Turkish, Coffee, and its discontents

It has been an interesting week here in the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for my daily bread.  Since Monday, I have been an unwilling participant in an ongoing argument with an elderly and more than a little loony Puerto Rican gentleman about the proper conjugation of Turkish verbs.  I am an unwilling participant in this brouhaha because, as I have told him numerous times, I do not speak Turkish, I have never spoken Turkish, and it is entirely unlikely that I will be trying to learn Turkish any time in the immediate future.  Given this state of absolute ignorance concerning all things concerning the Turkish language, I am not in a position to debate the proper conjugation of verbs in the future dubitative tense with this gentleman.  In fact, however, I should mention that the gentleman I am having this one-sided argument with is in no position to argue the facts of Turkish verb conjugation either—possession of a small and incredibly ratty Turkish dictionary  bought for a quarter at the second hand bookstore down the street from us does not make one an expert on the Turkish language, Turkish culture, or the long-term ramifications of current Turkish foreign policy in the eastern Mediterranean region and beyond, a position, I feel, is something that Turks  of all political persuasions can agree with. If not, please let me know.  After he finished lecturing me on how wrong I was in all matters concerning Turkish verb conjugation and grammar, our Puerto Rican gentleman asked for the address and phone number of a Spanish botanica in the city, saying that he wanted to go there in order to find something to help alleviate his loneliness.  No one at his group home wants to talk to him, he said, and he did not understand why not.  I must admit that I was about to snicker when he said this, but then the chuckle died aborning; it struck me that it must indeed be a lonely life for a mentally ill elderly man without a family when even his fellow crazies think he’s nuts.

Television advertising constantly reminds the American public these days that America runs on the baked goods and coffee of a large chain of restaurants that will remain unnamed here. If you are an American, you know which chain I am talking about; if you are not, then there is no point in bringing the matter up; and if you are an advertising executive for this chain who wants to do some product placement I should point out that the advertising rates for such placement are very reasonable here.  Getting back to the facts, I was sitting at the red light waiting to make my right onto the highway that leads into the heart of our happy little burg.  Unlike many red lights, which simply serve as a device to justify cops handing out traffic tickets, this particular red light does serve a practical function. While it is possible to make the right on red at this particular red light, it is not advisable.  The lay of the land and the curvature of the road are such that in order to see if anything is coming down the highway, the hurried motorist must inch out almost halfway out onto the highway, thereby increasing the risk of having the front end of his car sheared off by some impatient doofus hurtling through the intersection before the yellow light turns red.  Needless to say, I have, over the years, been the subject of so many near-misses at this light that I no longer go inching out onto the highway; being an extra minute early for work is simply not worth risking my neck for.  This attitude, however, is not widespread hereabouts, as demonstrated this morning when the incredibly angry obese woman with a face like a cross between a Vietnamese fat-bellied pig and a rusty fire hydrant in the car behind me began leaning on the horn in order to move me along.  I was not going to move, for the reasons aforementioned, and because that moving along is not a big deal at this light. This light, unlike so many traffic lights, actually goes through its green—yellow—red cycle quickly, so motorists in a hurry are never left sitting there wondering, when is this damn light ever going to change, for long.  

In any case, after one prolonged and very unnecessary horn blast, the woman opened her window and began screaming at me. I did not shout back at her; I simply adjusted my rear-view mirror in such a way that she could see what I was saying and used a short but definite phrase to let her know that I was not going to move until the light was green.  Our automotive Brunnhilde saw what I said, and promptly backed up and went around me even as the light was changing and went roaring out onto the highway without looking to see if there was anything coming. Now, if life was fair, this avoirdupois ass would have had her avoirdupois ass smeared all over the road by a tractor-trailer, but alas, Nemesis would not have Her way with this gelatinous dolt today.  She roared off down the highway like a Macy’s Thanksgiving balloon in a high wind even as the light turned green. I went out onto the highway a moment later and without worrying about the oncoming traffic.

I saw her only a few minutes later.  She was in the parking lot of the unnamed coffee and baked goods chain whose products keep America running, trying to hoist her very substantial and circumferential self out of the driver’s seat of her car.  I laughed out loud, a not terribly polite reaction on my part, I know, but one I could not help at the time—the idea of charging blindly out onto a highway without checking to see if there was anything coming was just so stupid to me I could not believe it, as was knowing that the object of this stupidity was because this onnazumo manqué could not bear someone keeping her from her doughnuts and coffee for an extra twenty seconds.  Those guys must make a damn fine cup of Joe.  

UMMM, I MISSPOKE: David Axelrod misspoke. That is what the former junior Senator from Illinois’ transition team says about Mr. Axelrod’s statement that the transition team discussed who the next junior Senator from Illinois would be with the soon to be former Governor of Illinois and they are sticking to that position come hell or new revelations. Five will get you ten, of course, that Mr. Axelrod didn’t know he was misspeaking when he made the statement in the first place—he was simply answering a reporter’s question at the time—but events have overtaken Mr. Axelrod and his response. Events are like that.

