What’s the Word: Language can be a bit tricky
Hang on to your hats folks, I’ve decided to write a column.
It’s not going to be a political column. That’s been covered.
It’s not going to be an opinion column. You know what they say about opinions.
It’s just going to be about something that has always interested me. Something you have to have to even write a column.
It’s going to be about language. Odd words and old sayings. Where they came from. Why we use them.
I do have one problem though. I’ve been agonizing over what to call it. Some writers give their columns cutesy names like “Karen’s Korner” or “Penny’s Porch” and I suppose that’s OK, but I couldn’t really come up with something that goes with Charlie. I gave some thought to “Charlie’s Chatter” but it doesn’t quite have that magisterial quality does it?
I considered calling it “The Occasional Wit” but I figured out early on that by the time somebody decides they are oh so witty, they usually aren’t anymore. So that one is out. I don’t want to jinx myself.
I do want my column to be humorous though. Two of the things I love most are language and humor. And if you look for it, there is an innate humor in language. Some words are just funny all by themselves.
Here’s a good example: slang. We all know what slang is but if you think about it, it’s a weird word. Slang. Sounds kind of reptilian. Sounds like something you would do if you had a snake by the tail and you wanted to get rid of it.
Another of my favorites is redundant. A great example of the meaning of that word is the phrase: true fact. I’m sure we’ve all heard that at some time or other.
“Is that a true fact?” someone will ask. Well, gee, if it’s true then it’s a fact, and if it’s a fact, then it’s true. One of the words is superfluous. All you really have to say is: “Is that true?” or, “Is that a fact?”
And speaking of redundant, another thing about the English language that can be a bit strange is the way we add the suffix -ant to verbs to make them adjectives. Sometimes it makes sense. The word resist is in the dictionary so it’s easy to see how we came up with resistant. The word flip is in the dictionary so it’s easy to see how we came up with the word flippant.
I couldn’t find the word “redund” in the dictionary anywhere, so you kind of wonder how something could be redundant.
Another of my favorite words is malapropism. Baseball player Yogi Berra is famous for his malapropisms. One that people mention pretty often is when he said, “It’s like d?ja vu all over again.”
Well, I guess you could call that a malapropism, but it seems more like a redundancy to me. And I suppose you could call it a redundant malapropism, but that’s getting out of my league, linguistically.
It would seem redundancies are everywhere if you look for them, and I do. In fact we have one right here in McMinnville I noticed the last time I ate at Applebee’s. Now, I hope they don’t take offense to this since it’s kind of a free plug after all, but I guess we’ll see.
I’m sure you’ve all heard of chicken fried steak. One of my favorites as you can tell by looking at me. For those who don’t know, like someone from the South Pole maybe, that’s a steak rolled in the same kind of batter used on fried chicken, fried up like chicken, and then smothered in gravy. Yum. But I digress.
The thing is, Applebee’s has a dish on their menu called: Chicken fried chicken. It’s true. I swear.
Anyhow, the important thing here is that I’ve decided what I’m going to call my column. It’s going to be called: “What’s the Word?” Hopefully that makes sense on several levels.
At any rate, it just seems accurately right. He said, redundantly.
(Charlie Johnson is a reporter for the Standard who can be reached at 473-2191.)