Now, a Word About Verbal Blunders

I think about all the lousy, stupid, insensitive things I’ve ever said, and, even though I’m a fairly nice guy, this takes a while.

I cringe when I think about meeting a girl at a college dance.

“Weird,” I said. “The way the light is, it looks like you have just one arm.”

An instant later, I realized she did.

“I’m sorry,” I stammered.

Stories like that might be small consolation to Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, but at least his humiliating blunder will be put to good use.

“It’ll make a great example in class,” said Rolland Petrello, a Moorpark College professor who teaches speech and helps coach the school’s top-ranked debate team.

Petrello’s students hear about all sorts of unfortunate public utterances.

There was John F. Kennedy’s famous declaration to thousands of bemused Germans: “Ich bin ein Berliner!”

Translation: “I am a jelly doughnut!”

Then there was Chevrolet’s insistence on marketing its Nova in Spanish-speaking countries--where “No va” was construed as: “It doesn’t go.”

And the famous “Got milk?” translation in Mexico, where the now-tired question read: “Are you lactating?”

But no corporation or modern politician has publicly used a racist term so freighted with vileness that we have been trained to refer to it only with a pallid circumlocution: “The N-word.”

Bustamante--who has championed minority causes throughout his career--said it out loud last week.

Addressing a dinner meeting of African American labor leaders, he named several historic black organizations--and stumbled, mortally, on the word, ‘Negro.’

So there you have it: profuse and immediate apologies, profound embarrassment and questions about judgment and sensitivity not just from Bustamante’s political opponents, but also from a few of his friends. Last weekend, he was so exhausted from the incident that he begged off from a banquet of Latino business leaders in Santa Barbara, where he was to be the keynote speaker.

In the end, his flub won’t have dimmed the light of racial justice one bit.

But it sends a chill through all who are scared that they’ll blurt out something lousy, stupid and insensitive while speaking to a Scout troop on “How to Tie Amazing Knots” or a service club on “Bicycling Through Iowa” or on weightier matters to a professional organization, doctoral committee, congressional inquest or federal grand jury.

In other words, it sends a chill through everyone who is scared of public speaking, which is to say, nearly everyone.

For, if the merciless editor within can fail an accomplished speaker like Bustamante, what about all the rest of us? What about all the people who list public speaking as their top fear--beyond air travel, job loss, disembowelment by ravenous hyenas? If a politician comfortable in the spotlight can open his mouth to have the N-word trip out, what hope is there for the quavery-voiced lectern-clutchers who are terrified to be up there in the first place?

I put these questions to Chuck Heinrichs, a retired engineer who has been dealing with them since he joined Toastmasters 35 years ago.

“I once was scared to say my name out loud,” he said. “Now I can.”

In fact, Heinrichs heads the speaking group’s Ventura County speaker’s bureau, dispatching members to talk on a wide range of topics before any organization that asks. Tonight, Heinrichs will speak to local Libertarians about “How to Think on Your Feet”--a talk that has taken a couple of days of painstaking preparation.

“The closer I get to delivering it,” he said, “the more I hope I won’t screw up.”

He’s never made a mistake of Bustamante-esque proportion or heard of any other Toastmaster doing so. But these are folks who read aloud to become comfortable with the sound of their own voices, who pore over videotapes of their efforts, who compete in speech tournaments, who study gestures, intonation, props, phrasing. Some of the county’s many Toastmaster clubs even require members to show up, eager to speak, in the cruel hour just past dawn.

Even with all that, the anxiety doesn’t disappear, Heinrichs said.

Perhaps Bustamante would appreciate a Toastmasters’ maxim in the nerve-racking moments before his next address:

“It doesn’t matter if you’ve got the butterflies, as long as they’re flying in formation.”

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Steve Chawkins can be reached at steve.chawkins@latimes.com and 653-7561.