The High Society

Three Heteronyms I Have Known 

In all due modesty, I consider myself to be the bard of SIOP.  Since most SIOP members communicate with each other using symbols, numbers, and Greek letters, it is not really that big of a deal.  It is sort of like being the valedictorian of a learning disabled class.  Nevertheless, I am flattered to bestow this title upon myself.  This column chronicles some linguistic travails I had to overcome to attain the status I currently possess.  These particular hardships involve heteronyms.  A heteronym is a word that has more than one meaning.  The multiple-meaning words are spelled the same way, but a particular meaning is indicated by its distinctive pronunciation.  For example, a "bow" is used to shoot an arrow, while a "bow" is a part of a ship.  There is a special set of heteronyms that have identical pronunciations as well as spellings.  Three of these are the basis of this column.  Each heteronym was encountered in my life, each produced a most confused response on my part, and each story is absolutely true.  Here then, are three stories in chronological order as taught to me by the school of hard knocks.

1.     The year was 1966.  I was a sophomore in my undergraduate school, Gettysburg College.  As a freshman I elected to major in chemistry.  After a brutal freshman year, I should have switched majors.  But being a moron, I thought I could do better after having gotten over a case of the "freshman jitters."  Wrong.  By mid-term I was failing three classes: organic chemistry, physics, and calculus.  Being a small school, it seemed just about everyone knew everyone else's business.  Students that I had never met before would pass me on the sidewalk and say, "Hey Muchinsky, I hear you're pulling down three F's.  Way to go, Einstein."  I felt ugly, incompetent, and rejected, and couldn't hide in the anonymity of a large campus.  I was totally self-absorbed in my abject misery, and ruminated about it continuously.  During Fall semester break, I drove 300 miles back to my home in Connecticut.  Facing my parents wasn't easy, but at least no one else knew of my academic plight.  I had scheduled an appointment with our family dentist to get my teeth cleaned.  I went to his office, sat back in the dental chair, opened wide, and was lost in my own academic thoughts.  The dentist held a dental pick and mirror in his hand, looked in my mouth, and then said something that made the blood rush from my head.  He said, "You've got calculus, and it's bad."  Absolutely dumbfounded, I sputtered, "How did you know?"  I envisioned one of my parents must have phoned the dentist to give him the low-down on my lousy grades in college.  I couldn't escape, not even 300 miles away.  The dentist said, "I can tell by your teeth."  I stammered, "You can tell by my teeth that I'm having trouble with calculus?"  He said, "I can tell by looking at them, but I can also detect it from the x-ray."  This was beyond comprehension to me, that an x-ray of my teeth would reveal I didn't know how to differentiate and integrate.  Not only was I flunking out of school, but my own teeth were revealing my shame.  At some point the spell was broken as the dentist said he would start to scrape the calculus off my teeth.  Then, and only then, did I realize there must be another meaning to the word "calculus."  Calculus also means tartar, and having a mouthful of tartar was the least of my problems.  One hour later my calculus was gone, but not my despair over failing it.

2.     The year was 1970, and I was working on my Ph.D. at Purdue.  My aunt and uncle in Florida invited me down to spend a week with them over semester break.  While it was a long drive from Indiana to Florida, they advised me not to get suckered by an old trick gasoline stations in Georgia were playing on unsuspecting out-of-state motorists.  This is back in the days when "gas stations" were called "service stations," and on-site mechanics would make car repairs.  The trick was while stopping for gas, a service station attendant would fabricate something wrong with your car, and would subject you to a totally unnecessary and expensive repair.  Forearmed with this knowledge, off I headed from the freezing blah of West Lafayette, Indiana to the siren call of Sarasota, Florida.  Everything was going fine until my old car suddenly started to surge forward or slow down, even though I kept constant foot pressure on the accelerator.  As luck would have it, this malfunction occurred while I was driving through Georgia.  I pulled off the highway and headed for the nearest service station.  An attendant emerged from the station who looked like "Cooter" from the old television show, "The Dukes of Hazzard."  I fully realized I'm about to become a human chicken -- plucked, stuffed, cooked, and devoured.  The attendant lifts up the hood of my car and asks me to start the engine.  Sure enough, the engine vacillated between roaring and idling without me touching the gas pedal.  The attendant then says to me, "I think I see what's wrong.  It's your governor."  I knew I was about to be ripped off, but I felt at the very least I was owed a semi-plausible explanation for my car's problem.  I said, "What does my governor have to do with this?"  I'm supposed to believe the Chief Executive Office of the State of Connecticut is responsible for my car problem in Georgia?  The attendant says, "I see you got Connecticut plates on your car.  Does Connecticut have mandatory annual state inspections for cars?"  Now I'm beginning to see the connection.  I said, "No, we don't have to get our cars inspected in Connecticut."  He replied, "Well, if you did, you probably would have caught the problem by now."  Let me get this straight, I said to myself.  The governor of the State of Connecticut would have had to sign into law making annual automobile inspections mandatory.  Had the governor done so, the inspection would have revealed my car would soon have an engine problem.  I gave the attendant credit for laying the problem on the rightful doorstep: the failure of my state government to protect one of its citizens.  The attendant then said, "I've got a governor for this make and model of car.  I'll have you on your way in a jiffy."  I nodded my head, half in bewilderment and half in fear, not knowing if this guy was some freak who kept a closet full of spare politicians in his back room.  Moments later he emerged with a small box containing an engine part.  About an hour later my engine was purring like a kitten.  The attendant couldn't have been more attentive, pleasant, and helpful.  The total repair bill was less than $50, and I was soon resuming my trip to Sarasota.  I not only got my car fixed, but I also learned a "governor" is a regulator that maintains a steady speed in a machine; in this case, the flow of gasoline into the engine.  It is no wonder that Presidents Bush, Clinton, and Reagan knew how to make things run smoothly in the White House.  They were all former governors.

