A malapropism by any other name

This week, my email contained three hilarious malapropisms.

In yesterday's mail, a friend's husband was updating us on his wife's status after recent surgery. He noted that the surgery was necessitated by Maurene's "Crone's disease," which immediately had me rotfl (rolling on the floor laughing).

Of course, Crohn's disease is no laughing matter, but for someone who just celebrated a 60th birthday, Crone's disease has that grotesque ring of truth. Luckily, while on vacation last year, I picked up a whole stack of greeting cards intended for my over-60 female friends that say "Crones celebrate." I will definitely be sending one of these to Maurene with a note for a full and speedy recovery.

Today, I opened a newsletter from copywriting guru John Forde. He held forth on the benefits of better communication for world peace, making the point that the same skills used to write good sales copy could be used to defuse conflicts in all kinds of situations.

I have no argument with his thesis.

What brought a smile to my face was the line, "I'll seal the deal by drawing taught those loose ends we talked about."

Ummm, Jack... The word you wanted was taut. But thanks for the lesson anyway.

The third instance was in another of John Forde's newsletters in an article called "Prospect Plundering 101" written by a guest columnist. The title made me think of piracy. The article itself was a lot less heavy-handed than its title and really addressed the issue of how to get to the emotions that underlie most purchases.

And the line that cracked me up? Judge for yourselves.

"Here's a list of neutral pass-back questions,
statements and actions to illicit the next level of
information."

Now I understand the title! (For you non-native English readers, illicit means illegal. The word he should have used was elicit, which means to draw forth.)

What is a malapropism? It's the use of an inappropriate word that has an accidental similarity to the word that should be used. If you remember the character Archie Bunker on that hilarious sitcom, All in the Family, you'll know what I'm talking about.

Many proofreading sites suggest that you read your work out loud to find errors, but that won't work for most malapropisms. The wrong words sound too much like the right ones -- that's the whole source of the problem. Spellcheckers won't find these errors either, since malapropisms are all legitimate words.

Over the years, many people have become associated with this unfortunate foot-in-mouth disease. It currently goes by the name Bushism. My advice? Always use a professional proofreading service to check your work. Otherwise, you risk having your name become the new standard bearer for malapropisms.

Less is More

Sometimes, you need to tell a customer "the whole story" as one of my favorite marketing gurus, Sean D'Souza says. But sometimes less is more.

I recently got a call from a client, Michael, asking for help dealing with a situation with one of his prospective customers -- let's call him Seiji. Things were getting out of hand. Michael sells sophisticated medical equipment. The product is quite technical and requires coordinating the settings on various pieces of apparatus. Since compressed oxygen is involved, it's important to get pressures in range and to proceed in the right order or things can get pretty explosive... literally!

Seiji had had some technical questions and Michael had tried to answer them. Several emails had gone back and forth, with each answer from Michael creating a new question in Seiji's mind. Instead of calming the waters, Michael's detailed answers seemed to be making matters worse. By the time Michael called for help, a very large sale was at serious risk!

Now understand that I'm an editor. I don't do counselling. But clearly, something about the way Michael was answering Seiji's inquiries was creating a problem. I read through the correspondence and realized that Michael needed to say less, not more!

It's the same mistake that an inexperienced, well-meaning parent often makes with very young children. The parent makes a request. The child says why. The parent explains, believing in the power of reason and logic. The child asks for further clarification. The parent explains. The child... Well, you know how it goes. In the end, the parent loses patience and yells "Because I said so!" Sometimes, it's better not to start down that road.

"Michael," I said, "he's asking you whether he's doing things correctly. He just needs to know yes or no. He doesn't need to know WHY he's right or wrong. Stop explaining! Let's make your next email as short as possible so that there's no room for him to create any more questions."

So we did. We cut Michael's draft down from 800 to 200 words. It was friendly, brief, and to the point.

It got the sale.

Ghoti?

Another day, another cautionary tale. And yes, I'm still dealing with names.

Most of my clients write to people in other countries. Today, I was editing a letter of introduction that my client David was sending to his associate, William, in the United States. In the letter, he was offering to set up a meeting between William and a man named Chaim.

Given that William is an American, I was pretty confident that he would try to pronounce the name Chaim in the same way one would pronounce the English word "chain" but with an "m" on the end. Bad choice! Chaim is actually a transliteration of a Hebrew name and in this case the transliteration needs some explanation... in fact, a whole lot of explanation.

Ch should be pronounced as a soft gutteral. It's a sound that doesn't exist in English.
a should be pronounced as "u" in the word "up."
i should be pronounced as "ee" in "wee."
m should be pronounced as "m."
There is also a "y" sound as in "yellow" between the "a" and the "i" that happens because there are two distinct vowel sounds one after the other.

So, in the end "Chaim" is pronounced more like "Hahyim."

I'm not suggesting that when faced with a similar situation that you put a whole pronunciation guide into your letter. We didn't. But I'm all for saving people from embarrassment if at all possible. In this case, we wrote:

"William, just a word of advice. Chaim is not pronounced the way it's written. I suggest you ask him how to say his name as soon as you meet. He'll set you straight."

And just for fun, did you know that "ghoti" is pronounced fish?

gh as in cough
o as in women
ti as in nation

That little gem has long been attributed to George Bernard Shaw!

By the way, my name, Rochelle, is pronounced:

R as in rose
o as in could
ch as in machine
ell as in spell
e is silent