I was three whiskeys into a Wednesday when the English language tried to kill me.
It started with a text I didn’t send. I typed “if” and my phone autocorrected it to “is” and suddenly I had committed to something I was still negotiating. This is the problem. This has always been the problem. Is and if are separated by a single letter and an entire theology and my phone does not respect the difference. Nobody does. Is shows up with its whole chest. If keeps its jacket on. One of them built the church. The other one is circling the parking lot, has been circling the parking lot, will die circling the parking lot, because commitment is a vowel sound it cannot make. The sexual tension between these two words has been fueling all of literature and most of the rent I’ve paid on apartments I stayed in too long and I am not going to explain that further because if you felt it you felt it and if you didn’t I can’t help you and the fact that I just used both words in the same sentence and they’re doing completely different things should alarm someone.
Nobody is alarmed.
I went to a dinner party. I don’t know why I go to dinner parties. At this one, a man pronounced it plEthora and a woman pronounced it plethOra and for eleven seconds the room contained two separate realities and no one acknowledged it. I stood there holding a glass of something that had been described to me and realized this wasn’t a disagreement. This was a border dispute. Two nations sharing a word and refusing to share a flag. The man who says plEthora went to a college where people corrected each other. The woman who says plethOra learned it from Three Amigos. Both correct. Neither will back down. And if you listen, really listen, the pronunciation someone chooses tells you more about their childhood than any memoir. It tells you which books were in the house. Whether the television was an authority or a guest. The mouth remembers what the mind has edited and the mouth does not care about your rebrand.
I left the party early. On the way home I tried to use faux pas in a sentence and nearly drove off the road.
A sincere phonetically accurate pronunciation of faux pas sounds like someone falling down a flight of stairs in a language they don’t speak. Fawx pass. I said it out loud in the car. The car did not judge me. The car is the only safe space left for language. You can say anything in a car. You can pronounce faux pas like an American, which is what it is, in your mouth, right now, an American word wearing a beret it bought at the airport. English swallowed this phrase from French centuries ago and has been pretending to know what to do with it ever since. The whole arrangement is a man who stole a tuxedo and now has to attend the opera and he’s sweating through the shirt and smiling and the word, the word itself, means false step, which means pronouncing it correctly is a performance of not making a false step, which means the word about social failure can only be spoken by someone performing social success, which means it undermines itself every time someone gets it right and fulfills its own prophecy every time someone gets it wrong, and I am in my car yelling FAWX PASS at the windshield and the windshield is taking it.
The language is haunted. I have been saying this to people. They do not invite me to dinner parties because of this but also I keep showing up. Every word drags behind it the corpse of every previous use and the corpse is not dead, it is pretending, and when you open your mouth the corpse sits up and says something you didn’t authorize. This is why you have said “I’m fine” in a tone of voice that means “I am disintegrating from the feet up.” The words were correct. The haunting was louder. The haunting is always louder.
And now it’s later, or maybe it’s earlier, the timeline has become unreliable, and someone at a different party, or possibly the same party on a different night, is telling me about the Mandela effect, and I am nodding, and what I am actually thinking is that misremembering might be the most honest thing a mouth can do. That consensus pronunciation is a treaty nobody signed. That reality is a draft, not a publication, and enough people remembering it wrong is functionally the same as it having been different, and the Mandela effect is not a glitch, it’s a peer review that came back with edits, and the original author is furious, and the reviewers have already left the building, and the word is sitting on the page meaning two things at once and belonging to nobody.
I got home. I typed something into my phone. My phone corrected it. I corrected my phone. My phone corrected my correction. We went back and forth like this for a while, two opposing theologies trapped in a device that fits in my pocket, and eventually I gave up and sent the message and it said what it said and not what I meant and the difference between those two things is a single letter and an entire religion and the parking lot is still being circled and the church is still being built and the tuxedo does not fit and never did and I said fawx pass one more time, quietly, to no one, and no one corrected me, and it was the truest thing I’d said all night.
The Hofflebrock 