Talking straight
By MARINA MAHATHIR
MUSINGS
Sunday, 27 Jun 2021
We seem to have a ‘new dictionary’ where the words have one meaning for some and another for others.
IN the alternate universe that some of our leaders inhabit, a new dictionary is being invented. It takes words that are normally understood by most people to mean something and gives them new meanings indeed. The most famous – some might say “infamous” – is of course the word ‘soon’.
In most cases, for example, when mothers demand their children pick up their mess, “soon” usually means “now!” For most adults however, time expands a little and “soon” might include maybe within the next week or so, as in “I’ll call you for coffee soon”. However, when the word is sandwiched between “as” and “as possible” and spoken by someone with as much authority as a mother, it is usually taken as meaning “right this minute”.
Of course, you could fudge the “as possible” bit by saying that the possibilities are endless. Yes, tomorrow is a possibility but so is next year. But as any child knows, negotiating terminology with a clearly irritated mother is inviting trouble, the sort of trouble that causes a grudge to be carried for years on end, even possibly a lifetime. The question that the child has to juggle in his or her mind is simple: is it worth it?
Then there’s the definition of “lockdown”. Normal people think of this term to mean “stay home”, don’t anybody move at all. In the 16th century when people realised that the reason the plague decimated so much of Europe was because people kept moving from place to place, they basically locked down whole cities until it was safe to open up again. Even earlier, in the 6th century, the Prophet Muhamad had said “When you hear that [a plague] is in a land, do not go to it and if it occurs in a land that you are already in, then do not leave it, fleeing from it.” The Prophet knew instinctively about quarantines and lockdowns not because he was a public health specialist but because he was a wise man with plenty of common sense.
If only we followed his example. Instead we have played with the definition of lockdown by allowing loopholes the size of the SMART tunnel. Worse we allowed some people to blithely walk through those loopholes because they are supposedly famous, important and kosher.
In the old dictionary, public health measures applied to all. That’s why it’s not called for-some-of-the-public health measures. But since we’re now using the new backdoor lexicon, the meaning of public is now elastic. Everyone is “the public” except for some. There’s the very few who because of fame, and not necessarily any utility, are excluded from any of the rules that apply to the hoi polloi. Then on the other end of the spectrum, there’s the groups that are very utilitarian but have to abide by even more rules than the “public”: the migrant workers and refugees who clean our toilets and streets, plough our fields, make our gloves and build our buildings. These we cramp into centres where the social distance is perhaps 10cm rather than 100cm, not much different from the many prisoners in our jails. The virus is however not showing any respect for these distinctions.
Of course the other phrases that have now gotten different meanings are the ones like “we’re doing really badly”, which now means “we’re doing really well”. We are “the worst in the world” translates as “we’re not”. Where once people panicked at news that there were 200 cases reported in a day, now we think that 2000 per day means we’re on the road to recovery. The word “cluster” used to send chills of fear through our hearts but now we learn that actually most cases aren’t related to clusters at all, they’re just sporadically all over the place. Nothing to fear because we’re really doing well.
Even that well-used phrase “herd immunity” which used to mean that about 80% of us would have been vaccinated is now made of rubber. We’re well on target (another rubbery word) apparently because we’ve vaccinated 10% of our people. Or at least the 10% who have registered to be vaccinated. In Kelantan, only a quarter of the people who should be vaccinated have registered and out of that, only a quarter of those have had a needle poked in their arms. What was that target again?
But I must say, of all the alternative characterisations of words that are currently in use now, the one that I take the most offense to is the one that says that discrimination is not discrimination. Specifically, if a law says that a Malaysian woman cannot enjoy the same rights as a Malaysian man, then she is not being discriminated against because that’s what the law says. And everyone knows that laws, despite being made by men with certain neanderthal tendencies, are always “neutral”.
It would be nice to think that “neutral” means “impartial” but when we look at the impact of some laws, we know that they’re not. If women cannot confer their citizenship to their children born abroad, we’re basically exiling them. Men on the other hand can marry who they want, have children wherever they want and all those progeny can claim Malaysian citizenship. If I were to be unkind, I would think that the law was made to punish women who had the gall to marry foreigners instead of our own males, privileged solely by their gender. Some Malaysian woman should marry Bill Gates to test this theory out. Might we change the law because he might bring his billions here?
Maybe a side-effect of this pandemic is the inability to think straight anymore. Or it has made people who never had the ability become even worse. As a simple example, witness the deafening silence from the Education Minister on the multiple complaints of sexual harassment in schools. Presumably he’s a parent too, yet has nothing to say about making our schools safe for our children. Nor has the Multimedia and Communications Minister had anything to say about online cyberbullying. Does silence mean they agree with what is happening, do not believe it or simply have no idea what to say?
In this new normal dictionary, when nobody in government takes a stand on anything, who knows what to make of all this wordlessness?
Marina Mahathir longs for the time when people talked straight, when up was not down and good was not bad.
