STUPIDER AND STUPIDER
So who was it that started tossing around the notion that with Age comes Wisdom? The wisest thing I can offer is that as far as I’m concerned, with Age comes Ignorance. Day after day, I am reinforced in my knowledge that in truth, I know very little. And the more I add to my tiny sponge-like brain that soaks up trivia like an Oreo soaks up milk, the less I understand about the world. Sure, I know an awful lot about the tiny piece of the world of linguistics that I use to make a living (I’m a Speech Pathologist by training who specializes in language disorders amongst folks with severe physical disabilities) you could fill a solar system with the stuff I haven’t a clue about.

Take the word apophasis, for example. Doubtless some of you dear readers have heard this word before and can even define what it means. But for me, it is a new one. And that’s all the more depressing for a guy who gets paid for his so-called skills in the English language. Fortunately, I at least have access to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, a two-volume tome that is possibly the most valuable investment I ever made; until I can pluck up the courage – and the cash – to buy the complete Oxford English Dictionary. Wedged between apopetalous and apophlegmatic, both of which are not picked up by my spell checking software, is apophasis, [Late Latin – from the Greek meaning denial] Rhet. A figure in which we feign to deny or pass over what we really say or advise. You may not have known the word itself, but you have doubtless seen it in action.

Politicians in particular seem to be positively apophasic when it comes to talking about their opponents: “I don’t intend to mention Senator Chamber’s seventeen felony convictions because what’s important is how our party intends to deal with crime.” What is also troubling is that while looking up the meaning of this new word, I discovered that I also didn’t know the meaning of the words immediately before and after it in the dictionary. In fact, I had to skip over eight unknown words until I found one that I knew – and that was apoplectic, something I was beginning to feel.

So if I only understand around one out of ten words in the dictionary, and I am supposed to be a linguist, how much more don’t I know about other fields. Physics, chemistry, math, biology, history, geography, football, baseball, boules, and even the plot of Days of our Lives. The more you try to educate yourself, the more stupid you feel.

This realization probably explains how irritated I get with people who claim to know everything about everything. You know the sort – it doesn’t matter what topic you’re discussing, they have something to add. And to make things worse, it isn’t always easy to refute what they are saying because you don’t know. I look back fondly to a conference some years back in Antwerp, where a group of researchers from a UK university did a one-hour presentation on a special software package they had developed that they claimed would make machine-generated language easier. To support their argument, they drew heavily on earlier research carried out by a Professor Van Balcom.

At the end of the presentation, they triumphantly announced, “Any questions?” and scanned the audience. From the back of the room, a portly, bespectacled gentleman stood up and said, “I’m afraid what you’re doing will not work.” Stunned, the lead presenter asked what evidence he had for this statement and the man replied, “Because I am Professor Van Balcom and the reason I stopped working on this line of programming was because it didn’t work.”

If Pride goeth before a fall, then the virtual thunder of researchers hitting the ground was deafening. And schadenfreude is a word that I do know the meaning of.