David McElroy

I’ve been talking a lot recently with a woman who’s from Europe. She lives in this country, so her English is excellent. Still, since English isn’t her native language, there are times when there are tiny gaps in communication between us — enough that it’s prompted me to think about how people use words to communicate.

There are times when I might use a particular word or phrase and she will interpret it as something entirely different from what I intended to convey. It’s not that she’s misunderstanding the words themselves. It’s simply that English words can mean so many different things in different contexts.

I’ve noticed from talking to her that some things we say — that we understand to mean certain things — can mean entirely different things if you interpret the words literally and don’t have decades of experience in learning the cultural context.

Even simple things can be confusing. She was going through something potentially difficult this past week, so I sent her an email to encourage her and say that I’d be “thinking about you” as she went through the issue. She had to ask — just to be sure — whether “thinking about you” means something different from “thinking of you.”

The whole experience has given me a new appreciation for how difficult English is to learn for someone who doesn’t grow up speaking it.

As I’ve pondered how language works between us — how it sometimes facilitates communication and sometimes impedes it — I’ve thought about why miscommunication of all kinds between humans is so common and why it seems to be so hard to improve.

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During the 1964 presidential campaign, an actor named Ronald Reagan got seriously involved in politics for the first time by endorsing Republican Barry Goldwater. Nobody knew then that Reagan would be elected himself just 16 years later.

The ’64 campaign was a polarizing one, because Goldwater and his supporters were the hard-core, rabid conservatives. They beat back moderate elements of the GOP to win the nomination. Goldwater talked about liberty and cutting the size of government. He even suggested making Social Security voluntary. His campaign slogan was, “In your heart, you know he’s right.” His Democratic opponent, President Lyndon Johnson, painted Goldwater as an extremist, mocking him with, “In your guts, you know he’s nuts.” Johnson also hit Goldwater with one of the earliest television attack ads.

The election was a disaster for Goldwater. He carried only six states. But his campaign was the beginning of a growing conservative movement that would expand and organize itself into something capable of completely taking over the Republican Party and propelling Reagan to the White House in 1980. The Goldwater campaign was the first part of the long process of switching the Solid South from Democrat to Republican. So much of what became the so-called Reagan Revolution never could have happened if the Goldwater campaign hadn’t happened in 1964.

I’ve been thinking about Goldwater and Reagan because I’m trying to project what effect Ron Paul is eventually going to have on the Republican Party or on U.S. politics. Only the most stubborn Paul supporter could possibly still claim that he has any chance of winning the nomination this year, much less being elected president, but it’s clear he’s energized a group of rabid, hard-core libertarians. At the polls, he’s going to lose badly. But will his influence come far down the road, as was the case for Goldwater?

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It’s been 17 years since cartoonist Gary Larson ended his comic strip, “The Far Side,” but it’s still one of the funniest comics ever drawn, as far as I’m concerned. We’re taking a look this week at a few of the many laughs from a man with a bizarrely wonderful sense of twisted humor.

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