Language in the Tall Grass

In dealing with a relatively minor point of theology one day, the great theologian Roger Nicole remarked, in his delightful French Swiss accent, “If your argument isn’t all that strong, surround it with a lot of big words so your opponent will lose the ball in the tall grass.” A lot of language usage obfuscates like that. A couple of days ago I went by a trailer park named Heritage Estates. I mean, come on, people.  No grass is tall enough to hide reality in that case.

One level down from that, in my opinion, is choosing a name for a product that for some reason has an appeal to a test group, even though it either means nothing or means something entirely foreign to the product in question. Plymouth had its Volaré, which with that accent means nothing in the Italian that is presumably supposed to be the referent, and “I will fly” in Spanish. Then there’s the Protegé. It’s cool to have an accent on a name-lends it class, don’t you know. But then why not put both of them on it (protégé)? Maybe that would be too classy. It’s more than a little bit hypocritical to pretend to be sophisticated in order to wow the masses.

But language can be used legitimately to put across an idea, of course, and can just as surely drive the target audience away. Again speaking of cars and their names, the case of the Chevy Nova in Latin America is well known. Potential buyers were actually avoiding the car because its name means “It doesn’t go” in Spanish. General Motors does have a problem with names at times. As I understand it, in Italian, “camaro” is the word for a crab that moves down the road sidewise. I owned a Chevy Cobalt. Webster’s says the word “is probably derived from kobold, a goblin, the demon of the mines, applied to cobalt by the miners when they did not know its value, because it was troublesome, a hard lustrous, steel-gray, ductile chemical element.” Sure describes my car, it does.

Then there’s the case of the wildly popular portobello mushrooms (usually misspelled in about a dozen different ways). They were simply “brown mushrooms” or some such until a bright entrepreneur decided to change their name.

Hey, what if we decided to call Spam by a nice foreign name? Maybe viande du mystère. Probably show up on Restaurant Row in Beverly Hills.

There is, of course, a more dignified tendency for language to mutate in order to designate a person, place or thing. The name Moses has always fascinated me. The Bible says it means “drawn out” and was given him because he was drawn out of the Nile in his little basket. Okay, folk etymology doesn’t negate the inspiration of the Scriptures. But I still need to check with a specialist in the Hebrew Bible about whether, just possibly, that Egyptian princess didn’t name him Rameses. After his encounter with Yahweh at the burning bush he would have dropped the “Ra” portion, which stands for the sun god, and kept some of the consonants. (And yes, I know that his name in Hebrew is Mosheh. Close enough, especially since the Hebrews tended to turn the Egyptian s into sh.)

There are also some fortuitous misunderstandings of words, especially between French and English. For example, in English Cinderella charmingly sports glass slippers; how delicate. But she probably got them when an English bard heard a French storyteller speak of her slippers of vair ‘fur,’ and took the word as being verre ‘glass,’ which is pronounced the same way. A highly significant error of that sort came about in the transmission of the legend of the fisher king. In French he was originally le roi pécheur ‘the sinner king,’ but if the e is shortened a bit he is le roi pêcheur ‘the fisher king’ condemned to fishing forever in penance for his wrongdoing. This is fortuitous because, since the fish is a symbol of Christ, he would be perpetually in search of forgiveness. The theology is lousy, but that’s not the point.

Revelation 1:5 has an interesting textual variant that must have come about the same way. In the Authorized Version, it reads “unto him who . . . washed us from our sins in his own blood.” Earlier and better manuscripts than those available to the King James translators in 1611, though, show the more likely reading to be “freed us from our sins.” What happened? In all probability, the error was introduced when a number of scribes were writing furiously as someone read aloud from the received manuscript. One scribe probably heard lusanti ‘having freed’ as lousanti ‘having washed.’ The first has one of those European u sounds with the lips pursed, while the second is more like oo. Since the concept of Jesus’ having washed us from our sins was already a common one, that is what got into the text.

Just try offering escargots on your menu, but call them snails. See how many takers you get.