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November 25, 2001
By Denis Solomon
As I once had to tell the President of the Senate, it is the despair of the semi-literate that words do not have precise meanings.
A fellow columnist once telephoned me to ask me the difference in meaning between a culture and a civilisation. I told him that any absolute difference between the two words must be a technical difference, limited to the field of anthropology. Word meaning interacts with sentence meaning and discourse meaning, or message. Within a certain range, the contribution of a word to the message is what the speaker or writer intends, and must be judged by the reader or listener on the basis of shared expectations. This is why different people can genuinely derive different messages from the same text. It is why poetry exists. It is also why pseudo-intellectuals can use words to mean nothing at all.
My fellow-columnist, despite being a poet as well as a journalist, couldn't grasp my explanation, and saying "You obviously don't know", hung up in a huff. He later called me with another query. He had a problem with Lloyd Best's claim that the government wasn't so much irresponsible as un-responsible; he hadn't been able to find "un-responsible" in the dictionary.
Misuse of language also springs from lack of knowledge of the world. Take metaphor. Trinidadians are especially prone to snapping up metaphorical expressions and, for want of understanding of their source, misusing them. One example of this has always irritated me. A sign outside a Port of Spain insurance company refers to the firm's good "track record", and shows an athlete breasting the tape. But the expression "track record" is a metaphor drawn not from athletics but from horse racing. What the British call a "racecourse" the Americans call a "track", and a horse's track record is the record of its performance—what the British call its "form".
Sometimes the misuser doesn't even know that the phrase is a metaphor. The latest buzz word here is "watch". "That didn't happen under my watch", says the Prime Minister, obviously thinking of "watch" in the literal sense (like "under my gaze"). But the phrase is "on my watch", because it is a metaphor drawn from shipping. An officer's watch is his turn on the bridge, when he is responsible for the ship. Something that happens during that period (and not necessarily under his gaze) happens on his watch.
Technical terms that come into general use are frequently misunderstood, and consequently misused, in the Trinidad and Tobago press. An example is "beg the question". This is frequently used to mean, simply, "raise the question". "The InnCogen revelation begs the question of whether the Prime Minister knew that the other industries would not be established." Begging the question (petitio elenchi) is a term in logic that means "using as a premise in an argument something that should be the conclusion". A question-begging argument is false because it assumes the truth of what it purports to prove.
The meaning that can be unambiguously assigned to a word is often very different from its dictionary "meaning", which is a compilation of its usages. The contribution of word meaning to message is an inference from its interaction with sentence meaning and discourse meaning. This is what beats prescriptive grammarians, who rely on what they see in school grammars, which is almost always wrong.
The current political controversy provides a perfect example of the extent to which this relationship is misunderstood. The Constitution states that the President, "acting in accordance with the advice of the Prime Minister, may at any time dissolve Parliament". Senator John Spence writes that this is a contradiction, because it requires "may" to be understood as "shall". Another correspondent illustrates the same misunderstanding of "may" with an anecdote in which his primary school teacher wouldn't let him go to the bathroom until he said "may I" instead of "can I".
But the basic meaning of "may" has nothing to do with being allowed to do something. "May", along with "must", "might", "should", "shall" and "will", belongs to the system of modal auxiliaries, which indicates degrees of likelihood of the event referred to in the sentence. Only sometimes is the degree of likelihood expressed by "may" interpretable, by inference, as implying permission granted to the subject of the sentence. "It may rain tomorrow" doesn't mean "it is allowed to rain tomorrow". It means there is a possibility of it raining tomorrow.
Section 68 (1) of the Constitution is not about the powers of the President. Those are listed in Part IV, Section 74. Section 68 falls under Part III, entitled "Summoning, Prorogation and Dissolution of Parliament". That is its context, and that is what sets up the framework of mutual expectation between writer and reader. The sentence therefore indicates one of the ways in which Parliament may be dissolved. The "may" refers to the fact that dissolution by the President on the advice of the Prime Minister is one possibility. Like the possibility of rain tomorrow. It is not in notional contrast with "shall". What could it possibly mean to say that the President shall dissolve Parliament at any time?
Copyright © 2004 Denis Solomon