloodthirsty hawks and ineffectual doves united in admiration for Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, Iraqi Minister of Information (currently on administrative leave)." A must read. And you can buy a T-shirt.
There's a lot of decimation going on these days, in multiples. This one is kind of a lost cause. As you know, it originally meant killing one-tenth of an army, perhaps by drawing lots. "Dec" of course means ten, as in decimal and decade. So the change in meaning isn't, as we might expect, simply less exact, i.e. wiping out a moderate percentage; it now is often used to mean wiping out a majority. Even dictionaries now say "decimate" can mean wiping out large numbers, even total annihilation. It's a shame to lose sight of that root "dec". Looking at word roots is one way I try to figure out the meaning of an unfamiliar word. I bet most school kids today are hardly aware of word roots at all. You don't have to actually know Latin or Greek, or the history of the English language, to have a useful knowledge of the sources of words and their parts.
Here are a couple of interesting military jobs from the past. I don't know if the titles are still extant:
You may have noticed the Babelfish translator at the bottom of my web page. Click on a flag and you can translate the page into any of eight languages. But not very well. My high school Spanish teacher, who occasionally does translations, is also an avid ice skating fan, and passed on a Babelfish translation of what I assume is perfectly good French (probably sans diacritical marks here due to e-mail and Web constraints):
"Kwan, 22 ans, a lancé les débats en produisant un programme toujours aussi gracieux et élégant, ne balbutiant que sur un saut, pour obtenir une ovation debout et une pluie de peluche sur la glace."
Babelfish translated this as:
"Kwan, 22 years, launched the debates by producing a program always also gracious and elegant, stammering only on one jump, to obtain an ovation upright and a rain of cuddly toy on the ice."
For more fun, try retranslating the Babelfish translation to French or another language, and then back again. Someone in Prague thought of this too, and devised a retranslator.
In his "Introduction to The New Guide of the Conversation In Portuguese and English", a very bad phrase book by a Pedro Carolino, Mark Twain wrote, "One cannot open this book anywhere and not find richness". Now we have Babelfish at our fingertips, but I still prefer the human error touch.
Copyright Rhonda Keith 2003. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but it is permissible to forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.
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