Duck Tape

Yes, that's duck tape.  Because you just never know when one of those pesky ducks is going to come crashing to Earth, flopping on the ground at your feet on a perfectly clear day for no obvious reason.  It could be guilty of eating too much smoked salmon and flying while inloxicated.  If you had compassion for him and could endure his fish breath, you would naturally put him back together using duck tape.

Perhaps this drunken duck finds you while you are walking on the Isles of Marsh.  Beware!

Having a little fun here this morning at the expense of mis-users of the language.  A friend sent me a photo of a small plane that had been repaired with duct tape, enough to fly it back to his base for proper repairs.  The article was in praise of duct tape saying, "Don't leave home with it."  Good idea, but my mind suddenly jumped to the fact that some folks don't actually know that this product is is duct tape, spelled with a t - a very strong and durable tape developed for the HVAC industry to hold air ducts together.  Perhaps some folks who know nothing about ducts think the tape is made with the linen canvas called duck. [* See insert below]  Yesterday I saw in the hardware store a colorful roll of something new called Duck Tape - probably some enterprising marketer figured out the public's tendency to think of the name in this way.  I personally have heard people clearly say duck tape on many occasions.  But no, I have never heard anyone say inloxicated.

The Isles of Marsh line was also a reference just made up today because I am jotting notes on March 15, called by Shakespeare the ides of March, or the middle of that month.  That's definitely an indefinite placement, the Roman calendar giving the 15th day of four months (March, May, July and October) the position of ides while the other eight months show the 13th bearing that wispy label.  So please don't make the simple slip of writing about the ides of April when taxes are due.  Forgivable, but it's better to be informed.

My mind has been on this matter of word misunderstanding, misspelling, mispronunciation etc., as well as the twisted use of expressions, due to an online literary contact having made a major fox paws in a promotion piece.  Even people who work in the world of words and writing can make bold blunders in their strange misuses of words and phrases, and as someone I knew many years ago used to say, in all seriousness, "That just ceases to amaze me."  (My own twisted sense of humor has allowed me often to utilize that little gem when in the company of someone who can enjoy the laugh with me.)

It was actually a literary agent sending out emails of self-promotion who made the stumble that has been eating at me for a few days.  I can't decide whether to thoughtfully inform the young lady of her misused reference or to let it go without comment.  First, it would be difficult to do a thoughtfully worded correction without sounding pompous or pretentious; and second, I've already questioned whether this literary connection is one worth keeping.  She could turn off others while representing me!

The blunder itself involved a lovely photograph of a night sky in a storm.  Two dramatic lightening bolts were caught simultaneously touching the ground, perhaps within three or four miles of each other.  The literary agent looking for an assist in catching the attention of her audience to impress us with the exciting news that an opportunity might actually be repeating itself, simply fell upon a seemingly easy context.  Problem was, the easy context was a totally misused one simply because the young lady apparently has always heard an old expression repeated in its common shortened version: lightening never strikes twice ...  The fact she didn't even seem to know that the original expression ends with, in the same place, is indicative of our abbreviated speech and abbreviated reasoning nowadays.  And she was not dedicated enough to check it out - even by a cursory Google search.  I did so and even typing in the shortened version only, the quick selections available all point to the full idiom and go into probable meanings and usages.  So she constructed an entire concept on half of a thought, which not only changed the meaning entirely, it showed she was lacking in thought.

Bothering me still further was the amazing fact that this person had obviously never witnessed a beautiful double - or multiple - lightening strike in her own world.  I've personally enjoyed these displays on a large scale and on numerous occasions.  One especially memorable night in Arizona a few years ago, my wife and I stayed outside our tent to marvel at the massive electrical storm that kept most of the sky to the west (a good, safe distance west!) of our location almost continuously lit up like some kind of laser light show.  We even put music (vocalizing Beethoven's 5th, etc.) to it and made up the likely words of a banter being shared among the clouds and their charges firing out.  There were easily six to ten strikes at times hitting the ground simultaneously during an hour or more of our devoted watching.  We weren't doing the photography thing and even if we had been, we could not have captured nearly enough of the action to do justice to the intensity of our excitement of being there in person.  Truly talented and dedicated photographers have displayed some incredibly awesome lightening shows. 

The more I look into it now online, the more disgusted I am with the shallowness that a supposed literary person revealed in using a simple premise to sell her too-simple approach and taking no time at all to check out the subject.  There must be hundreds of better ways to grab attention for a commercial purpose than to so flagrantly misuse and misunderstand an old expression.  I think I will just delete her emails in the future.

This dismissive way of dealing with a language abuser is not a typical approach for me; it all depends on whether the speaker is someone who already has my respect but who merely slips up.  Such was the case last week when I had to endure many repetitions of the old nucular offense, this time by Melissa Harris-Perry.  She is a highly intelligent and very highly educated professor who is worthy of my respect in her typical output and I try to catch some of her new show on MSNBC on weekend mornings.  She's so worthy of my audience that I've long since learned to virtually not hear a speech impediment that is obviously not within her control.  But her mispronouncing of words in the manner of less capable speakers was just too much for my ears.  So I sent her an email asking her - begging her - to rise above the level of the embarrassing former POTUS, GWB, who was notably poor at any kind of speaking and who never seemed to catch on to the way most of the world laughed at him for the oft-repeated mispronunciation of nuclear.  SNL folks did a commendable job of poking fun at him for it as did other comics and writers.  But as I said to Ms. Harris-Perry, Bush was perhaps incapable of learning; she is not.

No, I do NOT go through life trying to correct all the linguistic errors I encounter nor trying to punish all the usage criminals I confront.  And yes, even as one reader of this blog called me out, I still make those occasional blunders myself.  I hope I can avoid repeating egregious (or even minor) slips, but I'm pragmatic about this.  Anyone using the language very much is bound to sometimes misuse it.  I'm no paragon of proper speech, only someone who tries hard to be a good usage example.  My wonderful wife, who communicates as effectively as anyone I know, is nonetheless a font of foibles and flaws in speech and spoonerism.  She not only misuses words and expressions, she creates her own where nothing she knows is quite sufficient.  She unintentionally utters many hilarious lines such as those delivered with practiced innocence by Gracie Allen many years ago, but she is a cute and bubbly blond, so I have dubbed her Gracie Hawn.  When she asked me years ago to correct some of her missteps in speech, I declined until pressed on the issue.  Acting as a constant verbal editor for my wife would not have promoted much harmony between us.  We finally agreed that if she would try hard to avoid abusing just three offending words which are commonly mispronounced and are particularly grating on my nerves, then I would try hard never to wince or show any outward sign of dismay when she misses on any others.  So the only time I call her on anything is when she slips up and says the aforementioned nucular or that word I already covered in an entire post - real(e)ty. 

And the third one?  The other abused word I am allowed to reject and repair for my wife?  Amazingly, it's another one heard often coming from people in all walks of life, including even broadcasters!  And it's one of those words that is easier said properly than it is in the commonly corrupted version.  Go figure!  Oh, well, I guess error is here to stay; we can never excape it!

[ * Correction INSERT - Mar. 23]
Once again, this red-faced writer is guilty of doing exactly as he accused others of doing; writing before thoroughly checking it out himself.  If Wikipedia is correct, the article about duct tape shows that I am sadly lacking in knowledge of this product.  Now I'm reading up on other articles found in an online search, and I see that The Duct Tape Guys have written seven books on the subject.  No, I probably won't read all of those, but allow me to stand VERY corrected on my earlier snide remarks about the tape.  And NO, this was not premeditated as a test of my readership to see who might slap me around for my gaffe.  I simply blew it!