According to William Shakespeare (Romeo & Juliet Act 2 Scene 2) “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”. Me-thinks Bill got it wrong.
In last week’s post (Majoritising Dusticles) I attempted to introduce a couple of words into the English language – dusticles & majoritise.
Dusticles has generated a little bit of reaction and so I thought I’d keep the conversation going.
Firstly, I haven’t invented either of these words so I’m not trying to take credit for that.
Here are some of the responses I’ve had (which I love).
This is my favorite:
“Too funny Laurence – I’m going to use ‘dusticles’ in general vocab from now on. I’ve always said I have better things to do than dust … like live & enjoy life … :)”
Based on my own research and a comment from another reader (below) I suggested its usage be checked out before before being put into “general vocab”.
“May I say that this new word has an initial very naughty thought attached to it
Maybe invent a new word or just stick to plain old ‘dust’?”
Sadly “plain old dust” just doesn’t convey my meaning effectively.
According to Urban Dictionary: “The word refers to the dust that occupies your ball sack after not showering for days. May also refer to a very dumb individual from British Columbia who fails at everything except failing.”
This then raised the question for me of similar situations – words which have very different meanings dependent on context.
English, and I’m sure it also applies to most languages, is filled with words which have multiple, very different meanings.
Let’s look at just a few:
- prick
- pussy
- ball
When I say “the rose gave my finger a prick” you understand the cause of my rather sore finger. On the other hand if I said “he got his prick caught in his fly” you’d be seeing a very different situation, although it still involves pain and anatomy. “Fly” is another one of these context-specific words. Reverting to rose parts and insects that sentence would conjure up a rather strange image.
Recently, we’d been living in a house with two cats, one of which was very affectionate. If I made the comment “yesterday I woke up with a pussy on my face” knowing the context of the house arrangements you’d understand that as a perfectly, family friendly comment. Not being aware of that context, and having a mind which goes to other places, you could be seeing me waking up in a very awkward situation.
And now to my final example: ball.
There’s the usage referred to by the Urban Dictionary (quoted above). As you know, it also has many other uses.
For example: “Golf is a game in which players hit their balls with an iron club to see how far they can make them go, with the objective of getting them into a small hole”. If you were from another planet (or even a non-English speaking background) that sentence could have you filled with horror if someone had just invited you to 18 rounds of golf. And what would you make of an invitation to a royal ball?
And so, like Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s Through The Looking Glass, the meaning of words depends on the context in which they’re being used (although he did take it slightly further – to mean whatever he wanted them to mean which could make communication very challenging).
Going back to Juliet’s rose, words have a great deal of power – especially those words we use to name or describe things.
For example, I used to be a fan of Mike Carlton and particularly enjoyed his comments about Rugby – the game played in heaven, according to him. Since, I’ve recently found out that he’s actually an arrogant, bigoted anti-Jewish ratbag, rugby has now become tainted by association with him and when I hear it mentioned I think of a bunch of thuggish brutes running around a field chasing a ball and beating each other up.
Thus, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to remove context, bias and meaning from the words we use. So, while it’s important to be succinct (an attribute I tend to be rather lacking in), we do need to be sure we’ve conveyed the correct meaning in what we say.
And so, just for the record, here’s a picture of what I mean by “dusticles”.