Politicians misspeak a lot these days, so much so that you’d think that misspeaking is all the rage in the nation’s capital, the way the Hula-Hoop or the Pet Rock once were. Misspeaking is not exactly the same as lying, of course; lying has that ugly air of purpose about it, an air that might lead your average voter to conclude that his local solon was deliberately trying to deceive him. Lying is cold and hard, while misspeaking is as soft and fuzzy as a teddy bear and much more open to positive interpretation.

Misspeaking is, in its essentials, much more like using the passive voice. Most students don’t learn much about the passive voice in school today, which is understandable once you remember that public education in this our Great Republic is a governmental responsibility and what government wants to answer inconvenient questions from the citizenry? None that I know of, and if you don’t teach the kids about the passive voice in the first place, they’ll never know when you’re using it when these same kids are coughing up their hard-earned tax dollars to pay the Big Three automakers to lose money. Now just in case you haven’t heard yet, the passive voice occurs in a sentence where the subject is the object of the verb, as in the gun was left in the car, but not the cannolis. You’ll notice that you don’t know who left the gun in the car and if you’re smart you won’t ask, and this is the reason politicians and civil service types love the passive voice. It is easier, much easier, for a politician to say that errors were made in the implementation of this policy than it is for the pol to get up and say, I screwed up big time here, folks, I’m sorry. People who screw up lose their bids for re-election; errors made in the implementation of a policy are the gremlins’ fault.

The problem politicians have with the passive voice is that there are still enough people who recognize the beast when the pols trot it out to explain their latest disaster. What our lawmakers really need in cases like this is a way to lie through their teeth without looking actually looking like they’re lying. And thus we come to the ever-growing popularity of misspeaking.

What gives misspeaking its peculiar power is that the listener knows the pol is lying—he is, after all, a politician, and politicians lie when they inhale and when they exhale, when they eat and when they excrete, when they…well, you get the point—but the listener can’t tell just how this guy is jerking them around. A misspeak, beyond being something all pilots want to do, could be a flat-out lie or a simple mistake or a statement someone made without knowing there was a wiretap in the room or even just someone’s half-baked opinion and not at all the official policy of the government of the United States, no matter how many times you read it in the New York Times, which, just as an aside, likes to use the passive voice to plant unannounced editorials in the middle of its news coverage. Just thought I’d stick that in so you’d know what those guys are up to. Now, if you could combine the passive voice with a really good misspeak, the Air Force could accidentally set off a nuke in downtown Denver and then say that the Broncos were responsible for the disaster.

Given the immense popularity of misspeaking amongst politicians, it’s only a matter of time before misspeaking catches on with the public at large. Taxpayers could misspeak on their tax returns, husbands could misspeak about cheating on their wives, and their kids could misspeak about their grades, i.e. Mom, I misspoke when I said I was getting a B in math this semester. Misspeaking could get big, really big, I think, the kind of big that gets its own reality show, unless, that is, you already count C-Span as that reality show. They could change the format around though, and bring in better looking people; the ugly old clowns they’ve got in there now are just so miscast it’s not funny. I mean, really, Nancy Pelosi? Whose idea was that, for crying out loud? Isn’t Paris Hilton available these days?

Yes, I see a tremendous fortune in misspeaking. The opportunities in misspeaking on Wall Street are just too rich to think about and, better yet, the Democrats are returning to the White House. Republicans don’t misspeak as well as Democrats, for reasons that defy explication, although the media holding the Republicans to a different rhetorical and grammatical standard than Democrats might have something to do with it. Lyndon Johnson misspoke so often he opened a credibility gap several miles wide in Pennsylvania Avenue and Bill Clinton misspoke so often he couldn’t keep track of all his misspeaks and so ended up parsing the word is in public. Jimmy Carter tried to misspeak, but he wasn’t convincing as a misspeaker and had to rely on being wishy-washy instead.

Ronald Reagan was the only good Republican misspeaker in recent years, primarily because he’d convinced himself that he wasn’t misspeaking at all; the Bushes, both 41 and 43, weren’t and aren’t very good at it; there’s just something about misspeaking that offends the old New England Puritan spirit, I think; and Richard Nixon was positively horrible at it. Whenever Ron Ziegler, Nixon’s press secretary, needed to misspeak he’d say his previous statements were inoperative, which only made Nixon sound guilty as hell. That he was guilty as hell is not the point here; the entire point of misspeaking is that you never sound like you’re not telling the God’s honest truth as you know it right at this instant. And if it isn’t the God’s honest truth, well, you just misspoke, that’s all. No harm in that, is there?

