A woman called the office I managed in Culver City California, and I answered the phone; she asked for me and I replied, “This is he.” She then exclaimed, “Your mother taught you well!” Her comment about my reply was perhaps because I did not respond with “This is him.” But it was not my mother who “taught me well” in the use of the language, but my abusive father.
I’ve written before of the beatings and burnings administered to his family by my father, but one of the demands that he made of his children was that they speak the language “properly.” Autocrat that he was, he also required his first three children to write their full and complete names on their school papers. Not, “Jon Woods,” (me) or “Jerri Woods” (my brother) or “Jaci Woods,” (my sister.) Each school day, we brought home papers inscribed, “Clement Jon Woods, III,” and “Charl Jerrom Woods,” and “Caryn Jacquelyn Woods.” And on the weekend, we fled to the Carnegie Library in the Oakland area of Pittsburgh, where, as my mother noted many years later, we read to “escape.”
A prominent politician had a way of speaking where he would pause, inserting “err,” or “um.” I learned that this was a “speech disfluency,” which is “any of various breaks, irregularities, or non-lexical vocables which occur within the flow of otherwise fluent speech.” Some mean-spirited writers, eager to degrade the politician, would pounce on those pauses as evidence of a lack of critical thinking. Smarter writers gave me the definition of speech disfluencies, and why we use them, and it is often a pause to think. But there are a lot of speech peccadillos in the vocal world.
On one of the seven thousand judge shows that I watch, a litigant was testifying and kept tagging each sentence with, “You know what I’m sayin’?” Sometimes the sentences were not completed before he asked if the judge knew what he was saying. Another litigant on another show asked of the judges, “Do you feel me?” I think that phrase is asking if “you” understand, and/or agree with whatever situation is being discussed. You know? As I have written before, those kinds of statements make me grind my back teeth to powder. And what about “real quick?” I have heard one person tell another to “come here, real quick,” or “can I (do something) real quick.” But when someone says, “Just a second,” it is never a “second” that is needed. And why is it that we always either “jump” or “hop” into the shower. With all the modern, low entry shower stalls, why can we not just, like, “step” into the shower?
I used to gallop to the convenience store to get the Sunday edition of The New York Times, so that I could read a column about writing. A few years ago, I learned that the author of that column was an ardent segregationist who had written a “deeply disturbing essay” titled “The Hell He Is Equal,” positing that people who share my African background should not be granted equal rights. I don’t think his column is still being published (and that screed was rejected by The Saturday Evening Post), but he gave me some sound advice on the art of writing, the principles of which I apply to my speech.
Another little tooth-grinder for me is when people meander about a conversation, ostensibly making a case for something, then pause to ask the listener, “Does that make sense?” I always want to respond with “NO!”
Nor do I know what you’re saying.
cjon3acd@att.net