No one has a monopoly on spouting ridiculous and absurd statements.
Perhaps that's one thing upon which we can all agree.
Lately coming to mind in that regard are Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, R-Ga., and Whoopi Goldberg of ABC's "The View."
Both have succumbed to the ridiculous, making comments borne of ignorance.
Perhaps they both visit educational institutions and facilities centered around the Holocaust.
Ms. Goldberg’s comments have been discussed (and argued over) at length, some might even say ad nauseum, and need no further comment except to say that when Caryn Johnson changed her name to Whoopi Goldberg it was carefully chosen and deliberate.
She knew she was picking a Jewish name and that part of her humor routine would now contain the line "What I don’t look Jewish!"
She chose a Jewish name because it was funny. And because of Jewish audiences.
And because she knew it was all that and more.
Goldberg was not a white name. Goldberg is a Jewish name. When she changed her name, Jews were not mainstream, they were not white. Jews like Goldberg and comediennes like Johnson were part of the media but they were not part of America’s WASPY world.
Jews were outsiders. She traded one outsider stereotype for another.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene is another story. This member of congress proved, once again, that despite being correct on some important issues, she is shockingly uneducated on so many others. Being in a position of power while having large gaps in overall education is a dangerous, if not politically weaponized, combination.
If you have not yet heard, this is what Taylor-Green recently said, opining: "Not only do we have the D.C. jail, which is the D.C. Gulag, but now we have Nancy Pelosi’s gazpacho police, spying on members of Congress, spying on the legislative work that we do, spying on our staff and spying on American citizens who want to come talk to their representatives."
Did you catch it? Gazpacho.
If it were just a misspeak, it would just be funny. But it wasn’t just misspeaking.
Yes, it's funny, but also sad. And its alarming.
For the sake of humor, soups could become a theme for malaprops of this ilk.
Gazpacho. Gestapo. For anyone who has ever read the word "Gestapo" it would be difficult to confuse the two. Taylor-Greene could have made it worse. She could have said Goulash instead of Gulag or confuse Vichyssoise with Vichy, France.
One of the reasons Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 play "The Rivals" was so funny is because one of the central characters, Mrs. Malaprop, engaged in such misspeak.
They are also called acyrologia, or Dogberryism. Acyrologia derives from both the Latin and Greek and means misspoken word. Dogberry, like Mrs. Malaprop, was a fictious character in a play. His character appeared in William Shakespeare’s "Much Ado About Nothing."
Obviously, people make mistakes all the time. Some can be very funny, nevertheless they tend to typecast a person as someone who simply does not know language or does not know history — or both.
When Mike Tyson lost the world heavyweight title to Lennox Lewis he was asked what’s next? He answered: "I might fade into Bolivian."
Tony Abbott was the Australian Prime Minister from 2013-2015. He made the same mistake at least twice. His observation (and mistake!) was: "No one is the suppository of wisdom."
And later, he described someone as "a vast suppository of wisdom."
Making this even funnier, or more ridiculous, is that the person that Tony Abbott thought to have such wisdom, apologized for the prime minister’s misspeak by calling it a Miss-Marple-ism. This "suppository of wisdom" confused Mrs. Malaprop with a hero from the crime novels of Agatha Christie named Miss Marple.
Former Texas Governor, presidential candidate, and U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry employed a malaprop most often used by children.
He spoke of "lavatories of innovation and democracy."
While, we all make mistakes, some people are rightfully heald to higher standards and thus are expected to possess more knoweldge than the average person.
In the past I have written about President Biden confusing the 1967 Six Day War with the 1973 Yom Kippur War. If someone else made this mistake around the dinner table, someone would correct them and the conversation would go on. But some people --- like presidents and prime ministers and elected officials, are supposed to know better.
If they don’t — they need to be corrected.
There are many reasons we make such mistakes. One has to do with exposure to foreign languages. Unlike Europeans, few Americans have exposure to multiple other languages.
As a result, the foreign sounds blend together even when they are so different and come from very different languages. Like gazpacho which is Spanish and Gestapo which is German.
When this writer was growing up, he was fortunate to have many languages that "swirling" about him. However, this writer recalls his total shock when I discovered that "spatula" was not a Yiddish. Yet, it sounded oh so very Yiddish. At approximately the same time when my brother would prod and provoke me, my parents taught me the word "ignore."
Instead of saying ignore. I would run around saying annoy, annoy, annoy, annoy. I was correct — he was annoying me, but to my parents’ chagrin — I could not ignore him.
I expect that Marjorie Taylor-Greene and Whoopi Goldberg will be spend more time in the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.
Let us all hope so.
Micah Halpern is a political and foreign affairs commentator. He founded "The Micah Report" and hosts "Thinking Out Loud with Micah Halpern," a weekly TV program, and "My Chopp," a daily radio spot. Follow him on Twitter @MicahHalpern. Read Micah Halpern's Reports — More Here.