The latest insight into what responsible people may really think occurred in a Beach town here in Florida. Instead of getting out of it the person in question dug in deeper and made it worse. Slips of the tongue may be funny and cute if a child tries to wrap a tongue around unfamiliar words. My sister Evelyn was “elephant” to me until I caught on that it wasn’t funny to Evelyn.
Malapropisms are a bit different. They are tongue twisters that have no hidden meaning suddenly surfing. What is so bad about slips of the tongue are those that show the deeply held anti-religious or racial slurs embedded in the thinking and the words used by people we would not suspect harboring such thoughts. You never know when you raise the level of frustration of a friend and unknowingly give him or her permission to call you a name not uttered in polite society. This is a game with no rules for we all are responsible for what comes out of our mouths and saying - “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.” - helps not one whit.
The use of hate tinged or bigoted language which immediately causes the target to blanch and feel wounded physically as well as mentally goes on all the time. It is like we all are sitting on time bombs that burst out of our mouths and shatter the equanimity we thought was the norm.
Such slips of the tongue can and have ruined the political lives of potentially gifted and accomplished people. I had a professor once who got away with it because at the time, his teasing of the lone young woman in a graduate class was just on the edge and he would never have gotten away with it today. In casting around for a word to describe how I would appear if something happened to me, I searched for a word that described it, “deformed”, without remembering that there was a severely crippled young man in my class. He looked betrayed – for he was – and was about to say something in defense when he looked at me sadly and moved his hand in dismissal and the moment passed, although I have never forgotten it.
It is hard to hold one’s tongue when it is flopping out of your mouth and yearns to be heard among all the other words that are out there in the universe of discourse. Those that betray us - for we would not admit to any prejudice and ill feelings towards another religion, race or intelligence of individuals or whole groups of people - simply show that we ARE bigoted and need to do a lot of soul searching and cleaning up going back generations to where the slips were just the real thoughts of real people who taught us them as well as the politesse that passes for ordinary conversation. Time has passed but prejudices and bigotry remain.