Sometimes the power wielded by one word is a thing of beauty. Consider the impact of the word “if,” for example. “If” may very well be my all-time favorite word. Just imagine the volume of CYA-ing that’s been accomplished by if. Think of the millions and millions of dollars lost and won in lawsuits and contract negotiations and divorce settlements by if. I invite anyone who doesn’t believe in the power of language to try to calculate the dollar value of that one-vowel-one-consonant duo. But sometimes it’s not so pretty. The power of one word, which is often demonstrated by its omission, is particularly troubling to me. It’s a relatively simple word, six letters in all, two syllables, easy to spell. The word is former.
One of the toxins I pollute my life with is the Sunday morning news programs. My upbringing wasn’t particularly religious, but one of the few rules my father enforced was that we couldn’t turn on a television or a radio on Sunday mornings. I’m 43 now, and I’ve nullified that rule, and I reserve the right to slob around my house on Sunday mornings. I turn the television on – and there’s something thrilling about it, still, some bizarre sense that I’m getting away with something – and waste a couple of perfectly good hours listening to the yammering about what happened last week, what’s going to happen next week, and how that’s going to impact Obama’s approval rating, and how Obama’s approval rating compares to that of any number of other presidents after their first four weeks, four months, six months.
Whether this is an issue during other time slots I cannot say for sure, but it seems that the Sunday morning shows are particularly lax about using the word “former.” Newt Gingrich, who appears so regularly on Sunday mornings that I wouldn’t be surprised if he started preaching, is often addressed as “Mr. Speaker.” Newt Gingrich – whose birth name is Newton Leroy McPherson – was the 58th speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from Jan. 4, 1995 through Jan. 3, 1999. He’s not the speaker of the house at all – Nancy Pelosi is – and has not been the speaker of the house, in fact, for more than a decade. On Sundays though, his tenure as speaker is timeless. It’s the same thing with Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, whose presidencies are eternal on the seventh day. I thought, very briefly, that maybe it was a southern thing, until I came across this, on a blog hosted by a local radio station in Portland, Oregon:
Sunday September 20, 2009 - We invited Governor John Kitzhaber into our studios to talk about his 2010 run, healthcare reform, and Oregon’s “Green economy.”
One of the toxins I pollute my life with is the Sunday morning news programs. My upbringing wasn’t particularly religious, but one of the few rules my father enforced was that we couldn’t turn on a television or a radio on Sunday mornings. I’m 43 now, and I’ve nullified that rule, and I reserve the right to slob around my house on Sunday mornings. I turn the television on – and there’s something thrilling about it, still, some bizarre sense that I’m getting away with something – and waste a couple of perfectly good hours listening to the yammering about what happened last week, what’s going to happen next week, and how that’s going to impact Obama’s approval rating, and how Obama’s approval rating compares to that of any number of other presidents after their first four weeks, four months, six months.
Whether this is an issue during other time slots I cannot say for sure, but it seems that the Sunday morning shows are particularly lax about using the word “former.” Newt Gingrich, who appears so regularly on Sunday mornings that I wouldn’t be surprised if he started preaching, is often addressed as “Mr. Speaker.” Newt Gingrich – whose birth name is Newton Leroy McPherson – was the 58th speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from Jan. 4, 1995 through Jan. 3, 1999. He’s not the speaker of the house at all – Nancy Pelosi is – and has not been the speaker of the house, in fact, for more than a decade. On Sundays though, his tenure as speaker is timeless. It’s the same thing with Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, whose presidencies are eternal on the seventh day. I thought, very briefly, that maybe it was a southern thing, until I came across this, on a blog hosted by a local radio station in Portland, Oregon:
Sunday September 20, 2009 - We invited Governor John Kitzhaber into our studios to talk about his 2010 run, healthcare reform, and Oregon’s “Green economy.”
John Kitzhaber was the governor of Oregon from 1995 to 2003. He recently announced that he’s going to run for governor next year, in 2010. He is not the governor of Oregon. He has not been the governor of Oregon for six years. Though he’s easy to forget, the present governor of Oregon is Ted Kulongoski.
The absence of the word “former” somehow clogs the passage that connects my ear with the sound-to-thought conversion center in my brain. If someone with no interest in politics or the news were to happen across one of the Sunday morning shows, he or she would rightfully understand that Newton Leroy (I love that name, for some reason) is in fact the speaker of the house. Given his title, his authoritative tone of voice would make perfect sense. So too would John Kitzhaber’s in-charge swagger. Unless the viewer or listener takes the time to insert the word “former,” he is the governor. It seems like just one more layer of confusion to me –one that could be easily remedied.
Another easily remedied problem, I think, is the utter stupidity employed by the corporates when they talk. They are so limited – and, at the same time, so arrogant – that they assume that since they haven’t bothered to understand language, nobody else has either. But I’m encouraged, tentatively, by the fact that openly and rigorously ridiculing them is becoming almost common. Just this week, in fact, one of the morning news shows I listen to had a field day with one of those Business Speak – BS – top 10 lists. All the usual crap was included – leveraging, circling back, aligning etc. – but the top one on the list, I was very happy to hear, was this completely asinine anti-expression that has, for some reason, become quite popular: It is what it is.
I could write miles of text on those five words, and the people who use them in sequence, but I’d rather offer my own remedy, an alternate phrase. One of the grand old ladies from my childhood spoke in a way that was not always ladylike. This offended some people, who had, and have, very delicate sensibilities. So out of respect, I won’t mention her name, but she did exchange words with someone one day, and it made an impression. Someone came to the house and said, “Well hello there, whaddaya’ know?” So she said, quite simply, “A pig’s ass is pork, that’s what I know.” Because she’d already lived for many years and had navigated many situations, and because she could drink whiskey, smoke a cigarette and knit sweaters all at the same time, and because she knew how to do all sorts of math in her head, without a calculator, she only had to use the word “is” once when answering the question about what she knew.
