Now I Must Tell You...

Now I must tell you all this.

One day a scientist popped out of his lab. I don't know if he was a real scientist, he didn't have a wheelchair or a funny accent or a bow tie. But he said he was a scientist and he had a test tube with some stuff in, which was corroborating evidence. He said:

-Look at this! It's plastic!

Newspaper reporters were there and they wrote down his words. Others were there too.

One of the people who heard the scientist was Spencer, an expert in ambiguity. He groaned.

-If only you had come to me first. If only you had consulted me. No linguistic good will come of this, you mark my carefully chosen words.

-How so?

The latter phrase was spoken by the scientist, Chaucer, who had a laconic way about him lest surplus words should keep him from his experiments.

Spencer, the ambiguity expert, was exasperated.

-Don't you see what you've done? Well, don't you? You said that your tube contained a substance that was plastic, a substance that can be moulded into shape and will retain that new shape. Plastic is an adjective, it's been in use since the dawn of all dawns. Plasticine is plastic, putty is plastic, clay is plastic, they can all be moulded into shapes. Sometimes, once you've got the shape you want, you can stop the substance being plastic. By firing a clay pot, for instance. Now the pot is fired it can no longer be moulded into something else. Fired clay is no longer plastic.

The scientist, Chaucer, couldn't understand why Spencer was so keen to explain to him a word he had known since the age of nine and had just used perfectly correctly. His new substance was indeed plastic. It could be moulded into shape. What's more, by a chemical equivalent of firing a pot, it could be made un-plastic again, so it would retain its new shape. The scientist waited for an explanation. Spencer, mister disambiguity as he was known to his friends, didn't keep him waiting.

-You said that the substance was plastic, that it had the property of plasticity. What the reporters heard was, you have invented a substance called 'plastic'. Reporters are not very bright. They have a threadbare vocabulary. They've never heard the word 'plastic' before. The word is as new to them as the substance. You said, 'It's plastic.' That statement will, as you will easily see, support the correct interpretation. But when processed by the mind of a ninny, it will forever mean that your artificial polymer will be called 'plastic'. They think that's its name.

Chaucer the scientist hung his head in shame, saying:

-You mean I've perpetrated a new 'elastic' on the world? A new 'native'? Oh, woe is me.

Spencer was quick to press home his advantage.

-Exactly. A substance that has elasticity has the property of returning to its original shape when deformed. Exactly the opposite of plasticity. But the statement 'this is elastic' supports the correct interpretation, and also the ninny interpretation, that the object referred to is named 'elastic'. Similarly, when Victorian explorers told of encounters with the natives of Africa, it left a whole generation believing that the Natives were a tribe of black people who lived in Africa.

But Chaucer saw a loophole.

-That's only for the ninnies, surely? And there aren't that many ninnies, are there? I've hardly met any at all. In my work and in my social life I see only bright, educated people. Are there more than five or six ninnies in the world? Wouldn't they be in a home or something?

Then Spencer explained to Chaucer that as an educated person, he worked amongst educated people, socialised with educated people, and then extrapolated his own private situation to society at large. The reality was that the ninnies outnumbered the bright by hundreds to one.

Albert Feinstein, roving Jew, looked on. He had a plastic bucket which, oddly enough, was fairly elastic. If he squidged it, it returned to its bucket shape. However, in spite of being elastic he doubted whether it would hold knickers up. He wondered what the Natives, in their huts in Africa, would make of it all.