Unintended Meaning
Sometimes, when my mind wanders (as it is prone to do) while people are talking to me, I occasionally mis-hear them: words that leave their mouths in one shape can enter my brain with an entirely different shape, leading to curious misconstructions of meaning. At other times, I drift along and only hear excerpts of their spoken thread, and start filling in the blank spots with more creative license than I should. Sometimes I don't look closely enough at written words and see other (usually far more interesting) words in their place.
This is not always — or even frequently — a bad thing, since it can be the source of stimulating ideas that might not otherwise pop into my head through more pedestrian listening or reading. Perhaps it's a warning that my right brain is trying to seize control over my left brain, which is usually in charge.
This comes to mind simply as a digression from one example that passed by this morning, as I was reading headlines and excerpts from my collection of RSS feeds. This one, from The Seattle Post-Intelligencer caught my eye:
'Trust me' is too risky (2/13/2005) P-I Editorial: Probably the last person to assess a substance abuser's condition is the abuser.
Oh ho! I thouht, another incisive commentary about the current president and his untrustworthiness! But, no, it turned out to be about drunk drivers.
I liked my version better, really, and it's easy to see how I made this mistake. "Trust Me" must be one of the top-five phrases in the administration's handbook of reassuring public-policy statements. It comes in so many versatile forms, too, with an abundance of meaningful winks and nudges and references to "national security" and the "war on terror". (I'm also not a big fan of metaphorical "wars" on abstract and invisible targets, like the "war on drugs", but my discomfort increases dramatically when the administration takes a metaphoric "war" literally.) Thus, whenever I see "trust me", I naturally assume it's another lie from the administration.
And then there was that bit about "substance abuser". Momentarily I figured that the "substance" in this case must refer to "power", since abuse of power is surely one of the top-five most readily identifiable characteristics of the current administration.
Oops.
In: All, Hermeneutics, Notes to Richard, Splenetics