Language is a tricky thing. With the wrong words or the wrong construction, you can seem to mean things you don’t intend or can seem to intend things you don’t mean. You can get yourself into a lot of trouble. Many Catholics do, particularly when they write online.
At sites such as Facebook, many people have the impression that stream-of-consciousness writing is a good thing. They don’t re-read their words before they push the Send button. Not infrequently, they end up committing the literary crime of amphiboly.
That’s the use of an ambiguous word or sentence construction that confuses the reader, either innocently or intentionally. Let me give some non-religious examples.
At the conclusion of a musical performance, Calvin Coolidge was asked, “What do you think about the singer’s execution?” He replied: “I’m all for it.” That may not have been the kind of answer the inquirer was seeking, but it was the kind his imprecise wording deserved.
Similarly with a job applicant, who got a letter of recommendation from his former employer: “Anyone who can get Carbuncle to work for him will be lucky indeed.” One hopes Carbuncle didn’t show the letter to prospective employers. If he did, he’s probably still looking for a job.
More famously, there was the case of Croesus, king of Lydia from 560–547 B.C. and renowned for his wealth. Before marching against Persia, Croesus consulted the Delphic Oracle, which assured him, with studied ambiguity, that war against Persia would result in the fall of a great empire. That’s just what happened, except that it was the empire of Croesus that fell. (Croesus himself was captured and burned on a pyre by the Persians, who were led by Cyrus the Great—who is mentioned repeatedly in the Bible, so perhaps this example might count as quasi-religious.)
As in great history, so in great literature. In Henry VI Shakespeare provides this subtly unclear line: “The duke yet lives that Henry shall depose.” Does this poetic phrasing mean that Henry shall depose a duke who still lives or that there still lives a duke who shall depose Henry? Read the play to find out.
Sometimes ambiguous wording is used for personal gain. Years ago, some people purchased a record album titled Best of the Beatles, thinking it included the best songs of that group. It didn’t. The title referred to the band’s original drummer, Pete Best, and the album consisted of his songs.
More often, deliberately ambiguous wording is used humorously. One of the most famous instances is from the movie Animal Crackers. Groucho Marx speaks an ambiguous sentence and then immediately follows up with a punchline: “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.”
Online and elsewhere, amphiboly usually is innocent and arises from mangled sentence structure. My favorite comes from my own family. My maternal grandfather was an immigrant, and his English was imperfect. One day he was speaking to his daughter Nell: “Throw me down the stairs, Nellie, my hat and coat.”
I already have alluded to what brings amphiboly to mind: Facebook. Like many of you, I spend too much time on Facebook.
(Translation: “I spend too much time on Facebook” means “I spend time on Facebook.” Any time spent on Facebook is too much, given the other, constructive things I could be doing. I rationalize by assuring myself that I engage in apostolic work when I go online to battle the latest Catholic amphibolies and other manglings of the faith.)
Although you occasionally see references to Thomas Aquinas on Facebook, particularly in discussions among Catholics, you seldom see anyone write as he wrote. He wrote with great precision, and he wrote simply. He called his masterwork, the Summa Theologiae, a book for “beginners”—and so it is, despite its great length.
Aquinas was the epitome of precision. He made sure that he said what he intended to say—nothing more, nothing less. He parsed his arguments, breaking them into little pieces, looking at each piece from multiple angles. When you read a page of Aquinas, you know exactly what he means. It’s too bad that his good writing habits haven’t found their way onto Facebook.
I find myself responding to many Facebook posts that rise to the top of my news feed. It might be truer to say that I don’t so much respond as intrude. Sometimes I inject myself into discussions simply to clear up commenters’ imprecise language, and then I depart. I find myself defending people who unknowingly have committed amphibolies and who are being skewered for it: other commenters think they are saying X when they really meant to say Y.
Sometimes a single unclear sentence can result in dozens of annoyed and annoying responses. The original commenter is taken to the woodshed for having said something he didn’t say—or, at least, didn’t intend to say—and gets little mercy from people whose responses to him might be as unclear as his own phrasing. They don’t like what he said or, at least, how he said it. They don’t like his execution.
Or maybe they do.
This article is reprinted with permission from our friends at Catholic Answers.
