the butterfly likes me

There are so many times that I am correcting papers when I begin to think: “is this right or wrong?” Usually it comes toward the last quarter of a large stack of essays but it inevitably comes. Usually it comes as the result of fatigue and I recognize its signal and put the stack down and rest. Sometimes though it comes from the strange twists of language that second language learners create. Sometimes it is truly a mistake – something other than what is being said is what is meant. Sometimes it comes from a lack of idioms, clichés, phrases that we, who have learned, drop easily into our communication. Often after rest, I can recognize the intention and make a proper suggestion, we, teachers, call correction. But then there are times when the twisted language has an elegance that I just crave to have work within their context. Even more rarely, there is a turn of words that I think should be exchanged for the “correct” English. Elucidation:

When a Spanish speaker says, “the butterfly likes me,” we can be pretty certain that it is a translation that is too literal. We would most likely suggest: I like butterflies. Now, in today’s understanding of the Universe, quantum physics, new comprehension of consciousness and thought, it might well be that indeed the butterfly likes the writer of that expression. Wouldn’t it be interesting if that were actually what the writers have intended and I have been correcting them away from their intention? It reminds me of the Ray Bradbury story, “The Man in the Rorschach Shirt,” in which a very famous psychologist gets hearing aids and new glasses and suddenly sees too well and hears perfectly and runs amuck with self-doubt. Ah probably not. But what if…?

I personally like a pun I heard long ago that works off the clichéd expression: to kill two birds with one stone. The pun is: to feed two birds with one scone. Consider these two phrases. Both semantically convey the same essential idea of to accomplish several things with the same effort – multitasking, as the new vernacular would express it. However, the two expressions do not convey the same underlying implications, do they? If you are an animal ethicist, you get the difference immediately. So, then what happens when I consciously and intentionally use the pun in place of the cliché? Don’t I feed more birds with the same scone?

Now the pun above did not come from a second language student but here is another twist of language that does.

For years I have had students early in their English language learning use “love” in place of “law” when attempting to express the relationships of in-laws. They would say, “sister-in-love,” or “father-in-love,” and of course, when they would say, “mother-in-love,” we would make some comments about how few folks love their mothers-in-law. Thus, we continue to reinforce a stereotype of the intervening, overbearing, meddlesome, mother of a spouse. A person whom we can hardly tolerate, who makes our lives a misery and comes between us in our spousal relationships. I have reconsidered this “mistake” much has I did the bird and the scone and I have a new take on it too. Please follow along a bit more.

I first met my wife’s mother in 1991, when a Fulbright Scholarship took us to Nicaragua for six months and we lived with her for that time. She’d never met me before then. Our wedding was very simple and civil. Yet there she was waiting at the airport with literal and metaphorical open arms. She loved me on sight (I not so fast.) She treated me as the family I obviously had become. So, later in our lives, when she needed to come live with us, I had learned a bit of how love gets spread and held open my arms. She has been a part of our Miami home for almost ten years. There is no way that I can call her “mother-in-law” with all the attending connotations that it produces and its profound inaccuracy of describing the reality of our feelings and the true nature of our relationship. She is my mother-in-love, as dear to me as my birth mother, and she is as caring for me as my birth mother. She is bound within my heart and soul in a manner than no law could forge.

Now, as my family expands, we have come to use the love in place of the law for all the relationships: daughter-in-love, father-in-love, son-in-love, brothers and sisters-in-love. It trips off our tongues easily now and surely it draws attention. But the attention it draws is similar to the bird and the scone. They are intentional changes in words that hopefully call attention to changes in meanings and more accurately express the meanings we intend and perhaps the readers and listeners will reconsider their own language uses.

Of course, those of you out there who are sticklers for… might just now be mumbling under breaths: all well and good and perhaps even a bit interesting but what is he going to tell the students? Is he really going to teach them the wrong expression? Well dear reader, what I do is tell them the above story and let them choose and if they mistakenly or intentionally say, “…-in-love,” I say, “isn’t in love wonderful!”