Maschino

🎹 Music for this post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU_zMvaX05Q.

I’ve learned a lot from my husband Charles, who, this coming week, will join me in celebrating our 40th anniversary together.

I grew up in a family of correctors. You know: the people who hear you say something wrong, and are eager to tell you so. I confess that I was conditioned to do this as well, and it’s not something I am proud of. I suppose I was led to believe that helping people learn their mistakes was charitable, so that in the future, they wouldn’t make the same mistake and make a fool of themselves.

The problem, as I learned many times from Charles, is that it is the people who do that that are the fools.

Charles was working with a group of folks recently, and a woman related a story of how she’d been down for the count in the hospital because she thought that she was having a hemorrhage in her digestive tract. She was quite worried and, after some back-and-forth with emergency room staff, talked about what she’d been eating recently. Among many things, she reported that her sister had made a delicious batch of brownies — so delicious, as it turns out, that she ate many, many of them.

The brownies, as it turned out, contained maschino cherries.

How do you feel right now?

Charles’ main point in sharing this story was that not a single person present decided to correct the woman about her pronunciation of “maraschino.” He thought that was appropriate, humane, and respectful. As it turns out, all the people were older, and they knew better.

He’s right. What would the point be in correcting the pronunciation of a word that everyone understood? If someone had corrected her, who would benefit, and how would the woman have felt?

Words are imperfect. Just like those silly exercises that I’m sure you’ve already taken on LinkedIn, where you read a paragraph of completely jumbled words and can still understand it. For most of us, if there is even a semblance of a word, we can recognize the intent. Fixing or correcting someone else using an imperfect form of a word should only be done if it matters to health or harm, and 99% of the time, this isn’t the case.

I work with engineers and could probably be described as an engineer, even given my humble degree in rhetorical theory. Many, many engineers just love to correct people. It’s not our greatest trait.

My rule is: if you can figure out what someone is saying, then leave it alone unless doing so can create harm. In this age of AI-induced homogenous perfection, I’m beginning to enjoy imperfect humanity more than ever before.

I’m going to work extra hard to live a maschino life from here on in. How about you?