At ease

In Forever Liesl: A Memoir of the Sound of Music, the autobiography, of Charmian Carr (the singer and actress who played the elder Von Trapp girl in the film version of the classic film), Carr spends a paragraph explaining the origins of her rather unusual first name. It's Shakespearean, she points out, and it was her dad who chose it; he'd been struck by a similarly named sister of a friend, and loved the sound of the name: shar-mee-an. But while that sound was clear enough to him, it certainly wasn't always obvious to those who met, or ran into, Carr over the course of her career. "Everyone always mispronounced it," she explained, "calling me Char-mane, as if I was some kind of dish at a Chinese restaurant."

Well. Here at Halfstep, we've got nothing against either permutation. But we do want to point out that even mispronunciations can have their charm. On our recent five-day spring break trip to Ohio, for instance, I was repeatedly impressed by Cleo's vocabulary (in a game of Mad Libs, I asked her for two body parts, and was quickly rewarded with womb and anus) and syntax. Every now and then, however, she can still show traces of an earlier era, when longish words were simply insurmountable. For instance, she wondered at one point what we might be eating for brea-fakst. Breafakst? Charmian? I smiled, briefly, but of course I knew what she meant, and replied in kind. Because words are, among other things, simple tools of communication. Their backgrounds may be richly allusive, but their immediate functions are more mundane. And so, even when they fail to resemble the precise dish we're expecting, they can fill us nonetheless.