I can't imagine the pain you must be going through

One of the clichés we frequently offer to grieving people, in our seemingly hopeless attempt to offer some comfort, is 'I can't imagine what it must be like for you.' This expression is supposed to offer consolation, but apart from the offence it might cause by being a cliché, it could – for a thoughtful listener – provoke additional offence because of its logical absurdity.

Take a minute to think about it. If you utter these words – 'I can't imagine what you must be going through' – to someone who is grieving, then what you are saying, from a strictly logical viewpoint, is that you have no empathy at all for their situation. Yet this is the total opposite of the message you intend to convey. 'Empathy', according to oxforddictionaries.com, means 'the ability to understand and share the feelings of another'. Most of us would agree that empathy is a desirable human trait and that if we are going to understand and share the feelings of another, although we may never have been in their predicament, we will need to use our imaginations. We may not have had a relative who died tragically, but most of us have friends or family members whom we value dearly, and we can indeed imagine how devastated we would feel if they were to die suddenly. Unless we have a pathological deficit of empathy, we don't have to actually undergo the loss of a loved one to feel, if only to a small but nonetheless affecting degree, the distress of someone who is actually grieving. We instinctively put ourselves in their shoes and have no trouble at all imagining ourselves in a similarly dreadful situation.

Yes, I know what you're thinking. You're objecting that it's an idiom, and idioms can't always be analysed with logic. Although I don't have any historical analyses of this idiom at hand, my gut feeling born of years of listening with fascination as other people talk, tells me that this expression started out as its opposite, that is: 'I can imagine how you must feel'. This is, in fact, the true message we want to convey to the grieving person: this is an overwhelmingly distressing situation, but I can feel some of your pain along with you. Feeling someone else's distress is what motivates us to help them in the first place; we can all too easily imagine ourselves in that same situation, and we too would appreciate it if someone were to help us.

But somewhere along the way, the opposite of the current idiom – 'I can imagine how difficult it must be for you' – was offered a little too glibly for the liking of the person in despair, and the mourning person spat back, 'No, you can't imagine how difficult it must be! Have you ever lost a child/mother/father/dog/pet snail/whatever?'

So gradually we all adopted the reverse form of the expression and now utter its exact – if illogical – opposite: I can't imagine how difficult it must be for you. We somehow explain this to ourselves (usually only on a subconscious level) by reasoning that the tragedy is so overwhelming that it's beyond the capacity of our feeble imaginations. Many of us may have limited imaginations, but all of us at some time have envisaged various worst-case scenarios that could befall us and have shuddered at the prospect that they might actually manifest in our lives. People with anxiety and panic disorders, for example, have an unenviable aptitude for this kind of imagination. Mental health professionals even have a word for it: catastrophising. All of us can do it, and some of us, unfortunately, are past masters at it.

I suspect now, however, that both the positive and negative forms of this expression are unacceptable. The positive form ('I can imagine how difficult it must be for you') won't do, because it was already a cliché even before it sounded hollow and trite. And the negative version is not only a cliché, but compounds the insult with its stupidity.

It can be hard to think of comforting words – words that will encourage, enthuse and cheer – at the best of times, let alone at a time when not only the grieving person, but also we feel so dreadful. We despair and feel inadequate and that we are not up to the task: how can we – puny humans that we are – possibly offer anything to counteract the enormity of death and the psychological devastation that it brings upon those closest to the deceased?

But the truth is that we can. In my next post I'll talk about how to write a condolence card.

Synchronicity and language

Today I had another instance of the uncanny and synchronous events related to language that occasionally happen to me.

I often read while listening to the radio. And often I've found that at the exact moment that my eye lands upon a particularly unusual word, I will also hear that word on the radio. 

Yes, I know what you're thinking. If I'm reading a newspaper article about some person who is currently featuring in the news, then it's very likely that I'll also hear the name of that person being discussed in a news bulletin on the radio. But I'm not including instances like that, which are, of course, unsurprising.

Today, for example, I was listening to a program called Common Knowledge on the ABC's Radio National. It was the end of the program, and the presenter was referring to the program as "CK". At that very moment he said "CK" my eyes happened to look down to a bunch of keys in a tray, and one of the keyrings was a fake Calvin Klein keyring, which consisted of the letters C and K. It was the exact same moment.

This often happens to me. I'll hear an unusual word or phrase at the exact same moment as I also see it. But the written and the audible versions of that word usually are totally unrelated, as outlined above.

What's going on here? Many people talk of the significance of coincidences. But I can't detect any useful patterns in these coincidences. What significance could the initials "CK" possibly have for me? It it a recommendation to approach someone with those initials? Or a warning to stay away from them?

If you have had any similar experiences with synchronous words or phrases, please let me know.

Mangled Aussie pronunciations

Has anyone else noticed how many Australians mispronounce the name of the American city of Los Angeles? When I mention this to most people they say that they've never noticed it before. But many Australians pronounce it as 'Loss AN-jel-eez', whereas most Americans pronounce it as 'Loss AN-jel-ess'. A similar thing happens with New Orleans, which Americans utter as 'Noo OR-lunz' while the Aussies say 'Nyoo Or-LEENZ'. I know that we pronounce the word 'new' differently, and I'm not suggesting that Australians should say 'noo'. It's the 'Orleans' part of the city's name that is markedly at odds with the standard American pronunciation when issuing from the mouths of many Australians, and which we could easily modify without breaking the rules of standard Australian pronunciation.

Yes, it's not particularly important and there are many more pressing concerns that I should be preoccupying myself with. But I figure that if you're going to Rome, then you might as well try to speak the local lingo with a Latin accent

On a similar topic, hardly anyone I speak with or write to has noticed how the 's' sound before a 't' in the mouths of many younger Australians has morphed into a 'sh' sound. So what I would pronounce as 'Australian' becomes 'Aushtralian' for these speakers. I know that it may well become standard Australian pronunciation in 50 years' time, but I cringe every time I hear it. And if I hear several consecutive words with the 'st' collection of consonants squashed together in this way – as in 'I'm a shtruggling Aushtralian shtudent' – then I want to hurl something at the radio or TV. More than a few sportspeople seem to be the arch offenders. Listen to Shane Warne next time he does a TV ad.

All these non-standard versions seem to follow rules. In this case, the rule appears to be: 'If an 's' precedes a 't', then pronounce the two letters as 'sht'. But, strangely, I don't think I've ever heard the word 'steadily' pronounced as 'shteadily'. I'm just trying to conjure up from my memory examples of words that contain the 'st' sound, and it seems that not all of them get the 'sht' treatment. I have no idea why, but perhaps an observant linguist could explain why only some words containing 'st' are changed in this way.

What amazes me about this phenomenon is that hardly anyone I know is aware of it. But if I capture a grab of audio and play it back to my buttonholed interlocutor, then they can instantly detect what I'm talking about. But before I pointed it out they were oblivious to it.