Lost in transcription

When I was young, we would sometimes play a game we called “Chinese Whispers”. You start with a short text, and each player whispers it once to the next. When you reach the last player, you compare the original text to the final, resulting text, to much laughter (usually at least). The game, under various names, was once popular across Europe, and beyond. In America it was known as the Telephone Game.

Best known as an optical retailer, the UK company Specsavers recently launched what it calls its Misheard Manifesto. The campaign—which aims to encourage people to get their hearing checked (Specsavers has moved into hearing aids since its launch in the 1980s)—highlights a number of words, terms, and idioms that are systematically misused in speech, and presumably in written English too.

So we have “To nip something in the butt” (for what should be “To nip something in the bud”), “For all intensive purposes” (for what should be “For all intents and purposes”), and—my personal favorite—“Escape goat” (for what should be “Scapegoat”).

The Manifesto is short and to the point. The accompanying video droll. And you get to see several of Giles Brandreth’s famous sweaters. Which for some will be a good thing.

Know the meaning of every word you write

I can’t help but wonder how we can get these very common elements of written and spoken language so wrong. Yes, the origins of, for example, the term scapegoat are fairly obscure. But why would anyone refer to a “damp squid” to describe something disappointingly less effective than expected when a “squib” is a firework?  And what’s all this about “butt nipping”? Are these errors really all down to hearing loss as we grow older?

Of course, the misuse of words, terms, and idioms isn’t the result of hearing loss alone.

Sometimes it seems to be caused by a desire to secure what we might call “authority by association” If I say what someone with authority says, that authority will rub off on me.

But that explanation still requires a lack of attention to detail, and that lack of attention seems to play a significant role here. Only this week I heard a broadcaster say they were “rearing to go”.

It’s “raring to go”. “Raring” means to be very keen to do something.

“Rearing” means to raise an animal or child until fully grown, to breed animals, to cultivate plants, to rise up (as though on hind legs), to extend to a great height, or to show anger or irritation.

What could “rearing to go” actually mean?

All the technology we now have at our fingertips isn’t much help either. Only recently a client came to me with the phrase “You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours”, which they took to be the English equivalent of a commonly used German phrase. And we got to discuss the difference between it, and its mercantile nature, and the phrase “One good turn deserves another”, and its conveying of a favor returned. Nuances that non-contextual “translations” just don’t give you.

Crucially, my client had the admirable reflex to ask himself if it was, really, and accurate translation after all. A quality I wrote about in an earlier post on these pages.

As author and theologian C.S. Lewis once wrote in reply to a budding young writer, know the meaning of every word you write. That’s what good dictionaries, and good proofreaders, are for.

[Illustration by ELCS.ch. Kashmiri goats (Capra markhor) in Llandudno, North Wales, spring 2019—originally escaped goats, sometimes (now) scapegoats.]