Old habits, based in truth, die hard
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- May 24, 2020
- 897
It’s one of those expressions that’s always confused me.
Head over heels.
As in, “He’s head over heels in love with her.”
I understand the sentiment and the reality of the power behind it. Nothing is more disorienting, more debilitating, more paralyzing than the out-of-body feeling you get when it’s happening to you.
It’s the backbone of all great art, whether we’re talking Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan or Rick and Ilsa. The Taj Mahal was built in response to it. Poets and playwrights, songwriters and novelists, composers and creators of all that has lasted have bowed to it.
But you’d think somewhere along the line someone that gifted, that perceptive, that tuned in to what it means to be a human being overwhelmed by love, would have thought carefully about the words and said something to this effect:
“Um, sorry folks, but it doesn’t make any sense.”
Think about it.
Aren’t we all, in the course of most of our everyday lives, almost always existing with our heads over our heels?
Isn’t it the most ordinary of all positions?
Shouldn’t the expression be inverted into something along the lines of “heels over head?” Isn’t that more accurate?
I know what you’re probably thinking.
That I have way too much time on my hands.
But this is the way I’ve always been. Language, I was raised to believe, is a tool and as such ought to be calibrated and fine-tuned to its utmost precision.
Think of it as a sharpened scalpel, poised to make incisions so exact and so perfect that others will only be able to lean back and think to themselves, “Well, so much for what I had to say.”
That is the kind of household in which I was raised.
Faithful readers may recall both of my parents were college professors and that there were books in every room in our house.
Not slick coffee-table tomes or a collection of ribald jokes hanging from a hook in the bathroom.
No.
I mean books that had been read and reread, loved and shared, dog-eared with favorite passages underlined, notes penned in the margins, books that breathed life into our lives, even as they were handed down again and again.
It wasn’t my destiny to be a father, so I won’t pretend to be a parent, but I can faithfully report the very same books Mom and Dad used to read to us at bedtime are some of the ones my sister and my brother read to their children all those years later.
And that brings us back to language and its proper usage.
My mother, in particular, was a stickler for it.
“How are you doing with your homework?” she might ask any of us as the clock inched toward “Ed Sullivan” or “Laugh-In.”
“I’m done,” I might say, looking up from the kitchen table, knowing in an instant I’d screwed up.
“Michael,” she would say, wiping her hands on a dish towel, a scowl furrowing her brow. “Cakes are ‘done.’ People are ‘finished.’ Do you understand the difference?”
Of course I did.
I knew it, she knew it, anyone who’d ever been in our house knew it. Language was a tool, and if you didn’t understand how to use it properly, well, let’s just say you were better off just shutting up.
Over the years I’ve made my fair share of mistakes, and I always try to own up to them. Because a lot of my work appears in print, it’s impossible to deny their existence. So I live and learn.
This honest approach, however, has led to some rather uncomfortable social collisions, one of which I’ll detail now.
A couple of years after I’d moved to the American South, I found myself back home, and it was a welcome tonic, just being around my friends again, telling stories and sharing memories, exactly the kind of return I’d hoped to experience.
Soon enough, though, the novelty of my reappearance in that comfort zone wore off, and I was just one of the guys again.
The conversation turned toward a golf outing they were planning, some kind of fundraiser, and with my journalism experience and legendary way with words, they were eager for my take.
“We’re thinking of calling it ‘The First Annual Drive for Show, Putt for Dough.’ What do you think?”
I took a sip and put down my cup.
“You can’t call it that,” I said. “There’s no such thing as ‘first annual.’ By definition an event has to be at least two years old before the word ‘annual’ is appropriate.”
There was silence in the barn. Even the Allman Brothers Band took a break as the needle lifted off “Whipping Post.”
“I forgot,” said one of my friends, looking around at the rest of those gathered in the summer evening’s gloaming. “You too?”
Another guy smiled and said, “No, I get it. It’s the same thing he said when we got into that whole thing about a ‘new record’ being impossible. Remember that?”
Suddenly the music was back playing again and the laughs were contagious and I felt back home once more. Because it’s true: I had — years before — gone on and on about the linguistic laziness of writers who used that phrase without realizing its impossibility.
“A record is a record until it is broken,” I’d said. “Right?”
Nods all around.
“When that occurs,” I asked, prompting the guys with a what-happens-next hand gesture.
“It’s not a new record,” said one guy. “It’s the now record.”
I felt like a proud father watching his son graduate from college.
And don’t get me started on how a lot of people think the word “commencement” means an ending to something. I can’t face it.