Over my lifetime, I have not mastered a single language, including English, my native language. I still have to go to the dictionary–these days the internet–to look up the meaning of a word, with about the same frequency as I have to go to the bathroom. At various points in my life, usually points where I felt oddly ambitious or momentarily academic–both out of character, I would admit–I tried to train my tongue to wrap around German syllables as long as a freight train or to teach my nose to stay pinched as I uttered a few phrases in French, an effort upon which the snooty Parisians surely would have turned up their pinched noses.
But one language I admit I can’t speak worth a darn is highfalutin. If you go to the dictionary–as I did–highfalutin means fancy or pompous, high-sounding or pretentious. My own definition–a dangerous effort on my part–would be to describe highfalutin as talking over people’s heads. You can find linguists who have a natural ability to speak highfalutin–I guess it’s natural, although it seems to me to be about as natural as the third face-lift. They’re in all walks of life, except maybe a barroom or a barrio.
When you hear someone speak highfalutin, the first thing that pops into your head is, “That guy is smart.” The second thing you think is, “That guy is a showoff.” The third thing you think is “I wish that guy would shut the hell up.” People with the gift for highfalutin talk are notable for using big words, blown-up sentences, and boring you to death. Often, they would lead you to believe they never did baby-talk when they were two-years old. Who knows? Maybe they didn’t.
I made a short-lived effort at learning to speak highfalutin. It was back in my college days and it was more a matter of hero worship than it was picking up a new language. I already was struggling with French and trying to translate Camus from the original, which, when you consider it, was pointless because he wrote that all things are pointless. However, at the same time I had a different professor that spoke highfalutin and I liked how the words sounded as they flowed out of his mouth like a river of syllables, even if I drowned underneath this sweeping stream of words.
So I tried my hand at speaking highfalutin. Imitation, they say, is the highest form of flattery. I studied his diction, I practiced his delivery, and I dived into his dictionary. And after a while, I got good enough at speaking highfalutin that others would say, “You know, you sound like Professor So and So.” The prize came when I had to deliver a speech to a small group of highfalutin folk and one of them asked me afterwards if the same professor had not written it for me. I smiled and said I had written it myself.
But it was a phase, as we say, and I learned the perils of speaking highfalutin when the same professor was giving a talk one day to another group of listeners. Afterwards, I went to a mentor-friend and asked him what he thought of the talk. Expecting praise for the speaker’s obvious ability to speak highfalutin, the mentor simply said, “I don’t see much benefit in saying something that nobody understands.”
That was the day I put away highfalutin talk, not only because I was not a natural at it, but also because I agreed with the guy who said it was useless to say something that nobody understood. I realized that the whole purpose of communication is to speak comprehensible words to another person who, in turn, speaks comprehensible words to us. If either or both speakers talk incomprehensible words to one another, there is no communication, just vacant stares.
A few years later I took another class that had another professor that spoke highfalutin. It was a required course. But this guy’s ability to speak highfalutin was at the fluency level, making my first professor’s efforts—although commendable–sound little more than the monosyllabic monologue of a Monday night football commentator. I’m telling you this man could open his mouth and gigantic words the size of dinosaurs and long sentences the length of a rehearsal supper would pour out like a fire hydrant opened up by mischievous miscreants.
Of course, by this point in my life, I was not impressed by dictionary mouths anymore than I was by bad-breath mouths. So I would sit quietly in the back of the classroom, my eyes stoned and my arm supporting my chin as I moved ever closer to that deep stage of sleep that usually comes at midnight, not at midday. On a good day–and there weren’t many–I tried to listen, but none of it made sense. It was verbiage, which sounds like garbage for a good reason. I got a “B” in the class. Most everybody else got an “A,” especially those in the front row who seemed to have a mystical experience with every elocution from this non-electrifying educator. I swore I would never ever talk like he did. He killed the last drop of desire I might have had to learn how to speak highfalutin.
From that day on, I made a studied effort to speak English. Preferably words with Anglo-Saxon origins, since they required usually one syllable or at most two. Like the title of that biography about Harry S. Truman, I went for plain speaking. When I spoke, I wanted the person in front of me to understand what I was saying. I had no desire to prove I could memorize a dictionary.
But I had my comeuppance. It happens. Just when I thought I had no trace of highfalutin talk left in me, much like the Texas twang that I had left behind (more or less) years earlier, I found out that highfalutin is relative. Practiced at plain speaking and positioned as a person with a limited, but adequate, vocabulary, I learned the hard way that there is always more to learn when it comes to plain talk.
