Pop 89: The Subtle Enormous Difference

By Madonna Hamel

Thirty years ago, in October 1995, I began creating lists of words, arranged in two columns, with the heading: Spotting the Subtle, Enormous Difference Between. I was living in Quebec City at the time and was trying to grasp the difference between meanings of words that sound the same but have radically different meanings. For example: “voix” means “voice” and sounds a lot like  “voie” meaning “path”.

I came to realize that, a great deal of misunderstandings and arguments with friends and relations came from not defining our terms. My boyfriend and I used to put a lot of our arguments down to the fact that his first language was French and mine was English, but the truth is, even when two people speak the same language, it’s easy to assume we both mean the same thing.

Words can mean a variety of different things, depending on how the speaker was raised and taught, not to mention where they were raised - right down to the weather and the median income of the neighbourhood. And need I mention, gender, race, religion, and health?

Add to the above factors the fact that we can get lazy about the words we choose, not making the effort to be precise but depending, instead on the same old catch-all phrases, expressions and cliches for the very nuanced and personal experiences we’ve encountered in our lives. We make assumptions we are being understood, that we’re on the same page as our listeners, but the opposite is true - every person’s story is unique to them. What we do have in common is our humanity - our fallibility, our mortality and our shared desire to belong.

But back to my list.  Here are some of the first words I wanted to examine the subtle and enormous differences between: tough & strong, witnessing & seeing, correctness & awareness, reasons & excuses, control & protection, safety & confinement, labels & names, private property & personal space, courage & bravado, discussing & arguing, convincing & coercing, tolerating & patronizing…and so on and so on.

I’ve kept up the practice for over thirty years. Every time I start a new journal I keep a space on the back pages for the list. It’s like a sourdough starter for etymologists. Over the years I have tried to inject some humour into the list, including a consideration of the differences between: yams & sweet potatoes, second helpings & another meal, elites & snobs, and - inspired by my friend Ervin, who is very careful with his words - rednecks and hill people. He has an ongoing joke with a friend from Mankota that there is a distinct difference between the two, one city folk are incapable of discerning.

Joking aside, it becomes a dangerous game when governments deliberately play with words to get away with nefarious actions. When the Canadian government used the word “cede” in their treaties it was never explained to indigenous people that it was not synonymous with the word “share”. And our southern neighbours recently decided to rename their “defence department” their “war department”, a decision that makes me wonder what impression they intend to make on the rest of the world. To go from “defence” to “offence” is go from “locking one’s doors” to “locked and loaded”. To put up walls instead of build bridges.

Within the same week the president complained about being robbed of a Nobel peace prize and released a video of himself dropping excrement on his own people. I cannot imagine any leader on the planet behaving in such a way and still allowed to be in charge of running a country, unless that country is a dictatorship. That more people are not shaken to the core is beyond me. But maybe they are, and they just ain’t talking. Or maybe they choose to believe what the speaker of the house tells them - that the president is employing “satire”.

Ah yes, that’s the word I was looking for his little performance - satire. The man stands alongside the greats of the craft: Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain and Dorothy Parker. I so often confuse him with those guys. Not to mention George Orwell, and, the man most often identified with satire, Jonathan Swift. Swift suggested that the Irish solve the poverty “problem” by eating the poor.

Of course, I am trying to be satirical, but I can’t go on. My heart’s not in it. Because in times of lost souls and weak moral fibre we do not have the luxury of satire, let alone irony. It’s too clever and smarty-pants to play with words in these days of confusion and fakery, both of which are a luxury, frankly, the entire world cannot afford. Swift was, to be clear, on the side of the poor, not against them. He was trying to show the powers that be the insanity and inhumanity of treating “the poor” and not “poverty” as the problem to be solved. There is a perversity behind seeing citizens as either potential sources of profit or disposable drags on society - an attitude the Romans held before the dawn of Christianity.

This afternoon I had the honour of meeting archbishop Bolen for coffee. I was eager to tell him about my word lists, but my friend reminded me: try and listen, he is a spiritual teacher and you are a student, remember. But I nattered on and he listened kindly, reminding me of another subtle and enormous difference - the one between grace and luck. Grace is available to us all, and part of its beauty, is that it can arrive, unearned, yet always infused with an urge to be grateful. And urge that fills the receiver in a way luck cannot. Luck is random, grace is divine. And so I pray the rulers of the secular world met grace and see the hubris of their ways. Meanwhile, I will hold fast to what the archbishop reminded me of, over our coffee, “perhaps the least quoted words of Christ’s are: I have come to serve, not to be served.”