I fuck up, you make a mistake, he misspeaks

One day in French class at school, I was given a sentence to translate that entirely baffled me. Unlike one of my Latin teachers, who would choose translators pseudo-randomly, which allowed him the freedom to give me the thorniest sentence in the piece (which he typically did, the bastard), the French teacher would simply run along the rows from front to back, one sentence each. Counting off the number of kids before me, I worked out which sentence would be mine and set to work. And it shouldn’t have been a bitch, but it was. There was a particular phrase that defied any logical explanation. It went something like:

“Rapellez-vous moi à [someone].”

It was in direct speech, and in context I worked out that it must mean something like ‘give my best to [someone]’, or ‘say hi to [someone] for me’. But there didn’t seem to be a neat English phrase that captured the concept. The nearest I could come up with was the seemingly bizarre:

“Remember me to [someone].”

Obviously it wasn’t that. There was no such construction. Eventually my turn came, and I was none the wiser. I umm-ed and err-ed, but eventually just gave up. Whereupon the teacher asked for hands (probably one of the two particularly Hermione Grainger-esque girls in my class), and was happily told that the sentence translated as “Remember me to [someone].”

I was deeply puzzled. Had I somehow missed this apparently-obvious construction for the whole of my life thus far? Had it just been invented by some scary-haired linguist and launched, gleaming with newness, into the language? Those of you who pay attention to these things will not be surprised to learn that within the next week or so I heard “remember me to” used in anger several more times – as if I just hadn’t been paying attention before. Life is like that.

Which brings me to ‘misspeak’, which is also a new concept apparently freshly launched into my idiolect. I first came across it during the famous encounter between Bill O’Reilly and Al Franken at the 2003 LA Book Expo, at which Franken took O’Reilly to task for his claims/bullshitting about having won two Peabody awards, and O’Reilly retreated into an admission that he ‘misspoke’ about that. ‘Misspeaking’ seems to be a common occurrence for O’Reilly.

So what does this new (for me) word actually mean? What’s the concept that it captures? An efficient compression of ‘mistakenly speak’? Webster’s gives ‘misspeak’ as:

1 : to speak (as a word) incorrectly

2 : to express (oneself) imperfectly or incorrectly

Prior to discovering this word, I’d just have said ‘I made a mistake’, or ‘I got it wrong’.

But hang on a minute, because there’s an additional nuance to this concept which neither of those statements captures. The nuance might be said to have something to do with the good faith of the mistake. O’Reilly, for instance, launches himself time and time again on some fact-free diatribe, blithely throwing out claims which (charitably) he cannot know to be true, or (cynically) knows to be false. There are honest mistakes, and then there are either negligent or wilful mistakes – though enough negligence becomes de facto wilfulness anyhow, so the border is blurry. When finally called on such disregard for the truth, having ‘misspoken’ becomes the FOXhole into which the embattled O’Reilly climbs.

Where else do we see this concept? Quite a lot of places recently, actually. Try Rumsfeld misspoke, and Bush misspoke, and Cheney misspoke.

The most recent is via Al Franken’s Air America web-log, which doesn’t have permalinks, so I’ll quote the whole thing here:

Today on radio row, we had a surprise visit from Sean Hannity, Playgirl’s sexiest newscaster! Fireworks were in the air, friends! Among the highlights: when Hannity denied claiming that Howard Dean said the president knew about 9/11 ahead of time, we played a bit from his show:

HANNITY: “. . . and Howard Dean saying the president knew about 9/11 ahead of time.”

Our guest said he “misspoke.” Which must be his excuse for saying the same thing on other occasions too. For a thorough debunking Hannity’s favorite non-truths, look here.

In a spirit of new-found linguistic laissez-faire, I say define a word according to how it’s used. Here’s my current draft:

misspeak: To get caught either wilfully, or negligently, disregarding the truth, especially when pontificating self-importantly (cf. O’Reilly), or knowingly denying the existence of a previous statement.

In lieu of examples in context, here’s Donald Rumsfeld doing his thang, and one of The Daily Show’s finest moments, courtesy of Lisa Rein’s fabulous archive.

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