The lesson came by way of a funeral service that I had been asked to lead. I had years of experience already, and at first blush it should have been a cake walk–pardon the phrase, but you know what I mean. The situation seemed ordinary when it presented itself. A man I had helped to become a member of the local church had died unexpectedly. I had not seen him in about five years. Although I did not know him well, he remembered me or someone in the family did. I was asked to lead his chapel service at a funeral home.
As I said, all of this was ordinary stuff, except, I suppose, for the man who had died. A day or so before the service, the man’s obituary appeared in the newspaper. Much to my surprise, the obituary said the man had been the owner of a number of strip clubs in the city. Often, I had seen some of the neon signs on these establishments as I drove down the heavy-trafficked highway, never realizing that the deceased was the owner of them, and never once his telling me that this was his line of work–not that I know how the topic might have come up in our conversations.
Not that I am opposed to giving everybody a proper send-off, regardless of employment or errant ways or misplaced efforts in life. After all, Jesus’ closest friends were prostitutes and tax lawyers and a Mafia member of two. As he said on many occasions, “Who am I to judge?” I agreed with him a hundred percent.
The challenge was in finding the right words to say at the chapel service for this guy who spent his life in strip clubs and making money off of strippers. First, I decided it would be good form not to mention his line of work; after all, most everybody already knew what he did and, if they were there, apparently passed no judgment. And as I gave it further thought, I felt more restricted in what I could safely say without offending or alienating or misleading. I was so high-strung by the morning of the service that I asked a friend to go with me. If nothing else, the conversation in the car ride would distract me.
My unease only increased as I got to the funeral chapel and the mourners began to arrive. I looked toward the back door and it seemed like a steady stream of young females all similarly dressed in short skirts–black and leather–wearing shoes with stiletto heels that surely added seven inches to their height–moving to the front where the casket rested. All showed cleavage and all wore dark sunshades, although there is no sunlight in a funeral home, as everyone knows, only muted lighting that is supposed to suggest some kind of mood proper to death.
One after another, these young women–attractively dressed, for sure, even if not dressed in their usual attire–walked before the man’s casket and wept and wiped tears from beneath their black sunglasses. I concluded by their emotions that he must have been a good employer. By the time the service was scheduled to start, I could see a sea of black-dressed women–and an equal number of black-suited men, loyal friends or loyal customers–seated and waiting to hear what I would say. It is difficult to describe what I saw or what I felt in my stomach.
Stoic, I suppose, or stupid, I stood and spoke something of the Scriptures, seeking to offer solace to those saddened by the man’s sudden death, stealing a glance now and then towards the crowd, all of whom seemed stiff-backed and most of whom chewed gum with serious effort as I assured them of God’s love and his mercy for all his children. I admit I didn’t feel like I was connecting–a feeling dreaded by every speaker–to know that your words are not resting or resonating with your restless spectators. Bored to death might have been the better explanation, except for the present circumstances.
That fact fast hit me in the face when I began the Lord’s Prayer and no one in the crowd joined in its recitation, although I had invited them to do so. I only could conclude they were not familiar with the Lord’s Prayer. I also was fairly certain it wasn’t framed on the wall of their dressing rooms. So, I prayed it alone. The service ended and everyone filed out. As I recall, no one stopped to say anything to me. Even the funeral director seemed sympathetic as he said goodbye to me.
But, at the least, I had done the job, awkward and weird as it was. My friend and I left the chapel and as we walked to our car in the parking lot, he said to me, a slight smile on his face, “I think maybe you spoke above their heads.” I think he was right. Not that I spoke highfalutin. I swear I did not. But my words somehow fell short or my language was a long ways from what they listened to regularly, or they just weren’t interested in what I had to say.
I have carried the experience with me for years now, regularly asking myself if I could have found better words or a better way or a better world that would have spoken to them–those over-dressed women in their mini-skirts and high-heels. And while I never wanted or tried to sound highfalutin, I wonder if my words sounded that way to them. I suspect that vocabularies are specific to people, just as languages are.
If nothing else, I have put even more effort into not sounding highfalutin since that debacle. And I have come to see that it takes little effort to speak above people’s heads. The real effort comes in knowing how they talk and finding a way to talk to them in turn with words that make sense. I wonder now if there is a glossary of terms used in strip clubs. It would have been helpful to have had and would still be a good learning tool.
— Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 