William Southold | Opinion Columnist |The Southold Report
I will always remember my English teacher in my senior year of high school, Miss Potesta. She was an excellent teacher because she loved the English language, and wanted to pass on her love of it to her students. She was also a writer, of romance novels that did quite well. I didn’t discover this until I was in my thirties. It didn’t surprise me, though. She was certainly an object of many of the boys' imaginary romances back then, if not their out and out bawdy sexual fantasies. The drinking age at the time in NY, or what we took as the “suggested” drinking age, was 18. At our gatherings someone would inevitably raise a glass and offer a toast to her: “To Miss Potesta! Drink up boys, to drown your tears! She won’t look your way for years and years.” Boys will be boys.
Miss Potesta was also a stickler for words. She gave us one of my favorite quotes, which I have often turned to over the years. She didn’t identifying its source, and I was never able to track it down. Now I suspect what I should have suspected all along. The author was her.
“If you are a writer, you are a peddler of words, and you rely on them to be carriers of your meaning. But words can be crafty devils, difficult to capture and keep long enough to send on the journey you have envisioned. You can spot them in one room, try to track them to your office, and easily lose the trail along the way. So why not rise from a fitful sleep in the middle of the night to write them down? “Got ‘em!”, you think, only to find that overnight they have been successful in constructing a camouflage, and now they seem not to be the ones you had thought you had captured 6 hours earlier.
Words are an independent lot; they are very much masters of their own fate, not so much you. They will decide how to travel and what of yours to bring along with them. But always remember, you are the one who will be judged by the messages they deliver.”
Pretty good, huh?
She was also adamant that we increase our vocabulary. This point came to mind the other day when I heard our president gives us his interpretation of the meaning of the word “exonerate”, claiming the Mueller Report was a “complete and total exoneration”.
Here is a key quote from the Attorney General William Barr’s summary of the Mueller Report, which has set off a national debate:
"The Special Counsel states that 'while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.’”
Here is what Merriam-Webster has to say about it:
Exonerate -
- to relieve of a responsibility, obligation, or hardship
- to clear from accusation or blame
So, what’s going on here? It’s very confusing. Does Trump not understand the meaning of the word exonerate, or just when it’s presented in the negative? The latter is a fairly basic language skill usually learned in the earliest stages of childhood. For a man who excels in negatives, this seems a bit strange. He claims he should never have suffered this witch hunt, he is not responsible for anything, he has no obligation to correct anything that has been brought up from it, this hardship should never have been brought upon him, and there should have been no accusations or blame.
On the other hand, right away, Trump used a form of exonerate, exoneration, in his own defense, claiming the report clears him from any accusation or blame. So, when he uses the word, he seems to understand it in its totality.
Has the man just not mastered a most basic of language skills, the concept of “not”, or is he puzzled by the meaning of this word also? As I say, it’s very confusing.
In any case, when I think of language skills, and the meaning of words, my mind always goes back to Miss Potesta, who was certainly a challenge to my own language skills when I first entered her class.
So, I repeat, what’s going on here? I surely wish I had Miss Potesta around to ask.
Where have you gone, Miss Potesta
Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
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(Original image from Freepik)