Synonyms for a columnist include contributor, feature writer, journalist, correspondent, newspaperman/woman, penman, critic, reviewer, commentator, scribbler, scribe, pen-pusher, hack, talking-head and thumb-sucker. I have provided the selected few from a plethora of others.
I think what I do fits in there somewhere. Which brings me to my word for the week: definition. This is a problematic concept because I heard a beggar tell a potential patron that he is not defined by his begging bowl.
That was a radical take on the assumptions we make when we speak, write or react, often causing unintentional grief.
My brief, when I was invited to write this column in 2017, was to write on anything that took my fancy. I chose to write in English, about English, and in a way that reflected my domain-specific role as a teacher of this subject. Note that I treat the language as a subject, and not as a conduit for its cultural or political agendas.
Ultimately, then, definition could be a rhetorical strategy that uses various techniques to impress upon a reader the meaning of a term or idea.
Before this reduces to pedantry, let us leave it at that and explore some definitions that can cause amusement or fun, or just plain disbelief that words could be so mercurial and open to other interpretations.
Synonyms lend themselves to some semantic mischief. As in: Mary had a little lamb/ she also had a bear/I have often seen her little lamb/but I have never seen her bear. Or the familiar: Mary had a little lamb. So what? Old MacDonald had a farm! One can now start playing around with the familiar and gravitate towards the really bizarre.
A dowager lady was heard to admonish a tramp with the virulent accusation: Sir, you smell! Ironically, she did not realise it was the beggar I had referenced earlier, a natural linguist if ever there was one. He pulled himself up into a parody of her haughtiness and intoned: No, Madam, You smell. I stink!
Another of my lively friends asked me the meaning of the word Lexophilia. Apparently, it doesn’t appear in a dictionary as a legitimate semantic construct.
But here is the thing. The New York Times has an annual competition that seeks the cleverest sentence by a lexophile, as in: To write with a broken pencil is pointless. This opens the field to those inventive folks who populate the TikTok and other social media arenas with the cleverest and most inventive distortions.
It is what makes the cellphone interesting against the downsides of this gizmo. The examples I shall quote are straight off a WhatsApp clip, so I make the necessary acknowledgement in deference to journalist and research protocol.
England has no kidney bank, but it does have a Liverpool. I know a guy who is addicted to brake fluid, but he says he can stop any time. A thief who stole a calendar got 12 months. A cross-eyed teacher was sacked because she couldn’t control her pupils.
When you get a bladder infection, urine trouble. My personal favourite tells about a guy reading a book on anti-gravity. Now he can’t put the book down.
Why did I spend (waste) your time with this mundane stuff? Because it embodies the essence of being human. Communication is an essential element in our long march back to societal or civic sanity.
Often, we hear what we want to hear. Often we say what we did not mean to say.
Ultimately, civilised discussion reduces to demands and expressions around entitlement, and all the rot that has now caused campuses to be shut down. What else are we going to shut down? Conversation?
That would be the last straw. Let us recognise that even ill-defined tasks, like my simplistic column, exhort us to cherish the one thing we have to preserve: To talk to each other in the hope of construing or contriving or constructing some semblance of improvement and sanity in a sick society.
* Alex Tabisher.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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