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| William Archibald Spooner |
Eminent for the Spoken Word
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| Todd Akin |
The verb
misspeak
does not appear in my desk copy of
Webster’s
Collegiate Dictionary.
But
then it’s only the ninth edition, from 1987.
If I am going to continue to follow American politics I am
going to have to get something more up-to-date, because recently our politicians have been
misspeaking all over the place, with a promiscuity that makes my oak tree’s
annual production of acorns seem parsimonious.
From the look of things, to
misspeak ought to mean to
mispronounce,
as President Bush used to misspeak
nuclear
and as practically everybody misspeaks
kiln.
Another familiar form of
misspeaking, one at which I myself am
expert, is to call one offspring by the name of another, or in the climactic
sentence of a brilliant lecture on St. Bonaventure’s theory of something or
other, to attribute it to St. Thomas.
But
political misspeak, like political speak altogether, is of a different
genus. To misspeak politically is
to get caught out in a lie, or in nonsense so appalling that a coherent lie
would be preferable to it. The
latest example, as the whole world now knows, features the idiotic remarks of
Congressman Todd Akin (R-Missouri), now a candidate for the Senate, concerning
pregnancies eventuating from acts of rape. “From what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare,”
Akin said. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut
that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or
something, I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to
be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.”
Within
a few hours just about everybody in the Amerian political world, led by such
vestigial voices of good sense as remain within the Republican Party, was counseling
Akin’s immediate if not retroactive retirement from politics; but he still had
one staunch supporter. That was
his electoral rival Senator Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri), who had just been
transformed by fifty-eight words of voodoo gynecology from dead duck to soaring
eagle. Mr. Akin apologized for
having misspoken. But of course he had not misspoken; he
had merely spoken idiotically. I
presume he had also fibbed in citing the opinion of “doctors” to authorize the
idiocy, but I hope that whoever regulates medical licenses in the state of
Missouri has launched a vigorous investigation on the off chance he spoke
truth.
There
is of course such a thing as real misspeaking, which can be quite
interesting. In English there is
often a considerable gap between the way a word looks on paper and the way it
is voiced by native speakers. Americans
misspeak about half the topographic names of England, often to the visible
amusement of the locals. We are
also weak on certain surnames. Why
should Saint John be Sinjun, or
Taliaferro Tolliver? Brits wreak their revenge by
pronouncing the largest city in Texas as though it were house + ton, which of
course Houston Street in lower Manhattan really is. Curious, that.
I used to listen to Books on Tape as I drove around in my pick-up. I listened to the British actor Jeremy
Irons read an English version of Stendahl’s The
Red and the Black. By this
accident I learned that Irons, who is a very classy Shakespearean actor,
labored under the misapprehension that the city of Besançon in the
Franche Comté is pronounced Bezankon.
A
special category of misspeaks—the spoonerism—is
named after William Archibald Spooner (1843-1930) an Oxford don and editor of
Tacitus, who allegedly had a penchant for confusing the initial consonants of
words in his intended sentences.
Most of the misspeaks attributed to him are probably apocryphal, but the
following outpouring of affection for the aging Queen Victoria may be genuine:
"Three cheers for our queer old dean!"
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| Our dear old queen |
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| Our queer old dean |
When
I was young there was a radio program called “
Pardon My Blooper” that collected many of the verbal blunders recorded from live broadcasts.
Although most of them seemed to feature
ribald double entendres, some were charmingly innocent.
One I remember came at the end of a
religious program—they used to exist on the major networks—with the announcer
signing off with a biblical citation (Ecclesiastes 11:1):
“Remember—cast your broad upon the
waters.
This is the National
Breadcasting Corporation.”
I
cannot vouch for the authenticity of the best spoonerism that has come my way,
allegedly attributable to the Foreign Language Services of the BBC.
It is in French, but French of the very
best kind—meaning French that you don’t have to know any French to
understand.
The announcer was discussing demographic
developments in southern Africa, and in particular the burgeoning population in
what are today the coastal provinces of the Cape of Good Hope—the Western Cape,
the Eastern Cape, and KwaZulu-Natal.
Intending to say “la population énorme du Cap,” he said instead “la
copulation énorme du Pape”!
Perhaps that was what Akin had in mind by “legitimate rape”?
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| Cap |
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| Pape |
