Much Noisy Ado About Symbolism of Language

Before the holidays, I reported a complaint from Avalee Nicholls of Coronado that she had read the phrase “sounding brass and tinkling symbols” in George Will’s column in the San Diego Union.

Nicholls said she called the paper to point out that “symbols” should have been “cymbals,” and an editor said, “That’s George Will who wrote that and I don’t presume to correct George Will.”

A prudent position indeed. As I said, “Far be it from me, also, to correct George Will, but I would have thought that cymbals clanged and bells tinkled. “

Then I began worrying about it. Will is perhaps the most erudite of political columnists. He is not careless. His columns are illuminated with exquisitely apposite quotations. One suspects that he has an employee who does nothing but look them up, as Gary Trudeau suggested in a series of Doonesbury strips.

I thought it unlikely that Will would unthinkingly use the homophone symbols for cymbals . I suspected that it was a pun. But I didn’t have the text. I phoned my friend Neil Morgan, editor of the San Diego Tribune, to see if he could ask his library to find the column. He said it might be difficult, with only the words “sounding brass” and “tinkling symbols” to find in the data base. He gave me Will’s Washington telephone number.

To my surprise, his secretary put me through to him. I asked him about using “tinkling symbols,” and spelled it for him. “I might have done it,” he said. “I’m dumb enough.”

Of course we know Will isn’t dumb. His style and his learning are galvanizing. I told him I had guessed that he had used symbols as a pun. He said he doubted it. “I don’t like puns.”

Then I began receiving letters pointing out that Will was quoting the Bible. You can’t get on any firmer ground than the Bible. Dorothy M. Heitmiller and several other readers noted that the quote was from the King James translation of 1 Corinthians 13:1: “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.”

Heitmiller further pointed out that in the Revised Standard edition, the instruments had been changed to “a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal,” and in the New King James version “sounding brass or a clanging cymbal.”

My friend Chuck Chappell wrote that he just happened to be looking through the International Bible Dictionary and “unexpectedly found support for your position,” to wit: “In Corinthians 13.1 the apostle (Paul) deduces a comparison from sounding brass and ‘tinkling cymbals’; perhaps the latter words had been better rendered ‘clanging’ or ‘clattering cymbals’ since such is the nature of the instrument.”

Oddly, my Scofield reference Bible (authorized King James version, revised), reads: “Although I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding bronze, or a tinkling cymbal.”

This may seem like much ado about nothing (Shakespeare), but I felt obliged to confess that I did not recognize the biblical verse, and to reinforce my doubt that Will used symbols without a literary reason.

What prompted this research was a discussion here of homophones (words that sound alike but have different spellings, origins and meanings) and their cousins. I should note that Avalee Nicholls, in reporting the editor’s refusal to second-guess George Will’s symbols , concluded thus: “His editor didn’t dessert him in his thyme of knead.”

Fred A. Glienna says I forget to mention contranyms (his word?)--alike words that have opposite meanings: “The farmer dusted his crops while his wife dusted the furniture. . . . Cleave to my side, and don’t cleave my heart.”

Walter Goldschmidt, UCLA professor emeritus, anthropology, also remarks on the contranym, mentioning cleave and oversight , a word whose opposite meanings first dawned on him when he heard about a Congressional Committee on Oversight.

An English professor called cleave to his attention, he says, observing that “when the Bible enjoins us to cleave unto our wives it is not giving us license to go at them with a cleaver.”

OK, Will. If you can do it, I can do it: Gen. 2:24: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall be one flesh.”