On Twitter, columnist Shannon Proudfoot asks: What’s the most mundane but thunderous epiphany you ever had? Something so ridiculously dull or elementary that still bowled you over when you figured it out? Some of the answers had to do with misunderstandings about language, including the meaning of guerilla warfare, AM radio stations, and money laundering. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Thunderous Epiphanies”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. The funniest Twitter thread I’ve read in ages was started by Shannon Proudfoot. She’s a writer in Ottawa. And she asked the world, what’s the most mundane but thunderous epiphany you’ve ever had? Something so ridiculously dull or elementary that still bowled you over when you figured it out. Oh, boy. And there were a lot of really useful things, like the fact that on a lot of dashboards of cars, it has the little picture of the gas tank, and there’s a little arrow showing you which side the opening is on. See, I knew you would know this already. And did you know that a lot of elevators ding once if they’re going up and twice if they’re going down? Oh, I love it. I didn’t believe it, but I ran out to the elevator in my and sure enough, that elevator did that.
Now, I’m bringing this up because there are also a lot of things that involve language. Yeah, people confess that when they were young and heard about guerrilla warfare, they thought it was actually big hairy beasts. And somebody wrote, my sister was about 22 when she realized that the AM radio stations work afternoon. Oh. Oh. She thought AM was about morning time only, right? Yeah. Yeah. And somebody else wrote, I thought money laundering was physically washing the money and hanging it out to dry to get the cocaine off of it. I thought that too.
I’m not going to tell you what things I would add to that. No, now you have to. You brought it up. Oh, do I? Oh. How about if I tell you that one later in the show? Okay. Because it’s really embarrassing.
So misunderstandings about language is something we all go through. It’s a safe space, Martha. Okay. You’ll be fine. I’ll share it later. I’ll only laugh a little bit. Okay. And if you have some linguistic misunderstandings that got corrected kind of late in life when you should have known better, boy, do we want to hear about them. Please share 877-929-9673 or email us words@waywordradio.org or tell us on Twitter @wayword.
