Wielding Words like Weapons Wounds Sometimes

Depending on your watch, you might still have time this morning to be part of Norwich (CT) Mayor Peter Nystrom's Question and Answer session at the Central fire house starting at nine (Allen Iverson will not be taking part, so the Mayor will handle the answers I expect). I realize this may be of moot import to those in Mountain View, California. 'Right back at cha!' ;-)

To take the chill off yesterday, with the falling snow we had around here and the dip in temperatures. I popped into the sandwich place that has the guy who lost all the weight by eating them as their spokesman (I'm assuming they give him money, right? They don't pay him in sandwiches, though looking at recent pictures since he became a celebrity maybe they do), I had a bowl of 'homemade vegetable soup' with my sandwich, which I call 'samwich' inspired by a half-memory of a Soupy Sales routine, I think. I do wish the ghosts of past lives would wear name tags when they wander the corridors of my memory so I'd know how to sort them.

It was, surprisingly very good soup-and I asked the fellow who is always there (which I think means he's the franchise owner), how he knew. He was puzzled by my question and offered his own, 'how I did know, what?' "How did you know this was what my homemade vegetable soup was supposed to taste like?" I asked. Maybe he thought I was joking but I didn't think I was joking.

My homemade vegetable soup would taste different from yours. It would have to, right? Unless we're twin sons of different mothers. And what about the people who are adopted or who were raised by relatives other than their own parents, what does their homemade vegetable soup taste like? We bandy words around sometimes like there's a common meaning that everyone knows when there isn't. Sometimes shared references aren't.

A couple of weeks ago in Norwich, there was a lot of earnest discussion, and our City Manager at the direction of City Council, is investigating the costs and return of benefits of it, about creating a "community center" at the address of the former YMCA that closed the end of last March. A well-attended presentation by the Recreation Director who has been working on rounding up all the cats and dogs for a project like this and an impassioned, at times, public hearing in the City Council chambers resulted in the City Manager's efforts and when he has the data he's looking for, he'll share it with the Council and, as a city, we'll see where we are and where we're going.

Except, as someone whose opinion I value greatly pointed out to me this week, maybe we should be calling whatever is going to go into 337 Main Street something other than a "community center". His point, and I think a very valid one, is based on the dollar figures he's been crunching and the stubby-pencil reckoning he's been doing.

He looked at projected membership costs (reasonable by MY standards and I bet you can already see his point) in the context of the available discretionary income of those families within our community forecast to be the users of such a center, and something in the air does not compute. The facility being described and the community who can afford to use it will, he suggests, not be anywhere near the same despite our well-meaning and sincere desire that it be otherwise.

Wishing it were so and making it so are TWO very different realities and what we do is so loud that sometimes you can't hear what we say. Even though we may all use the same words, "community center", "homemade", "transubstantiation" (okay, that one not so much) they can, and do, actually have very different meanings to and for each of us. If a cat had kittens in an oven, you wouldn't call them biscuits, right? That saying makes me happier than a wooden spoon at a spelling bee, at least until Scott Adams' attorney calls me (and that's why I have caller ID).

Language should create a frame of common reference and enlarge the body of shared knowledge to enhance understanding and further communication, not mask meaning and disguise intentions. Nothing is less clear than synthetic agreement or more harmful than coerced consensus. Honesty is something we claim to always want but rarely welcome and is always in short supply especially on a chilly Saturday morning in January. Perhaps we should go to your house and have some soup.
-bill kenny