It is amazing what you can do with words! Spoonerisms, puns, palindromes, they all can bring much enjoyment. Then there are anagrams (a word or phrase formed by rearranging the letters of another, in case you have forgotten!).
by Tim Middleton
Did you know an anagram of “dormitory” is “dirty room”? Anyone with a child who boards might think the two are one and the same! There are other very clever ones: the anagram of “election results” is amazingly lies — let’s recount”. Finally there is the wonderful anagram for “mother-in-law” (though your mother-in-law might not consider it to be ‘wonderful’) — the anagram of that is “woman Hitler”!
The Washington Post some time ago ran an annual competition among its readers inviting them to take any word from the dictionary, then add, subtract or change one letter and give a new definition for the word. Thus “giraffiti” took the meaning: “vandalism spray-painted very, very high”; “hipatitis” would mean “terminal coolness” and “sarchasm” came to mean “the gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it”. Clever! The same paper also ran a competition for its readers to give alternate meanings for common words. Some of these included: “lymph” meaning “to walk with a lisp”; “coffee” meaning “the person upon whom one coughs”; “flabbergasted” meaning “appalled over how much weight you have gained” and “abdicate” meaning “to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach”. Brilliant, amusing nonsense!
While the above comments are all done in fun, it does seem that some people have invented new meanings for the word “education” — some of the new meanings are really not much more, however, than clever, amusing nonsense. Some might argue that people have taken the word education, added the letter “n” and turned it into “Ned-ucation” (whereby “ned” is a slang word for “Non-Educated Delinquent”) — that might appear to be what we are producing. But have you realised that an anagram of education is “cautioned”? People who try to change education need to be cautioned about change for change’s sake. Similarly, another anagram of education is auctioned and other folk seem to think that the value of education can be auctioned off to the highest bidder.
It is a sobering thought that most of today’s parents never had to study Latin — it probably dates those of us who did. But education does, after all, come from two Latin words, “ex” meaning “out” and “duce” meaning “lead” — education, therefore, is literally a matter of “leading out”. Nowadays people often think of it more as “stuffing in” and devise a curriculum to do so but that is utterly the wrong approach. Education is literally “leading out”.
Education is about leading people out of confusion into clarity, out of darkness into light, out of ignorance into knowledge, out of an enclosure into space. Teachers must lead pupils out by example, exhortation, explanation and experiment (note again how Es remain so much more important than As). Education should be the next great Exodus, leading our young people out of the wilderness into a promised land, full of “milk and honey” — a journey with many battles, giants, hardships and obstacles, for sure, but with freedom and hope in sight. Leading will lead to learning.
American politics used to be about believing in principles and standing for them; nowadays it is about finding what people like and promising them that, to get or stay in power. Similarly, education used to be about helping youngsters discover truth, knowledge, wisdom for themselves; now, people think it is about being fun, easy, profitable. Thus, “The public art galleries” to many people are no more than the anagram “Large picture halls, I bet” and “the earthquakes” is described as its anagram, simply “that queer shake”. As a result, we are in danger of downplaying the importance and significance of education, of down-sizing it. Education is not a matter of being clever with words.
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It may be worrying to us that someone has spent time working out all these anagrams or even that some readers have now checked to see if the anagrams really are correct! It will be far more worrying, however, if we do not realise that the education we bring to our children must lead them out, not leave them out in the cold. Or am I just a victim of “sarchasm”?
Tim Middleton is the executive director of the Association of Trust Schools and author of the book on “failure” called Failing to Win.
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website: www.atschisz.co.zw
