The phone in my office rang, and I answered it, identifying the place as Household Finance.
“May I speak to Mr. Woods?” the woman’s voice asked.
“This is he,” I replied.
The woman exclaimed, “Oh! Your mother must have been a fine woman, to teach you to speak so well!” She went on to complain about the many voices over the phone who respond to inquiries with “This is him,” or “This is her.” She then asked for the balance on her account. I did not tell the woman that it was not my mother who taught me to “speak so well.”
I have written before of my drunken and abusive father, who demanded that his children speak and pronounce words properly, under penalty of a striped and swollen behind. To escape his tyranny, his first three children became frequent fliers at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie library, reading of lives lived by others. I was also granted the privilege of being a page in the closed stacks of the University of Pittsburgh library, where I swam in books, many of which I brought home. My sister, who went on to win awards as a writer and producer of radio and television talk shows, told me once that our reading gave her language, but at times, she was surprised when she heard the word she had seen, spoken aloud.
On a recent stroll down a street near my house, a neighbor greeted me as I passed: “How are you doing?” I waved at him and said, “I’m doing well; how are you?” When I was an artist for an electrical contractor building the (ill-fated) Marble Hill nuclear power plant in Madison Indiana, I overheard some co-workers commenting on my responses to greetings. “Superb,” I overheard someone mutter. “That must be CJ coming in.” When my power plant co-workers asked me, “How are you?” I would respond, “Superb.” When asked how I was doing, my answer was “Superbly.” Once at the cubicle that had been assigned to me, I would sit down to write “The Powerline,” an internal newsletter and morale booster that I had been tasked with producing. The person to whom I reported was a Boston born college graduate and electrician who showed me open contempt, ostensibly because I had no tool-belt. When he made fun of my Pittsburgh pronunciation of a word, I turned to him and said: “I am the master of the language, and any error that I might make becomes a part of the popular lexicon.” He had not hired me and could not fire me; he glowered at me, turned away and rarely spoke to me for the next eight months.
My language is the same no matter what the environment. When I am in the pool hall and my path to the table is impeded, I will say, “Pardon me.” Should I belly up to the bar and be served by someone who has not previously seen me, I will ask, “May I have a Heineken Zero?” Once served, I always say “Thank you.” I do have a silo of profanity ready to launch when I want to drop fireworks on an opponent, but the deadly delivery of those epithets is almost always done calmly and quietly; often, the recipient is unsure if they have been insulted. I’ve found that a calm demeanor in a volatile situation has a de-escalating effect.
But when I am reading my favorite authors, I try on the language used in the tales they tell, and add those tales to my own, spoken language.
cjon3acd@att.net