When, in an earlier discussion at Kessler, the subject of the former President Herbert Hoover came up. Mrs. Morganstein said that it was not unusual for Aphasia patents to mangle his name, i.e., Hoobert Heever. I gather that Spoonerisms are a commonplace and would involve other names beyond Herbert Hoover.
During much of the last half of the 1960’s, I worked with a man in Washington who was given to Spoonerisms, bad enunciation and just plain bad English. As we go along I’ll try to give you examples of each one of his deficiencies. His name was Ben Franklin Givens. He was nominally my boss.
Ben Givens took up with a fundamentalist church in California, after his retirement. When I visited him a few years after leaving the Washington job, he spoke of his wife. She had recently died. He said that she always came to him as sort of an apparition. Ben said that she always came to him on the Congressional Golf Club in suburban Washington. I didn’t want to get into the apparition business so I suppressed my desire to ask what hole or fairway she appeared on. Besides, Givens did all the talking. At one point, he took a ruler and walked across the room to show me the exact size of the apparition. He seemed to favor the rear wall of his office for this demonstration. I asked Ben what they talked about on the golf course. He said they talked about the same things as when she was alive — like the children and his job. I didn’t say it, but I should think that someone who could appear in an apparition would probably know about the kids or his job. But, maybe they wouldn’t know about such things, after all. I’m not that conversant with apparitions.
Well at any rate, Ben died in 1997 having worked his way up to a Bishop or some such title in the church. I thought now and then how those old Hebrew names must have taken a fall or two out of Givens during his sermons.
His death rated a small column in the AT&T news for he was in the end a Vice President. Now I wouldn’t want old Ben’s demise to go unnoticed in this journal for he contributed a good bit to my misunderstanding of our common tongue.
I collected these expressions over a three year period when Ben began to speak in unknown tongues, or glossilalia. When I began to catch on to his speech patterns, I would sometimes return to my office and add a Givens-ism to my list. I’m sorry that the list fails to cover all of Ben’s pronouncements. After I began to collect them – SEE ITERS COLLECTEM -they often came so fast that I had trouble keeping up with them. And, I had a lobbying job to do as well.
In many cases, I would be seduced into a Givens-ism and I had to watch my language when speaking to others. Let’s try some of these expressions which happened almost 30 years ago. Maybe Mrs. Morganstein will identify the Spoonerisms as well as the other slips that passed in Givens’ speech.
Now I gave you ITERS COLLECTEM. It means a collectors item – a rare find. That’s a good start.
We move on to the foremost restaurant and bar for lobbyists in the Capital City, namely DUKE ZIEBERTS. Ben called it VIC ZUBERTS. (I’m having trouble writing this down. I just started to call him Vic Zubert.)
Ben always said he was NONPULSED. He meant he was NONPLUSED – meaning to put at a loss as to what to think, say or do.
He sometimes had MIXED GIVINGS meaning that he had MISGIVINGS about someone or something.
At dinner, when Ben was offered a COMPOTE as a fruity dessert, he said it was a nice COMPOST. Try that on your garden.
If you ever barely got by, Givens-ism explained that it was “BY THE SKIM OF YOUR TEETH.”
When someone was a specialist who attempted to solve a problem, it was said that he gave his EXPERTY on the subject. He meant EXPERTISE. Sometimes he would say that we could go to New York where there would be many EXPERTYS.
When he said INTIMATE, he meant IMMINENT. Quite a difference. And he said ANTI-CLIMAXICAL in place of CLIMACTIC. I’m still having trouble writing this stuff down here.
Ben said, “We’ll go back to the BREAD BOARD” when he meant back to the DRAWING BOARD. And he substituted BRANDIED for the word BANDIED.
Computers were new at the time so he called them the more familiar term of COMMUTER. And he said they ran the GRAMUT from A to Z. He meant GAMUT.
PARTICIPATION in a meeting came out as “I want to thank you all for your PRECIPITATION.” And lawyers were always described as making a MUTE point. He meant MOOT point. He would also say that the THRUST of the point was THRUSH. The THRUSH of my point is that Givens was silly.
Ben was APPRECITIOUS for the JOYALTY of the occasion. He meant he APPRECIATED the JOVIALITY.
If he wished to say something EXUDES great charm, he would say that it EXCLUDES great charm.
I’m running out of steam because I keep mixing up Ben’s spelling with mine. Three more examples. CROSSWISE became CROSSEYED and RAPPORT became a three word hyphenated sound of RAP-PA-PORT.
And I leave you with one of my favorites. When there were left over items to clean up, that is usually called TIDBITS. Ben always called them TIDBATS. I never saw that mistake again until 1981 or 1982 when a Chinese merchant in Hong Kong offered what he called small bites of food, that is, TIDBATS.
In the end, mispronunciations were rampant. The people who worked on the Hill were REPASENTATIVES and the number two fellow in the hierarchy of a department became a DEPATY. At last, there was Elizabeth who worked for Ben as his SECATARY.
And finally, as a little piece of lagniappe, I leave you with the testimony of Raymond Patriarca testifying before Representative Claude Pepper as to the charge that he was the Godfather of the Boston Mafia. Patriarca said, “That’s all wrong. It’s just a bunch of FRICTION.” I rest my case.
Or Givens’ rests his.
For the three and a half years there in Washington, Ben talked mostly golf. I mean he talked golf, golf, golf. I don’t do golf so I was able to escape falling into every trap such as his Spoonerisms and mispronunciations. As it is, I still hesitate when doing this piece as to MIXED GIVINGS or THE SKIM OF YOUR TEETH and all the rest of Givens-isms.
And so I leave it to Mrs. Morganstein to deliver a postmortem on old Ben. Was it Aphasia? I think two or three other fellows from the Washington lobbying office would like to know the result of the analysis so that we may go about our work without thinking twice about TIDBATS and BREAD BOARD, NONPULSED and the like.
E. E. Carr
December 31, 1997
Essay #10 (Old Format)
~~~
“Mixed Givings” and a few others in there are funny particularly because they could, plausibly, be a correct way of articulating something. It’s like when my girlfriend’s little brother used to call “eyebrows” “eye clouds” as a child — makes total sense, just isn’t quite what the dictionary would have you use.