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Anguish Languish

9781465655486
100 pages
Library of Alexandria
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Overview
A visiting professor of Anguish, Dr. ——, who, while learning to understand spoken English, was continually bewildered and embarrassed by the similarity of such expressions as boys and girls and poisoned gulls, used to exclaim: “Gracious! What a lot of words sound like each other! If it wasn’t for the different situations in which we hear ’em, we’d have a terrible time saying which was which.” Of course, these may not have been the professor’s exact words, because he often did his exclaiming in Anguish rather than in English. In that case he would say: “Crashes! Water larders warts sunned lack itch udder! Effervescent further deferent saturations an witch way harem, wade heifer haliver tam sang witch worse witch.” Dr. —— was right, both in English and Anguish. Although other factors than the pronunciation of words affect our ability to understand them, the situation in which the words are uttered is of prime importance. You can easily prove this, right in the privacy of your own kitchen, by asking a friend to help you wash up a dozen cops and sorcerers. Ten to one, she’ll think you said a dozencups and saucers, and be genuinely surprised if you put her to work cleaning up even one police officer, let alone all the others, and the magicians, too. If you think that she misunderstands merely because the two phrases sound somewhat alike and not because of the situation, read what SPAL’s Committee on Housewives has to say: “Presented with a dishes-piled-in-sink situation, several hundred well-adjusted housewives thought that cops and sorcerersreferred to dishes, but seldom did normal subjects, interviewed under the same conditions, make the opposite mistake. When they were asked to help us wash cups and saucers, some women consented, some made stupid excuses, and some told us bluntly to go wash them ourselves, but practically no one thought that we were talking about policemen and magicians.”

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