Watch the Language

Clarity of thought and clarity of expression are what we strive to achieve. Learning a language, particularly one as rich as English, is a life long endeavor. We have incorporated so many words from so many different languages. As a result we have many words with very similar meanings and many words that sound similar but have very different meanings. While this large vocabulary allows us to express our thoughts more precisely it also makes it far more likely that we will commit some rather colossal blunders. Indeed we even have words to describe those blunders, words such as malapropism and oxymoron.

In Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 play, The Rivals, Mrs. Malaprop is a pretentious character. She tries to use ten dollar words to express nickel thoughts. This causes her to use words that sound similar to the words she intends to use but which have different meanings than she intended.

Examples of malapropisms:

“The politician stated that the greatest challenge we face today is the defecate.” This sentence makes no sense. Does the politician consider our greatest challenge to be a shitty subject or did he mean to say deficit?

“He placed a copy of the legal document in a suppository.” If the document was a complaint I am sure the person against whom it was filed would be quick to tell the filer where the suppository should be placed.

This is fun. Hey, I’m on a role. Oops! I just used a word that sounds like the one I wanted to use but which has a different spelling and a different meaning than I intended. I am blaming it on my spell checker. Can we call it a spellcheckaprop? If we can, will “spellcheckaprop” become a new word? In this case the creation was intentional. What do we call it when the creation is unintentional, such as President Harding’s inadvertent coinage of the word “normalcy?”

Sarah Palin refutes, disputes and hoots. She does not repudiate she refutiates. I will give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she meant repudiate when she typed “refutiate” on her blog or twitter. Her error amuses me, but some of my mistakes are as bad. I almost abbreviated twitter as twit. Using that abbreviation would not have been a good thing to do. People should be careful about how they abbreviate words and names. I know my friends at the Assembly of God have a strong objection to people abbreviating the name of their church as “Ass of God.” Gee, I wonder why.

Acronyms: “Sears handy indoor toilet comes out as shit.” This phrasing is not as accurate as saying that the acronym is SHIT, but the first phrase could be appropriate if you are making a statement about the quality of Sears’ toilets. I have also heard DOG, the Department of Oil and Gas, referred to as the kennel because of its acronym. I am sure you can probably come up with some funnier examples of acronyms.

The humorous results of acronyms are because of the position of the letters. The same results can occur because of the position of words even when that positioning is perfectly proper. If the Master at a school has the surname of Bates, for instance, he is bound to cringe a bit when he hears his students referring to him as Master Bates.

Oxymoron: I enjoy the use of a good oxymoron, which in and of itself may be an oxymoron. The humor, of course, arises from the apparent contradiction. “The manufacturer of this car really spared no skimp. You can’t even open the back windows.” Then there is Samuel Goldwyn’s, “include me out.”

Well, I have had enough fun with the language for now. I may strive for clarity of thought and expression, but I will admit that I do not always achieve it. Given the amount of time I give myself to proof read and edit what I write I am bound to make a few mistakes that will cause you to laugh at me rather than with me. I am not insulted by your laughter on those occasions. I also laugh when I discover those errors.

First published in macsbackporch.fictionforall.com on Nov. 9, 2011