November 03, 2010
Dirty Spirits
During my bedtime prayers I routinely ask the Lord to put a hedge of protection around my house so that Satan and his minions might not enter in and disturb my sleep. A few weeks ago I heard Michelle Obama stumping on the campaign trail and she solicited spiritual intervention from the audience. I feel certain she meant to ask that evil, unclean spirits be kept from being around the campaign, however what she actually said was to, “Keep the spirits clean around us.”
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Gail;
-----I think only those who intimately know Michelle know for sure what she meant, if she meant anything other than simply making a statement which sounded spiritual. Her directive was sufficiently ambiguous to preclude any certainty of its meaning apart from the context of her own intention. If the premise ‘All people use linguistics with perfect accuracy’ were true, then the mere truth that she is a person would lead to the conclusion that she either meant for the spirits to be kept clean, or she meant ‘clean’ to be an adjective indicative of ‘thoroughly around us‘ - almost a slang usage, as in, “Babe Ruth could hit the ball clean out of the park.” If her intention could have been the former sense, then she either referred to keeping not-clean spirits clean or clean spirits from becoming not-clean (which is the simpler sense in ‘keep the spirits clean’,) or, since she left the vocative for the listener to supply, she could have also left the listener to supply the fact her use of ‘clean’ was actually in reference to a category of spirits, as in, “Keep the spirits of the clean category around us.” This is the more complex sense you received. And it is the more logical sense in that unclean spirits are undesirables whether or not kept clean (if they could be kept so), or since it is usually not thought that clean spirits today would ever become unclean. And all of this discussion assumes she was speaking of actual spirits rather than using the term ‘spirits’ analogously to mean the temperaments and attitudes of people, as in, ‘those with high spirits’, ‘of good spirit’, or ‘of clean spirit’.
-----But all of this is certainly superfluous, if not downright boring, since the premise ‘All people use linguistics with perfect accuracy’ is not true. Then the conclusion that she only meant those possibilities is also not true, and we are back to understanding that she could have meant just about anything. I would tend to believe she deliberately meant just about anything by the reason that her speech was political, and that is what politicians on the stump try to do - mean whatever the listener might want to hear. So what I think she truly meant (God bless her and spank me if I am wrong) was, “Gobble gobble gobble.”
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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