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Trippingly on the tongue
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___ One of our boys asked me the other day: "Why do you sometimes start to say one thing and something else comes out?"
___Good question, I said, wishing I had a correspondingly good answer. We like to make jokes about misspeak
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MARK WINGFIELD
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ing being a sign of old age, but obviously there’s more to it than that if even a 7-year-old suffers from slips of the tongue.
___Some of us, of course, are more prone to this problem than others. Yogi Berra, the famous baseball player of days gone by, was notorious for tripping over his tongue. And in our house, there’s Alison.
___I think her brain sometimes moves faster than her tongue, and the two sort of cross paths in mid-sentence. It sure does make for some funny family moments, though.
___Like the other day, when I was telling her about a person we know who has struggled with alcoholism and has fallen into trouble again because of it. "Has he ever been to Triple A?" she quickly asked.
___ I, of course, never suffer any speech problems--except when speaking before large groups. Even when I know exactly what I’m trying to say and think I’m forming the word correctly, sometimes the mouth muscles exercise a mind of their own and cause a different word to come out.
___This type of structural slippery tongue wreaks havoc on our young boys, who haven’t completely mastered the pronunciation of all English-language sounds and who have a bad habit of speaking quickly. Many a time I’ve been on the brink of questioning where they learned a particularly obscene word I thought I had heard them utter--only to realize the problem was not with their speech but with my hearing.
___ Seems it’s just as easy to have slippery hearing as a slippery tongue.
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__We all have our little foibles. Mine just happens to be mixing up metaphors and other words. Somebody has to provide the entertainment in the family.
___The minute I said "Triple A," I knew it was wron
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ALISON WINGFIELD
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g, but you can’t take it back. I threatened Mark with his life if he told anybody. So what does he do? He puts it on the Web for the whole world to see. If this column becomes just "she said," I will not be held accountable.
___ Like many people, I speak before I think.
___Mixing up metaphors and forgetting names must go hand in mouth. I can see someone daily and still draw a flush when it comes to her name. It’s not that I don’t know who she is, I just have a mental brick on names.
___ (See how easy it is to mix metaphors?)
___ I inherited this inability to remember names from my dad. He is notorious for this. We had a favorite breakfast place for which I cannot remember the real name to this day because he always called it "Aunt Susie’s."
___ Part of the name problem is context. When you see someone outside of the normal setting where you usually encounter them, such as work or school, it is easy to forget their names. Both my dad and I tremble when we have to introduce somebody, for fear we’ll get it wrong. If I’m with him, I always take the initiative and introduce myself to the person, in hopes they will automatically say their name back.
___ Anyone listening in on our phone conversations would think they were nonsensical.
___ He’ll tell me about this great movie starring what’s-his-name, you know, the one who was in that other movie that took place in England, with what’s-her-name. The scary thing is, I usually know who he’s talking about.
___ My consolation is that we have a God who knows our names and knows exactly what we’re thinking, even when it comes out all wrong.
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He Said/She Said is a new regular feature of the Baptist Standard's on-line edition. Mark Wingfield is managing editor of the Standard. Alison Wingfield is a freelance writer. The Wingfields moved to Texas in January from Louisville, Ky., where Mark had been editor of the Western Recorder, in which this column appeared weekly. |
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