Witoubou Newmai
"In an era where language has lost all stable referents, it is difficult to find a word that describes the tenor of our times,” writes Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Vice Chancellor of Ashoka University, also an influential columnist, in OPEN magazine.
In fact, the “tenor of our times” seems to have lost.
It is anyone’s guess as to what will happen to a society when rhetorical narratives from various quarters continue to send pheromones into it. Such a trend will definitely spawn a blend of multifarious characters of a given society, sometimes extremely confusing. In such a scenario, the collective ambivalent feelings will overwhelm the society.
Deliberating on this theme, one is reminded of the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott who says,”…Where shall I turn, divided to the vein.”
Are all these trends attributed to the ‘evil’ side of human nature as illustrated by Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Anthony Harris, and others?
In “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” Stevenson acquaints us with the duality of human nature - good and evil- that makes up a person’s “soul.” According to him, “these basic elements cannot be separated because man is defined by the conflict within his inner nature and how he deals with this duality.”
Harris in his book, “I’m OK-You’re OK,” also tells us that, “man has a multiple nature….always it has been seen as a conflict: the conflict between good and evil, the lower nature and the higher nature, the inner man and the outer man.”
Irrespective of whether one does subscribe to these view or not, definitely a society will continue to display assorted “split” characters in terms of approaches to confronting issues and challenges as long as it is not able to discern its own ‘evil’ characters or nature.
Suffice it to say, discourses will seldom work in such a situation. But if left unaddressed, one will witness that priorities and loyalties of that society will be misplaced. When the situation reaches to such a degree, the society is in a vulnerable condition for acquiring another character similar to that of “Spoonerism in action.”
Cambridge Dictionary explains Spoonerism as “a mistake made when speaking in which the first sounds of two words are exchanged with each other to produce a not intended and usually funny meaning.” But for a practical society after acquiring the character its affairs will be Spoonerism in action rather than mere “speaking mistake.”
Some instances of Spoonerism as cited in the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia are: "The Lord is a shoving leopard” instead of saying "The Lord is a loving shepherd”; or “Belly jeans” instead of “Jelly beans”; or “Fighting a liar” instead of “Lighting a fire.”
One can exercise a guess-work on the implications or consequences of such characters in action.
