I received my gas bill today, and it was addressed to someone named "Dugles". Somehow, nobody at the gas company felt that spelling looked odd, and it will probably end up on my credit report as one of my "aliases" because I'm going to pay it. This is not the first time some other person has misspelled or misused my name. For many years now, Gouglas has appeared as an alias, even though I have never used it. In class, I tell people to call me "Doug" or "Professor" or for those who feel particularly brave, "Oh captain, my captain", and none of those appear elsewhere. Although probably just a matter of typos, I have to wonder sometimes what goes through people's minds when they try to communicate, because English really is an awful language in which to communicate.
After my second town hall visit with Congressman Stephen Horsford (D-NV), I realized that many people mean different things with the words they use than I do. He kept talking about how he was going to "fix" things, and so I asked if he meant fix as in "to repair" or as in "to make permanent". You see, I have a 1914 copy of the Oxford English Dictionary at home, and 100 years ago, "fix" did not mean "to repair" according to that volume in ANY context. Yet, in modern parlance we assume that they mean what we mean, or perhaps more appropriately what we hope they mean. It reminds me of the exchange from The Princess Bride where Inigro points out to Vizzini that inconceivable does not apparently mean what he thinks it means.
Many things are inappropriately named. We talk of how we had a "near miss" with another car, when if we really nearly missed it means that we actually had a collision. We talk about trying without realizing that this form of conversation predicts defeat. We talk about health care when what is actually meant is health coverage. We misapply the word love in many contexts when everyone knows that my love for chocolate cake is very different from love for a woman. We answer grammatically incorrectly that "it is me" when the appropriate asks us to say "it is I", and we talk of "by the by" which means the exact opposite today from its meaning in 1620. English is one of the worst languages in which to communicate because it obfuscates meaning, omits detail, ensnares the senses, misleads the mind, and expresses nearly enough to any number of putative interpretations that you can say almost anything and mean either everything or nothing at all depending on how recipients take it.
On Tuesday night, I went out with my friend for his birthday. During our conversation afterwards, he told me that I am the only person in his life with whom he does not have to interpret when I speak with him because I say what I mean. I don't really have time to play games or an interest in subterfuge, but this makes me unique and a target, because it's uncommon. I heard years ago that Theodore "Dr. Seuss" Giessel said that you should "Be who you are and say what you think because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind", and I took that counsel to heart. Most people however do the opposite. They call things the Affordable Care Act when it's neither affordable nor about care. They talk of budget cuts when it's really cuts in the increases. They talk about compassion and Christian values when they are interested in anything but that, unless they are the recipient of your charity. In essence, most people are duplicitous when they talk, and it creates all sorts of problems.
For almost six months now, I've been struggling with a problem. I made decisions based on what appears to be misinformation. Since I speak my mind and tell the truth and am straightforward with people, I mistakenly assume that other people are too. At the very least, the best information I have is what other people volunteer for me unless I snoop, and so I make decisions based on the representations given to me. What now seems foolhardy made perfect sense with the information provided to me, but if it was inaccurate or misleading or disingenuous, I can't help that. It didn't bear fruit because the information was bad, not because I made a mistake. Back during graduate school, I learned that I spent an entire year working on a project that was a red herring. The information published based upon which I predicated my research turned out to be falsified. I assumed that the scientist was on the square and started where he finished only to discover that it was a sandy foundation and wasted both time and money. The information based upon which I started turned out to be faulty, but my efforts looked that way in the end.
Honesty truly is the best policy. People make decisions based on information given to them, and when you undertake to mislead people by calling a tomato a cantelope, you waste other people's time and money. When I decide to waste my time and money, that's my business, but when I discover that you have done so by misleading me, then in essence you have stolen my life and substance. When we call things as they really are rather than as we prefer them to be, it may not feed our ego, but if you really care about other people, you don't lie or mislead or miscommunicate. You do the very best you can with what you have and call things as they are. It brings serenity to you and me both.
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