‘How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg?’ Abraham Lincoln

8

May 8, 2013 by kate ahearne

Part One

I first posed this question to a group of students learning English as a second language – a sort-of-serious frivolity for them to take home and think about – some poor classmate being designated to speak on the question to the class tomorrow.

I was hoping for at least some dawning insight that I could help them to explore – about what language is, what it’s for, how it works, and how we don’t always use language to tell the truth about our world; about how, in fact, we often use this beautifully honed instrument of truth, to tell lies.

Maybe it was always going to be far too complex to be put into good English in the Pre-Intermediate class, but well worth the struggle, I thought – the actual thinking not beyond any of us?

In everyday life, my students, in conversation with native speakers of English, would almost always find themselves punching well above their weight, although usually managing to understand the important bits and to be understood. It mightn’t have been elegant, but elegance wasn’t what really mattered, except to some extent, to the examiners.

The students wanted to learn English to do business mostly, or to help them to move forward towards something else – dreaming of a pilot’s licence, or permission to study overseas, or some shadowy future when their people might be free, and their English might prove useful in all sorts of other ways.

The first time I tried Abraham’s question on a class, I had judged it was time that we began thinking in our new second language, and that we might enjoy thinking and talking about more interesting and important things than, ‘Can you tell me the way to the station?‘ Or, ‘Would you like fries with that?‘ (Or, more true-to-life, ‘D’ya want fries with that?’)

I was hoping for a miracle, as it turned out. The class already had plenty of experience with preparing little talks on particular proverbs and quotations that I would allocate at the end of each day as a ‘starter’ for the next day’s class. Sometimes there was enthusiastic discussion in very ordinary English.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that ‘How many legs…’ was a real stinker.

Later, I tried it on one or two friends and relations, and eventually on a bunch of teachers ‘orienting’ for a stretch of teaching in Yemen. We had been asked to share something that we routinely did in class that might be a bit different from the norm. So I explained my proverbs and quotations, and wrote the ‘doggy’ question on the board.

It wasn’t any of the teachers, though, who ‘got’ it, but the administrative assistant, a very classy girl on her way to bigger and better things. The teachers had agreed, without much fuss, that the correct answer was ‘five‘. The admin assistant thought ‘four’.

More recently, one Sunday, I conducted a survey of 28 people, asking each of them, ‘How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg?’ Exactly 25% of the respondents ‘got’ it. (In other words, 7 people.)

Well, no matter how clever we are, we all do know that a dog has four legs, unless he/she has been unfortunate enough to lose one in a nasty accident.

(Thanks for the image to http://twinkietinydog.blogspot.com.au/2010/06/aint-nothing-wrong-with-three-legged.html)

So, yes, there are a few three-legged dogs, maybe even some two or one-legged dogs, even rarer and more unfortunate. To play out the fantasy – perhaps even a very select number of no-legged dogs – chasing cars; strolling along mountain roads in Afghanistan; wrong place, wrong time, but fortunately a dog-loving medic passing by. The dog’s life is saved, but the legs are gone.

It might have happened this way. As every competent liar knows – if you can imagine it, it could be true.

But there are no five-legged dogs, although there have been two-headed calves, well-documented. But this is a cul-de-sac, and it can’t take us where we need to go, unless we’re discussing genetics, or pollutants in the grass. (Or trying to escape scrutiny of the actual issue.)

So how could we be so easily led astray about legs, after all our years of observing dogs, and practising our native tongue? Most of us have been made to doubt something we have always known by the simple expedient of a lie perpetrated by someone calling something by a name that we usually apply to something else.

We use language principally to name things. Obviously, nouns are the names of things –  ‘leg‘, ‘tail’, ‘gullibility’ and so on. But we also name actions and states of being with verbs, like ‘run‘, ‘jump‘, ‘believe’. And we name the types of action with adverbs like ‘fast‘, ‘high’, ‘mindlessly’, and so on.

I name the owner of my red pen with the possessive pronoun, ‘my’; its colour with the adjective, ‘red’; its location with the help of a preposition, as in ‘on the table’. I name the particular table with the word ‘the’, so that we will not be confused about tables in another room, or on the moon.

I also use all the other avenues of grammar, and I employ bits of whatever might be the patois of the group I wish to communicate with, in order to shape my communication and point it where I want it to go. ‘Hey, Bro. Them illegals should go right back where they come from. Yeah? Let’s bash ’em.’ Or, ‘This woman is a blasphemer. She must die.’

So, when I deliberately pin the name ‘leg’ on a tail, I’m manipulating you – I‘m telling you a lie, and, if I’m simply repeating what someone else has told me, believing without question, refusing to use my brain, and repeating with all the intonation and nuance of a parrot, I’m also lying to myself.

For instance, it is common for Australians to refer to genuine refugees and asylum-seekers as ‘illegals’, when they are not illegal at all. On the contrary, according to international law to which we are signatory, people who are persecuted in their home country are legally entitled to come to ours by whatever means they can, and to seek asylum. We have been using the word ‘illegal’ to describe asylum seekers for many years now, with horrible consequences for people so much less fortunate than ourselves.

In the same way, the ‘blasphemer’ is not a blasphemer at all – just someone who doesn’t believe as some other people think they should. In Pakistan, in 2011, both the Governor of Punjab, Salmaan Taseer and the Minister for Minority Affairs, Shabaz Bhatti, were assassinated for their opposition to the Pakistani blasphemy laws and their support of a Christian woman, Asia Bibi, sentenced to death for blasphemy. Salmaan Taseer’s assassin, Mumtaz Qadir became a hero.