3.     It was 1985, give or take a few years.  I was on the faculty of Iowa State University.  It was standard graduate school policy that a candidate's doctoral committee consist of four members internal to the candidate's department, plus one external member.  The responsibility of the external member was to ensure that everything was run on the up-and-up: conformance to graduate school policies, no cronyism, and a sense of fair play in the evaluation of the candidate.  When it came time to evaluate the candidate's dissertation, about all any external member could do was either to look for nit-picky grammatical mistakes, or ask very broad "big picture" questions (e.g., "How will your research alter the course of humanity?").  The research was usually so technical the external member often got lost soon after reading the table of contents.

I was serving as the external member for a Ph.D. candidate in diary science.  The candidate was a student whose native language was not English.  I spotted 1-2 very minor grammatical errors per page.  I began to make a list of them, as this was going to be my contribution to critiquing the candidate's dissertation, which was on reproductive diseases in the bovine family of animals.  Then came the mother of all linguistic mistakes I have ever read.  The student wrote: "A sterile policeman was inserted into the vagina of a cow."  The first time I read it I laughed so hard I experienced a small uncontrollable call of nature in my pants.  The line did not lose any of its humor the next 9 times I read it.  Then my mind began to wander.  Was this study approved by the Human Subjects Use Committee (or the Animal Subjects Use Committee, for that matter)?  How did the policeman feel about this assignment?  Did he receive any additional compensation for performing such an act of duty?  Was this cow suspected of wrong-doing, thus necessitating not only the involvement, but the insertion, of a law enforcement officer?  How much of the policeman was inserted?  All of him?  Not having been raised in farm country, I questioned the anatomical proportions of cows.  I concluded this must have been one big cow.  Why was it necessary for the student to inform the committee the policeman could not father offspring?  Stating so seemed to be an invasion of his privacy.  And what is the purpose of selecting a policeman who was sterile?  Was it to prevent the possible conception of a half-human, half-bovine super action hero - Moo Man?  If the object of the research was to study the cow, why report the policeman in question had been the recipient of a vasectomy?  I know sometimes you can get so close to your writing that you fail to detect obvious errors, but this one seemed over the top.  However, I remained mystified why the policeman had to be sterile.  So I eventually looked up the word "policeman" in a dictionary on the off-chance we were not dealing with a member of the law enforcement community.  It turns out a policeman is also "an instrument (typically a flat piece of rubber on a glass rod) for removing solids from a vessel."  I now have far greater appreciation for the oft-heard line, "Why is it you can never find a policeman when you need one?"

As you can see, my journey to bardhood was not seamless.  In fact, there was a previous career-defining incident that did not involve a heteronym, synonym, homonym, or antonym.  It was just a plain old dirty trick, literary style.  It was 1962, and it occurred in my 10^th grade English class.  Our English teacher (Mrs. Meltzer) would call on each student to read aloud a passage written by some famous writer, and then have us explain in our own words what it meant.  I long believed Mrs. Meltzer didn't like me, and the passage she selected for me to read confirmed my suspicion.  I can no longer remember the exact passage or who wrote it, but it ended with a word I had never seen or heard before.  The word was "brazier."  I subsequently learned a brazier is a canister or container.  It is pronounced bray-zee-er.  I was merrily reading aloud when I came to this last word in the passage.  I paused, not knowing how to pronounce it.  The pause seemed like an eternity, and I knew I had to say something.  What came next is one of those things you do in life that you know is wrong, but for some unfathomable reason, you do it anyway.  I went ahead and pronounced it "brassiere."  The class roared, Mrs. Meltzer smirked, and I could have dug a hole and crawled into it.  I think it took all of about 20 minutes for each of the 1,500 students in my high school to hear of the story.  I was taunted unmercifully on the bus ride home.  The next morning I told my mother I must have developed a malady during the night, because I didn't feel well enough to go to school.  I think the strange illness kept me home for about a week.  In truth, when I was 15 I had as much practical experience with braziers and I did with brassieres.  Experience (or the lack thereof) can be such an unforgiving teacher.  But just look at me now.  The bard of SIOP has paid his dues with the blood of the innocent (and stupid). 

* Any connection between the author of The High Society and the author of Psychology Applied To Work is strictly intentional.