The beauty and power of words part 5: Picking the right words

When I say, “words change lives,” I don’t only mean it in a JFK/Obama style speech that changes your outlook on life. I’m thinking of a more basic everyday usage of words that will have an impact in a way that no one could imagine. There’s a line in the Sonic Youth song, Tunic (Song for Karen), that hits hard every time I hear it. The song is written from the point of view of Karen Carpenter in heaven. It’s her talking to her friends and family from the other side.

Hey mom! Look I'm up here, I finally made it.

I'm playing the drums again too.

Don't be sad, the band doesn't sound half bad.

And I remember mom, what you said

You said, honey, you look so under-fed.

For those that don’t know, Karen Carpenter died of a heart condition that was believed to be a result of years of anorexia. “You look so under-fed” can mean just that and only that. Stick those words in a song and let that context shape the meaning and the words mean something else entirely. That’s how it goes in literature. But something recently came to mind, an example of using the wrong words, or more accurately, the wrong pronunciation, and the results being life changing.

As is well documented, by myself and well evidenced in all my school reports, I was not a very good secondary school student. This carried over into sixth form college. Surprisingly, after my GCSE retakes the college let me do one A-Level. It didn’t go well. I actually was excited about the idea of Sociology long before anyone in my year knew what it was. That seemed to make my failure at the subject even worse. I wasn’t inspired by my Sociology teachers but I really did like the subject and still do. I’m still proud of my brain retaining enough of what I’d learned at the age of sixteen to be able to come up with this bit of smart-arsery in recent years:

Teenage student: I’d like to know about Sociology.

Adult me advising student: What would you like to know?

Teenage student: Everything.

Adult me advising student: What? Everything? Would you like me to start with Durkheim, Weber and Marx?

And the student went, “Uh?” And no one in a five-mile radius was impressed with my wit or my ability to remember the names of the three founding fathers of Sociology.

The path back to educational respectability involved dealing with the mess of my secondary schooling and a large part of that was trying to prove to myself and everyone else around me that I wasn’t a fuck-up. I think some of my teachers were always pulling for me and they knew I wasn’t stupid. But at that stage of my life they couldn’t help me and I couldn’t help me either. I didn’t want to learn and they didn’t know how to teach me and that is what probably made my school life feel antagonistic on so many levels.

Mr Lizard didn’t help make matters any better.  Obviously, his name wasn’t Mr Lizard. He was Mr Wilson. For a moment I felt the urge to get descriptive there, before remembering that that’s not my forte. The man looked like a lizard. He was a very peculiar sort. We can leave it at that. Clearly, when you’re calling your Sociology teacher Mr Lizard behind his back then that relationship isn’t great. But the antagonistism ran both ways. What I really want to say, as teen me might want to say, is, “He started it.” From day one he would mispronounce my name, seemingly intentionally. He’d make a mess of it, stressing the second half of the name, almost exaggerating it. In a school playground setting, that at the age of sixteen, we were not so far removed from, intentionally getting your name wrong or rhyming your name or mispronouncing it in any way was a common way to wind up your classmates.

In a modern world where communicating using text is the norm, I think everyone has fun with spotting typos. There’s always that Atomic Typo out there, where one wrong word changes the whole meaning of a sentence. It can happen to anyone and it’s not a measure of intelligence. Apparently, particularly if typing in a hurry, your brain will use a similar word to the one you were supposed to use and it often goes for the one you use more often. If you write about writing a lot you’re more likely to type “write” rather than “right,” even when you clearly know the difference. It’s a case of your brain being on automatic pilot.

Word usage, or word miss-usage, effects how we perceive people. There’s always someone out there, maybe you haven’t met them yet, who says Pacifically when you know they mean specifically. I’m one of those that needs to take a pause before daring to utter phenomenon. I have a friend who always trips over the word insomnia. Which is not fair considering that she’s an insomniac.

If I was writing the character of Lizard Wilson I’d have to focus on how he’d get my name wrong every time. It would be a hook for the character to hang his hat on. It would tell you all you need to know about the relationship between Mr Lizard and young Mr Chiz-Holm. Chiz-Holm with a hard “H,” drawn out “L” and a hum of “Mmmm” at the end. The very idea of calling your students “Mr Anything” or “Miss That” seems buried in some sort of Dickensian sentiment. And in the story, as I tell it, as I would write it, there is no suggestion that he might be getting it unknowingly wrong. It’s only decades later that it even occurred to me that he actually thought he was pronouncing my name correctly.

There is no way to pronounce my name that would have made sixteen year old me straighten up and fly right. There is however, miss-pronunciation that changes the narratives in life.