My mother ended formal schooling at sixth grade. She was well read and entertained a host of thoughts and ideas well beyond her education years. Mom loved to write and had dreamed of being an author, but put aside her dreams to help her husband battle the depression years and to raise their five children to adulthood. Somewhere in those battles, she put the dream so far aside as to bury it completely. She loved crossword puzzles and rarely was stumped by one. All those words had real meaning to her but many of them were beyond her ability to pronounce. If she wrote a letter, the recipient was wise to have a lexicon handy. Mom poured all her love of words into those letters. If she couldn’t pronounce them, there was satisfaction in writing them!
She had an uncanny ability to destroy her own angry tirades by twisting the words in her sentences making hilarious statements. Remember in previous blogs I have shared the disparity in age between my elder siblings and me. Nonetheless, at times she still found we were all involved in the same discretion. Once we were all standing before her wrath in a line from eldest to youngest. After going on about something we had done, she announced, “After all, I don’t look as dumb as I am, you know!” She was the first to laugh. Otherwise, we would not have dared. She also liked to put “the horse before the cart” as opposed to “the cart before the horse”. Her shoes were tied with “stew shrings” rather than shoe strings. She also chose to hold things between “fore and thumb finger”.
Mom was wonderful when others were hurting or grieving. She was one of the first to appear on their door step with casserole in hand. However, sitting with one of her friends heavily burdened with a loss (I don’t remember the particulars), she put her arm around the woman and said softly, “It really will be all right. We all have to die once in awhile!” My friend, Donna, nearly topped that when she called me after Mom died. I had nearly reached the end of bearing up under sympathy and I was tired, just plain tired, and tired of crying. Donna said into the phone, “I called to offer you 'congratulations’ (condolences) on the death of your mother!” I can assure you I wasn’t crying!
My sister, Dot, was short, barely five feet tall. In her younger years, she was pretty and shapely. Betty and I were five feet five inches and five feet four inches, respectively, and gifted with hips that were wide enough to compensate for the fact we had not much to carry in a bra. Pat gained a height of five feet six inches and stole Betty’s and my portion of bust thereby giving Mae West (Dolly Parton for the younger readers) a chest to look up to. Dot was very angry at Pat one afternoon and was letting her know in no uncertain terms who was elder sister. Shaking her finger in Pat’s face, she intended to say, “Listen here, Toots!” but it came out “Listen here, tits!” and the laughter was on.
Pat worked at Honeywell for a time. She was a secretary and was in charge of following up on routine maintenance of office equipment as well as assisting when military branches were coming to inspect latest Honeywell developments. One morning over the PA system, her voice was heard announcing: “All persons with sticky drawers please put in a request for maintenance!” I would assume not many would be willing to come forward. She also sent out a memo announcing there would be a “navel inspection” the following week.
Betty had one memorable faux paus when she needed a particular herb for her Thanksgiving stuffing. She practiced the word “oregano” all the way to the store. At the time they were living in a small little town in the Adirondack Mountains of New York state. Walking up to the clerk at the grocery she smiled and asked, “Do you have any ‘orgasm’ today?” He did the only thing a gentleman could do. He turned abruptly and rapidly strode away without answering. It was months before her husband, Frank, could convince her she would have to resume the shopping duties. She carefully wrote lists and left the purchasing and the questions up to Frank.
Let me switch briefly to Dave’s grandmother, Nana. Nana was a caring and giving woman who loved her Lord and Savior but said shocking things at the most inopportune times. Regularly and often when someone admired a knick-knack of hers, she would offer to “nap it up in a roospaper” and send it home with them. She invited her pastor to a meal announcing proudly she was serving 'cherry prickin’ (prairie chicken).” I don’t know if it was the same pastor or not, but being hostess at a meal, she offered him another “gliss of ass water” (glass of ice water).
