The Magic Dance of Words: You Can Be Deceived with the Truth

One day an old woman goes to a fishmonger. “Son, is the fish fresh?” she asks. The fishmonger replies, “It’s alive, auntie, alive!” (in Turkish, “canlı” also means lively, fresh). At that the old woman answers, “Son, that’s not what I’m asking. I’m alive too, but I’m not fresh.” As we see, the two people load different meanings onto two different words. The fishmonger answers the woman’s idea of “fresh” with “alive”. He chooses the word “alive” to stress freshness, but the old woman, measuring it against herself, looks at the matter through a different window.

People, just as in this joke, use the same words, but everyone may load the same word with a different meaning.

When a thought forms, it moves to the part of the brain that holds the meanings of words. Then the thought and its matching meaning go to the place in the brain where words are stored. There the meaning is linked to the right word. Words express thoughts. The best way for a person to understand the words someone else speaks and writes is to listen to them carefully and try to grasp what the other person means. (John R. Schafer)

When we hear a word, our mind first suggests its primary meaning, and we interpret the word within that frame. Sometimes, however, the situation is very different from the first meaning that comes to mind. For example, the municipality of Amsterdam lowered the urban speed limit from 50 to 30, but what it really means is: “I want to reduce car use in the city but I can’t ban it. Now the speed limit is 30. You already ride a bike at around 30. So leave your cars and cycle.”

In a sketch from Güldür Güldür (between minutes 10 and 15), a student with bad grades tries to win his teacher’s sympathy to get a better mark. He says, “Sir, my mother has been battling a terrible illness for a year, and my father hasn’t been home for a month.” The teacher who hears this probably thinks, “Poor thing, his mother probably has cancer, his father walked out on them, the children have been left destitute.” Later another teacher comes along, hears the story and says, “Don’t believe him, his mother has an umbilical hernia and his father is a merchant navy captain; once he leaves, he doesn’t come back for two months,” exposing the lie, or the manipulation.

In an episode of the cartoon series Rafadan Tayfa (between minutes 6 and 9), a group of men at work say to the noisy children, “Kids, why don’t you play something quiet, like marbles (misket)?” The children then put “Misket”, a folk dance tune from Ankara, on the radio, and the old men intervene again: “We told you to play marbles, you know, the game with little balls.”

In another Güldür Güldür sketch (between minutes 36 and 43), Ali Sunal holds a lying contest. One audience member says, “I produce electricity,” but what he actually means is that he works at a thermal power plant. Another says, “I started my career as an office boy and I am still an office boy.”

Everyone who hears this may accept it as true. But the speaker has quietly loaded the words with meanings of his own and explains: “I started my career as an office boy. Now I have a small company but no employees. So every morning I mop and sweep the office before I start work.”

He is in fact the boss of his own business, but by presenting one of his tasks as if it were his profession, he manages to mislead his listeners.

In the series Gelsin Hayat Bildiği Gibi (from minute 2:30 onwards), a man who is in the mafia starts dating a woman who is a nurse. When she asks what he does, he replies, “I have a cleaning company,” but what is going through his mind at that moment is “killing people, getting rid of the people he has killed, burying them” and so on. The woman thinks she is talking to someone who cleans homes or offices, but the reality is very different.

In an episode of the series Alsancak, one of the characters was carrying out an operation while saying, “I’m on holiday.”

In another episode of Gelsin Hayat Bildiği Gibi (between minutes 51 and 52), when a police officer says “izindeyim” (I’m on leave), the chief inspector replies, “Right, you’re on the trail (izinde), on the suspect’s trail; no lie there.” (In Turkish, “izin” means leave and “iz” means trail, so the same sentence can mean both.)

Don’t think such things happen only in series or sketches. In everyday life we often encounter similar situations, even if we don’t notice.

Once, for instance, when I called my father, he said he was “doing the grill” (ızgara yapmak). I thought he was having a barbecue. In fact he was doing “ızgara” in the field, one of the tasks that prepare the soil for sowing. There was no attempt to mislead here, but it matters a great deal for understanding the other person.

I had a friend whose YDS (foreign language exam) score was 82.5, but he told everyone it was “doksan altı”. Why? Because “doksan altı” means ninety-six, but “doksanın altı” means below ninety, and 82.5 is below ninety.

When the police asked a man with an arrest warrant against him for his ID, he replied, “I’m a soldier,” and tried not to hand it over. When his identity came out after the police grew suspicious, he said in his interrogation, “I said I’m a soldier because every Turk is born a soldier.”

The main reason we see similar examples even in scripts is that they have a psychological background.

At breakfast my aunt suddenly asked her son, a university student, “Are you drinking alcohol?” My nephew replied, “No, of course not, Mum, I’m not drinking.” My aunt was pleased, but I knew my nephew drank because I had seen it in his Instagram stories.

When we were alone, I asked him, “Why do you lie to your mother?” My nephew said, “I’m not lying, uncle. My mother didn’t ask me ‘Do you drink?’; she asked ‘Are you drinking?’, in the present continuous. Since I wasn’t drinking at that moment, I said no, of course not. I was drinking tea then.”

Or let’s look at Ahmet Davutoğlu. Years ago, when the Russian plane was shot down, he said, “I personally gave the order.” That day everyone, Buket Aydın included, thought Ahmet Davutoğlu had given the order at that very moment. Years later Ahmet Davutoğlu says, “The order I gave was a general order. I gave the order ‘Shoot down planes that violate the rules of engagement.’ It is not possible for them to call me about an airspace violation unfolding almost instantly, for me to approve it, and for a fighter jet to take off as a result and shoot down another plane.” Yes, this explanation is reasonable and logical, but if you stand up and say “I personally gave the order”, nobody thinks “there is a prime minister behind every order”; they think he gave the order “shoot down the Russian plane” directly.

The person in front of you may load the same word with a different meaning and mislead you, or cause you to misunderstand…