Come, Again? Whaddya'say?

Language, noun (fr. Latin: Lingua or tongue) -- any one of many specific sets of rules by means of which a group or multiple groups of animals miscommunicate (and betimes communicate).

I recall wondering about language in my early years of studying sacred texts and old languages. How could it be, for instance, that Sacer, in Latin, could describe something that was either Sacred or Profane. Or how could it be that Kadosh, in Biblical Hebrew, means Sacred, while Kadesh -- spelled identically the same in Scripture -- identifies a Male Prostitute. And what, I wondered, did it mean when one person says to another: "you made me angry." I remember being pleased in one of those unisex bathrooms of the Sixties when I found penned on a column the following successive messages which at least questions the meaning of such constructions as "you made me angry":

 MY mother made 

me a homosexual.

  If I get her the wool, 

will she make me one, too?

Or as an easy ti find example, in my scribbles on this so-called Blog, I seem to travel without fanfare from speaking of The Last Quarter and The Fourth Quarter of Life, as if they were the same ... with but a summary nod to the possibility of Overtime when invoking the Blog's second title. Language as miscommunication or am I communicating something about the specific unconscious connection in my mind between getting old and dying.

So ... some quick (and dirty) examples.

Today, in the Jewish faith traditions, is referred to as Sabbath Nachamu ... sometimes doubly mistranslated as the Sabbath of Consolation or Sabbath Comfort. Indeed, the word "sabbath" should never have been rendered as the proper noun "Sabbath" but was used pretty clearly in biblical writing and is best rendered as the common noun "restfulness."   Secondly, the word Nachamu, used by Isaiah quite a long time ago, so fascinated me that it, to this day, it appears as 'the plate number' of my roadster. Everyone who sees it suspects, I suspect, that NACHAMU is not likely a number, by the way, and some-not-so-few make the mistake of asking this Word-Nerd what it could possibly mean.
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Glad you asked.

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Think I'll tell you.

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Handl's Messiah, performed so often during the Christmas Season, begins in its English translated form of Isaiah 41 (?): "Comfort, Ye! Comfort, Ye, my People!" In Isaiah's language: Nachamu, Nachamu Ami!

As a young Seminarian, this troubled me, for in Genesis when God is pissed off about his sinning creations, the same root-word (va'Yi'Nachem) is used right before God decides to knock off all his creations except Noah and his seafaring zoo ....  but it's meaning is more or less antithetical to comfort. "And God became disillusioned about his Creations."

As neither a linguist nor a lexicographer, I made peace with my own sense that the word, in its many forms, referred to a moving from one state of mind to another ... from mourning to comfort ... from pleasure in one's Creations to disgust .... I came to translate it in my mind as CHILL or THERE IS ANOTHER WAY and thought it appropriate to, therefore, adorn my roadster ripping down the road with its license plate: NACHAMU! .... TAKE A CHILL PILL, BABY, AND GET OFF MY TAIL! (The fact that no one would understand? Hell! I need some humor in my life, too.)

In any case, my interest has long been in language ... its communications .... its miscommunications.

This week has been no different in terms of easily-mined examples and during what seemed a never-ending 7 days, at least the following has stopped my thinking for a moment or more. I won't belabor the point of how these represent miscommunications ... it would, I fear, too often lead to further miscommunication.

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"I have a different way of seeing things."

This expression pretty uniformly is heard as 

"I think you're wrong."

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Indeed, the "I" in the above ... in "I have a different way" 

is not infrequently heard as 

"I think anyone but an ass agrees with me."

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"I consider what you said offensive"

is often heard as "I feel hurt or offended by you."

Now, that's a good one, as it puts the purportedly "offended party" 
in the position of being asked to explain.

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Flipping some of this over:

"You made me angry"

often ignores the principal reality of "I am angry" 
and situates the feeling firmly in the other person's behavior.

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"I heard you apologize"

is misunderstood as

"I accept your apology," 

an idea somewhat foreign or -- at least -- complex to me.

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Indeed, the whole idea of forgiveness needs a tune-up to my way of thinking. Many a visitor to my office has struggled with what that means when someone asks them for forgiveness and I've never left such explorations feeling satisfied.

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"I love you but I don't like you or what you did."

It was maybe 50 years ago when my kids were young that the Psychologist Ginott wrote a book recommending such communications to kids. 'Focus on the behavior,' he would suggest. That works for me, too. But the idea that I continue to love something that I don't like is not so easy to take in. Maybe, if hate and love weren't seen as opposites, but rather both seen as opposites of indifference, as some Viennese Doc once said, maybe things would be different. 

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Hey! If you have other examples of language used as miscommunication, I'd love to hear from you ... here or at hhcovitz@aol.com. I'm confident there are examples-aplenty in the above posting.