And so the tide of tangled tongues came to me from my family and was handed to Helen from both our families. Dave escaped but shared his heritage also with Helen. From there, we begin to see why people often stare at Helen and me in amazement as we garble rapidly at each other. We are so used to it we do not slow down but interpret what the other meant to say. My mother had a saying "Always take a Deutchman by what he means, not by what he says!"
As a child, I mixed things that are often mixed by children anywhere. I saw tower waters, hopper grasses, and flutterbyes. The top hoads croaked at dusk until dawn, and the tars swinkled brightly in the skies. When I was in high school choir, many a solo had to be worked diligently as the choir director sought to untangle tricky phrases and find a way to help me keep them untangled. As Chair Woman of a rather prestigious group of women, I stood nervously facing members of years of long standing on my first day in office and said, “My first order of business is to gratefully thank our “past Johnson, Mrs. President, for her service!” As these women began to titter, then giggle, then belly laugh I stood confused and a little hurt. I made eye contact with Helen and Pat who were sitting owl eyed and shaking their heads. It was some time before order was restored. I’m not sure they ever took me seriously. One of my favorite hymns Let Us Break Bread Together causes total worship in my soul. Well, it did. Then one day I was heard to sing in a robust voice that transcended and stood out over an entire congregation, “when I fall on my face with my knees to the rising sun”. Can you imagine what it is to bring an entire congregation down to their knees not in worship but In hysteria? I won’t even begin to try to explain the Easter morning I sang loudly about “death’s dark angel” in the midst of a praise for the risen Lord. All I know is Helen and Marc’s wife, Jenny, on either side of me, closed my hymnal and ordered me to stop singing! Apparently those words didn’t even appear in the song.
To return to Helen, her natural bent to rearrange letters and words is enhanced by seizure disorder that blights short-term memory as well as causes lapses in speech. She was relating to her director of a preschool that one of the children in the day care had been particularly difficult all day long. Helen said, “ . . . and then she tipped her head back, opened her mouth and started screaming like a 'whore' (shrew)!” It was years before the director could remember the slip without falling apart. She confessed she had worried several people on a bus by the memory rearing its ugly head. She began to chuckle, then to laugh, and finally was reduced to laughing so hard she was crying. Trying to explain what made her laugh only made her look more like a lunatic.
I had not heard the term “synoptic gospels” until the night Helen asked me a question about them. When I said I didn’t know what she was talking about she said, “You know, the ‘synoptic gobbles’ are the three gospels that contain much of the same information about Jesus.” I couldn’t breathe and the pained look on her face told me she did not find it as funny as I did. Another time, riding in a car through flat, uninteresting prairie, Helen pointed out the “bay hales”. Immediately I said, “Those aren’t bay hales, those are ‘bale hays’!” Dave says it is extremely difficult to concentrate on driving with two aliens carrying on in the car.
The only claim to fame Dave has in this line is one time when he was ill. Dave does not like to spend time in bed, removed from family and TV. Our children were still young and I did not want his bout with the flu to travel through the rest of us. I was firm about where he would spend his time. He also had a temperature, chills and was feeling very sorry for himself. He whined, “You are making me feel like a ‘pyorrhea’!” He was totally incensed that I would laugh at a dying man simply because he didn’t say ‘pariah’ correctly.
People can call this anything they like: malapropisms, spoonerisms, dyslexia. Whatever you call it, laughter is the best medicine. The problem will not go away, feeling insecure or self conscious makes it worse. Even if we don’t hear the twisted utterance, one look at the hearer’s face is a clue that words were spoken terribly wrong. Some days when the malady is stronger than others, I ask over and over again, “What did I just say?” I try not to argue when someone says I made a mess of speech (even though I am often certain they heard me incorrectly).
There are ever so many more instances, but you get the idea. If you know me well, just listen and you will be dazzled by the garble. If you don’t know me but are reading this, know that I am pleased you are laughing. Where would we be without laughter? I hope, if you also suffer with “tangled tongue syndrome” you find a way to appreciate it for what it is: comic relief. May God bless you! We each have our way to bring lightness to others. After all, it must be boring to be correct all the time.
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