On 11 September, 2012, the anniversary of the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers, 4 Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, were killed in Benghazi when their Consulate was stormed by a mob who seem to have been angered by a ‘blasphemous’ film that they believed had been made by an American. And we all remember the fatwa issued in 1989 against the author, Salman Rushdie, who was also accused of blasphemy.

(Thanks for the image to stormdestro at http://www.worth1000.com/contests/3823/doggie)

This is the sort of thing that can happen when we call the tail a leg. ‘How many legs does a dog have, if you call the tail a leg?

’‘Four. Calling the tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.’ Abraham Lincoln

Part Two

(I found this pic on http://www.independentaustralia.net/2013/politics/our-samizdat-years/  However, it was created by Tony Yegles, @NoFibs  and came originally from http://australiansforhonestpolitics.wordpress.com/)

So with an election coming up in September, and the media so clearly hostile (with few exceptions) to the Labor-led minority government, how can the concept of the five-legged dog help us to make sense of it all?

Here are some tails that we could take a look at, among many others:

• Backflip

• Broken Promises

• Black Hole

• Died of Shame

• Class War

• Children Overboard

• Weapons of Mass Destruction

• Criminal/AWU Slush Fund

• Drunken Sailor

So, for practical reasons, let’s take a good look at just one of these possibilities.

The Tail(s) of the Drunken Sailor

I found this on Farming Ahead, but it was quite widely reported in much the same, or exactly the same way.

‘Earlier today Steven Ciobo, the Liberal National MP for the Gold-Coast based seat of Moncrieff, likened the Prime Minister to “an alcoholic”.

‘”Julia Gillard is like an alcoholic,” he told Sky News. “Every single day she’ll come up with another set of excuses to justify poor behaviour and what’s taken place the previous day.”

‘Mr Abbott, who is currently on the ‘Pollie Pedal’ charity bike ride, said he would not use such “colourful language” instead finding his own phrase: “I think everyone knows that this is a Government which has been spending like a drunken sailor.”’

Eh? He wouldn’t use such ‘colourful language’? ‘Alcoholic’ then, is ‘colourful’ while ‘drunken sailor’ is what? – Measured? Factual? Fair and Reasonable?

And that funny little phrase, ‘distanced himself’… How ‘distant’ is a ‘drunken sailor’ from an ‘alcoholic’?

‘Excuse me, is that bar-stool next to you taken?’

Why didn’t this journalist notice something odd here? Why didn’t other journalists notice anything peculiar? Why was it left to the Sober Sailors to express anger and disgust? (Although you will notice that the Sober Sailors are not angry about this kind of invective being used against our elected government – they’re worried about their own image, and nothing else.)

This is by Ian McPhedran in The Australian:

‘Royal Australian Navy sick of Tony Abbott’s use of phrase ‘drunken sailors’, 1 May, 2013.

‘SOBER sailors have finally had enough of Opposition Leader Tony Abbott’s repeated use of the insulting phrase “spending like drunken sailors”.

‘Royal Australian Navy staff from Admirals in the corridors of power in Canberra to seamen on mess decks around the nation are sick and tired of Mr Abbott repeatedly comparing Labor’s fiscal policy to a “drunken sailor”.

‘”It is not reflective of where the Navy is today,” one source said.’

So here we have a lovely little microcosm that demonstrates, with stunning clarity, the shenanigans we’re up against. Three ‘tails’, by my count.

1. ‘like an alcoholic’ –

• Stumbling around?

• Resorting to her drug of choice every time someone denigrates, demeans and lies about her?

• Doesn’t give a bugger about how big her bum looks in that suit?

• Hopeless in lycra?

• Might not be able to remember every little tiny thing that happened yesterday, er, nearly two decades ago? (Or maybe her memory is perfectly fine, but others are having a little problem with theirs? Sorry, Horrie – couldn’t resist that!)

• Spending like Kevin Rudd’s government did to stimulate our economy and keep us out of the Global Financial Crisis?

• Taking out a mortgage to buy us all a future?

• Often late for work? Or sometimes just doesn’t even bother to turn up?

A picture is worth a thousand words:

(Thanks to Alex Ellinghausen of Fairfax Media for this photo, and to Nifty_26 for drawing our attention to it.  http://www.independentaustralia.net/2013/politics/how-bad-is-the-gillard-government-really/#comment-140851)

2. ‘drunken sailor’

• Stumbling around?

• Resorting to her drug of choice every time someone denigrates, demeans and lies about her?

• Doesn’t give a bugger about how big her bum looks in that suit?

• Hopeless in lycra?

• Might not be able to remember every little tiny thing that happened yesterday, er, nearly two decades ago? (Or maybe her memory is perfectly fine, but others are having a little problem with theirs? Sorry, Horrie – couldn’t resist that!)

• Spending like Kevin Rudd’s government did to stimulate our economy and keep us out of the Global Financial Crisis?

• Taking out a mortgage to buy us all a future?

• Often late for work? Or sometimes just doesn’t even bother to turn up?

3. ‘distanced himself’

• ‘Excuse me, is that bar-stool next to you taken?’

• How far can you throw an alcoholic?

• No further than you can throw a drunken sailor, unless you have help, and/or unless your eye-witnesses are a little bit thickie, or reading the newspapers, or watching the tellie, or listening to the radio, and just not thinking for themselves. Or willfully or legally blind and, hey, maybe even drawing the Disability Payment.

I seem to be detecting 3 tails on this unfortunate dog, and they all seem to be calling themselves legs. Back to the drawing board:

(Thanks for this image to http://www.ehow.com/how_4913365_draw-pin-tail-donkey.htm)

Is that a tail? Is that a donkey? Who’s a donkey? What happened to the dog?