Here’s the situation: a white professor with all the best intentions sees a black male student of his acquaintance walking across campus with a group of young black males and says, “Hey, you’ve got the whole gang with you.”The black male is offended by the stereotypical assumption that he is a member of a gang, although it is probably fair to say that the professor meant no offense and may, indeed, not have had the black street gang association in his consciousness at the moment the remark was made. It is possible, in fact, that the professor is a fan of the “Capital Gang” on CNN where middle-aged white men in business suits (and a token woman) spar, riposte and slice at one another defending their main-line partisan street corners with all the passion of teenagers hyped on testosterone and too much time on their hands.TIME OUT for a language lesson. Native speakers of a language can determine three things about a sentence: whether it is grammatical (makes sense); whether it is synonymous in meaning with another sentence; and whether or not it is ambiguous.”Visiting relatives can be a nuisance” and “A rabbi married my sister” are classic examples of ambiguity. And so is “Well, I see you are part of a gang.”We call a word ambiguous when it allows two different meanings at the same time: although if I call Jack a toad, no native speaker of English will accept my explanation that I meant to say he was an amphibious creature with a deep voice. If I keep a toad named Jack in a terrarium in my office, I might explain that I didn’t intend to refer to the Jack you and I know as a fine fellow. I was just talking about my pet (who I just happen to have named after Jack)! Whether you (or Jack) will buy my explanation is another question. According to Freud, ambiguous or loaded words come out uncensored from our subconscious, and our errors reveal more than we intend. For example, a newspaper once referred to a retired general as “a battle scared veteran”; the general protested and it printed a retraction, this time calling him “a bottle scarred veteran.”Were the meanings that the general was a frightened alcoholic implicit in the original story and the unfortunate retraction? Undeniably. Denying that a meaning exists-when anyone able to speak English knows better-is silly. Were the errors intentional? Only a certified telepath could say for sure. Neither party can ever truly know the intent of the other. That’s what “ambiguous” means. We have a social formula for such awkward moments of misunderstanding, if both parties will act in good faith: the professor can say, “No offense,” and the student would reply, “None taken.” Why is it so hard to cut one another this kind of slack? Trust, perhaps, begins with honesty (not denial) that can be cemented with forgiveness (but not more accusation). No matter whether you are the one stereotyped as a gang member or as “a discriminator,” or whether you are the one who overreacts to a linguistic ambiguity, you do have a right to be taken seriously, as the professor insists, but the right must be earned by first acknowledging the ambiguity. Begin with the tolerance of ambiguity instead of accusation or denial, and see if that doesn’t work better for everyone.

Virginia Allen

Graduate English examiner

English