MAKING SURE
I have, a least, a score of items constantly on my list about which I and not certain.
Some of them are single words about which I am in doubt, and others are expressions I
hear being used and which I sometimes echo without really knowing, for sure and certain,
what they might mean. Try keeping such a list yourself for a while and I’ll bet you find you are
using words and saying things you don’t quite understand. You sense some uneasiness when
you voice them and wander if they mean what you think they do.
For instance, I hear horsy people talking about an animal measuring so many “hands”
high. To me that means sorta like laying your hand against the beast very gently from foot to
topside - head? haunch? ear tips? rump?.. and is your hand horizontal as if you are
compassing out an area or distance on a flat board? Is a “hand” across the palm from edge
to edge or from wrist to the end of your longest fingernail?
One chart I consult tells me “sixty-five inches is equal to 16.2 hands” Now, that’s a real
help isn’t it?` I’ve never had nerve enough nerve to step right up to a pawing steed and
perhaps tickle him a bit as I hand measure his height to see if the formula holds true. The
statement can’t be accurate, I insist even as I perform the daring ceded in a mental preview
au, because my hand is bigger than my wife’s hand and she would probably have courage
enough to give the necessary measurement a try. So, I’m still in doubt about how such hand
measurement a horse works. In conversation I can ask how many hands high a horse might
be, but I can’t say it was so many hands high. And, while we’re here in the stables, I have to
admit that until recently, I thought the term “dressage” meant “grooming.” It does not. It’s
French for “training.”
Seagoing terms give me nervous pings now and then, as well. I
had read that a “fathom” is what? Seven feet? I think so. If the water is
seven feet deep, why not just say “seven feet” instead of a “fathom?”
A “league” bothers me, as well...from the very time I read one of my favorite books as a kid
which had “twenty-thousand “of them. It’s long. That’s about all know about it.
I’m grew up in an era in which the metric system was considered to be the “old” way
of measuring things. We now consider it to be either the ”best” way or the “only” method of
measurement. So, I’ve had to translate my measurements from one “language” to another,
you might say. In doing so, I’m never absolutely sure of how much of anything is what is
intended.
Then, take words like “noisome”. I use it occasionally and I am fully ware that it does not
allude to “noise” but rather to unpleasant odors. It is related to nausea rather than to
rackets of any kind. When I speak of the halls in a tenement house as being “noisome”, I mean
the stink to high heaven and not that they are, necessarily, noisy. I still shy away from using
the word, thinking, perhaps, that the person who hears me say it, or reads it when I have
written it, will think, as I once did, that it means the place is noisy.
Did you ever notice how many people pause reflectively to make sure they say
ant-ARC- tic-a, with the first letter “C” in place?
And, there is a localism in the area in which I live which drops a letter from the
emergency vehicle called an “ambulance.” Here-abouts it is often heard as an
“AN-val-ANCE”. When I hear it, or use the term correctly, I often wonder how many other
words I may be mispronouncing or mis-using out of sheer laziness or sheer ignorance.
A.L.M. August 5, 2002 [c672wds]