LIFE AND THE NOTENGLISH LANGUAGE: You probably couldn’t prove something like by checking Wikipedia, but based on my personal observation, and I see no reason why my personal observation shouldn’t be just as valid as Wikipedia’s; after all, I’ve written an article for them and got paid exactly the same amount I get for writing these screeds, which is to say, zip zilch nada rien absolutely nothing; it would appear that there are exactly two languages spoken in the world today: English and NotEnglish. There are many differences between the two languages, some subtle, others not so subtle, but the way I tell the difference between the two is that when someone speaks English I usually understand what they are saying and when they speak NotEnglish, I don’t. This method may work for you or it may not; I merely offer it as a suggestion; you do not have to pay royalties to me or anyone else for it.

I also learn from Wikipedia that the majority of the people on this planet speak NotEnglish as a first language, most of them not bothering to learn English at all or, if they do, that their language skills are so minimal as to render communication impossible. This fact stunned me, or it might have been that door closing in my face that did the stunning—I’m better now, thank you, even if my nose still hurts like nobody’s business—and I checked my copy of the 1979 World Almanac to see if this allegation were true. Strange as it may seem, this is true—most NotEnglish speakers not only do not speak English, but have no intention of learning English—the World Almanac confirming what appeared to me at first to be utterly incredible. This is very troubling, as you might imagine, since lack of English language skills almost guarantees that most of these people will have trouble finding work after they graduate from high school. Furthermore, most NotEnglish speakers tend to be foreigners, when they are not actually teenagers. Teenagers are a singularly uncommunicative group, especially when their parents are around, their NotEnglish skills limited to a series of grunts, shrugs, and exasperated eye-rolling undecipherable to all save other teenagers and several small species of East African baboon.

Having said that, I should point out that modern NotEnglish also comes in a wide variety of dialects, not all of which are mutually intelligible. This seems to be a result of geography and a bad phone plan, and also as a result of these people being foreigners, although the need to avoid census takers and lawyers may also play a role in this linguistic distribution. After census takers come tax collectors and then tort lawyers, life insurance salesmen, and Red Sox fans, and the sensible thing to do when confronted by any of these vile miscreants is to move as far away from them as possible lest they attempt to perform their loathsome religious rituals upon you and yours while keeping one eye peeled for the cops. Pretending that you don’t know what they are saying also helps and, no doubt, provides the basis of a good many NotEnglish dialects.

The main problem with NotEnglish, insofar as I can see, is that the grammars of the various dialects differ wildly, with no two sets of grammar being exactly alike. There are occasional convergences, as in those places the Romans once ruled, but on the whole, most NotEnglish speakers understand each other about as well as I understand them. Where English has only the one set of grammar and comes complete with rooms full of Irish nuns who will box your ears in if you forget that the I comes before the C except after E or that its and it’s are not the same word, its being the possessive pronoun and possessive adjective form of the personal pronoun it and it’s being a contraction of the words it is or it has—English is very big on contractions, for some reason or other; I’m not sure why, though; English certainly has enough words in the dictionary so that we can afford to use the whole word and not just the good parts, but no one asked me for my opinion when they made this decision—the dialects of NotEnglish have neither a set standard nor the pugilistic power of Irish nuns to back them up. I hear that in Paris, the government sponsors an organization that aspires to this sort of linguistic authority, but this same government will not allow the members of this organization to commit assault and battery, and without the ability to knock small children on their backsides with a single stroke of the hand, an ability that many nuns raised to the level of a marital art, no dialect can hope to standardize its own grammar, much less outdo the other speakers of NotEnglish.

You may point out that the members of this Parisian organization tend to be quite elderly and therefore incapable of using an art, martial or otherwise, to enforce the rules of their particular brand of NotEnglish, but those of us who have gone to parochial schools know better than that. I once saw Sister Mary Agnes knock Billy Harrigan on his backside for speaking disrespectfully to her, and Billy was 6’4” and 250 pounds when he was thirteen years old, and Sister Mary Agnes was eighty-five, five foot nothing, and if she ever weighed more than one hundred pounds in her life it was when she was carrying a box of books from the convent into the school. Billy went down fast and hard, just like a keg of beer at the firemen’s annual family day party, and I don’t think he ever saw what hit him. I don’t think the fight was entirely fair, though; I’m pretty sure I saw Sister Mary Agnes wrap her rosary beads around her fist just a couple of seconds before she walloped Billy, but the judges didn’t see her do it and so she got away with what was definitely a clear violation of the Marquis of Queensbury rules. On the other hand, I never did like Billy Harrigan; he was a thoroughly disagreeable sort, all told, and much given to the vile practice of giving his smaller classmates wedgies, so I and a lot of other witnesses to the good sister’s cheap shot weren’t inclined to help Billy one bit when he complained to the principal about getting decked by an old nun. In truth, we all enjoyed watching Billy get his comeuppance and we were not at all inclined to help him one way or the other. I know that vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay, but this was one of those times when He repaid in real time, so we could all see the mysterious ways His wonders to perform. Watching the heathen fall by the wayside was truly a wondrous thing, yes, it was, and all God’s children said, Amen.