Discourse of Malapropisms
In his 1775 play, The Rivals, Sheridan invented the character, Mrs. Malaprop, who was an absolute genius in using words in such a way that it was absolutely clear that she had no idea of what they meant, as when she once described seeing “an allegory on the banks of the Nile.” Her name has been immortalized in the word malapropism, a term which has no equivalent in the local language, but maybe I should coin one. It would, after all, not be my first time.
This issue has a particularly good example of malapropism in the article on oligarchy, which the author seems to think means rule of the best. Actually, as we all should know, oligarchy means rule of the few. Plato used quite another word for rule of the best or noblest, aristocracy. Philosophers in ancient Greece understood oligarchy as a debased or degenerated form of aristocracy, something I really doubt our learned author wants for Ukraine.
Everybody commits malapropisms occasionally. To do so is a far from deadly sin. It becomes a mortal danger only when it reaches the point that people seem to have such a garbled understanding of the words they use that they simply fail to understand the concepts and ideas they are discussing. I call this a discourse of malapropisms, and one encounters it over and over in post-Soviet discourse, especially in discussing economics and politics. The examples that could be cited are legion: civil society, market economy, democracy, etc. The reason is that from roughly 1928 the USSR was rigorously segregated from the intellectual discourse going on in the outside world. Instead of economics, the Soviet Union had something called political economy, a somewhat different kettle of fish, and in place of political science it had something called scientific Communism, an entirely different kettle of fish. After independence, when the former adepts of the latter discipline were all simply renamed political scientists, some were so disoriented that they seriously suggested creating something altogether different under the name of scientific nationalism, which would “incorporate the Ukrainian national bias” into its research. This had less to do with nationalism, a phenomenon with which the savants in question had at best a very passing acquaintance, as with retaining a use for their skills in manipulating ideological constructs. Fortunately, their proposal was rejected, but I find it hard to believe that many of them who are now teaching something called political science have much understanding of what my colleagues in the West understand by that discipline. And until the post-Soviet discourse of malapropisms is replaced by one where everyone has a common understanding of the content of the words they are using, this country will never be able to integrate itself into the First World, for those in a position to do so will simply not understand what they have to do.
