Slop Wins the Day

by Byron McAllister

Some misunderstandings become so firmly embedded in our ideas that they lose their misunderstanding status and become understandings. Sloppy ones, yes, but well-nigh universal.

Here's a wonderfully widespread usage that is completely at variance with its original meaning. In science, a “quantum leap” is the smallest jump in energy level that can be made by a…, well, do you want to spend the day talking science, or do you want to get on with it? Here's the point: when the term “quantum leap” made its way into the vocabulary of the literati, nobody in that one of “The Two Cultures” had the slightest idea what “quantum” meant, so they only paid attention to the “leap” part. They took the phrase “a quantum leap” to mean a leap that is simply enormous . I'm not going to argue that they are idiots, or any of that appropriate stuff, because in ordinary conversation, they have won the day, and “quantum leap” has come to mean “very big leap.” Except, of course, among physicists; but they're in the science side of “The Two Cultures,” and won't be reading this.

Don't think science is the only thing that's misunderstood by people on the literary side of the Two Cultures line. Literate people don't even understand each other. Robert Frost wrote a poem called “Mending Wall.” The poem is written as if said by a narrator, who, because he raises apples, may well be suspected of reflecting Frost himself—up to a point, anyhow. Each spring, said narrator collaborates with his neighbor in repairing a stone wall that separates their two properties, and as they do so, the neighbor says, repeatedly, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Frost, as the narrator, makes it perfectly clear that in spite of the collaboration, he doesn't agree with the formulation, which, he contends, only applies when something mobile, like cows, are being walled in or out; in the poem neither neighbor has cows. And yet, how many times have you heard somebody say, “As Robert Frost points out, good fences make good neighbors”? It happens all the time, and is really a calumny on Robert Frost. But it has been repeated so often that there's no use fighting it. Now and forever, Robert Frost will be cited as the authority when someone wants to claim that good fences make good neighbors. It's another misunderstanding that has become an understanding, albeit a sloppy one.

While we were working on physics, we passed up plenty of other terms that have been misunderstood so frequently that the sloppy understanding has driven the original meaning out of common usage. Words like “energy,” for example: what can “This place has bad energy” possibly mean if the word is taken with its true meaning rather than as a way of attempting to use a term of known respectability to describe a possibly unaccountable disagreeable feeling. The same can be said of “vibrations,” as in “good vibes,” or “bad vibes,” or of “dimension,” as in “their music takes to a whole new dimension,” or “plane,” as in “in this way we can ascend to a higher plane.”

Don't think the way of faith has escaped from the same sort of confusion. Everybody knows what isn't so about how Adam and Eve happened to get kicked out of the Garden of Eden. It was for eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, sometimes symbolized by an apple, right? Well, the book of Genesis tells about it, and if you'll look in chapter 3 you get the whole story, including verses 22, 23 and 24, where the primal couple gets kicked out, all right. But it doesn't say they were being punished. Rather, it says that their eating “the apple” caused God to worry about what they might do next. Namely, next they might eat the fruit of quite another tree, the tree of life, after which they could live forever. To prevent it, the primal couple was ejected. Permanently. Read it and see. But here, also, what began as a misunderstanding has become a sloppy understanding, and people are going to go on claiming, no matter what, that the eviction was punishment for eating whatever fruit Adam and Eve ate—“apples,” if you like.

(By the way, do you think believing in evolution could avoid the problem with apples and such? Maybe, depending on which evolutionist you talk to. But Darwinians have their own troubles with ideas that are sufficiently misunderstood that in common usage they look quite different than they do among professionals. The most radical, perhaps, is that Darwin said man ascended from monkeys. He didn't, but, since it's a complicated matter, do you think the misconception will ever be stamped out? Me either.)