When Words Wobble, What's Next?

Communicating (and commiserating) about communication.

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Believe me, I am convinced that language has become an abject failure as a way to communicate. It’s true that I make this statement using words, the very building blocks of lingo, but that just shows how sorry the whole thing is, since there’s nothing to replace how we do it. We need a Plan B for competent communication.

Not that I haven’t given Plan B a great effort. My attempts at mind-reading were promising but the intense staring only creeped out several former friends who went on to block me online as well as mentally. Later I tried using emojis exclusively, but it meant nothing to contemporaries and somewhat less to young people. It’s not the right time for universal acceptance since there’s no emoji for déjà vu but there is one for poop.  

There are specialized ways of writing, like music and mathematics. Those are fine for certain things. Nothing conveys love as warmly as a tune by Al Green. Or Weird Al’s “Wanna B Ur Lovr.” As for math, well, it’s splendid for devising complex Facebook algorithms to pry into your personal life, but it’s hardly practical as a way to teach your kids manners.

Considering how many words exist, we still have a hard time being understood. It helps that there are different tongues to choose from. English has nothing like the snarky German “Schadenfreude,” but then again, Americans came up with Google, so cultures can swap nouns, allusions, and insults freely and interlingually. But we still fail to hear very well. I once witnessed a young man working in an ice cream parlor chatting up a young woman. When done, they chastely hugged and she left. An old man was watching them, so the young guy smiled and said, “She’s my cousin.” The geezer cackled and said, “You say you’ve got a dozen? Congratulations!”

Other examples of mishearing are abundant. In Chuck Berry’s “Memphis,” where he sings “With hurry-home drops on her cheek,” some of you will hear “With hairy moondrops on her cheek.” Or Marc Cohn’s notorious “Walking in Memphis” refers to “W.C. Handy,” a line often heard as “Double you see hind me.” 

Because we all have to rely on our worldly languages to communicate, it’s very much like a monopoly that takes over and no one can be bothered to improve things. As Lily Tomlin’s “Laugh-In” telephone operator Ernestine said to customers: “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.” 

Those days were quaint. Nowadays oligopolies are the new monopolies. Just ask Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft, the usual suspects topping lists of the most valuable companies in the world. And don’t let language get in your way of realizing that our all-American oligopolies are not the same as Russian oligarchies. Oligopolies are run by a few people having scads of economic power and wanting all your private information. Oligarchs are a few people having enormous political and economic power and wanting to meddle in elections. 

And if that doesn’t illustrate how language and speech and communication are a mess, then I make my final argument. Words have become about as reliable as cryptocurrency speculation, thanks to President Trump. “Believe me,” he says — a lot. But there’s no percentage in that. His words have no meaning, but they’re not at all meaningless.

There is, in fact, a scientific term that's practically made to order for describing the void of presidential pronunciamentos. “Eezo” — it’s a real term — stands for “Element Zero,” which is defined as “a rare material that releases dark energy which can be manipulated into a mass effect field, raising or lowering the mass of all objects within that field.”

Newspeople, pols, and the commentariat insist on microanalyzing Trump’s dark energy like gold miners peering at their pans for a glimmer of thought. The world’s mass then rises and falls according to his utterances, no matter how covfefe they are.

Believe me.

Jon W. Sparks is the editor of inside memphis business, memphis magazine’s sister publication.