Augustine’s Lightning Bug

Finding the Right Word

There is an obscure saying attributed at times to Mark Twain, or Josh Billings, or some forgotten writer, that “the difference between an almost right word and the right word is like the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”

Whoever actually said it, the sentiment rings true. While there may be different ways to “say the same thing,” to convey the same thought, finding the right word or words is paramount. Here are three examples where it seems to me the speakers are trying to say the same thing, but are they using “the right word?”

First - just to set the stage - here is one of the better known “Yogi-isms” of baseball’s Yogi Berra: “It’s deja vu all over again.”

Second, there’s a line in the Tennessee Williams play, Glass Menagerie: “The future becomes the present, the present becomes the past, and the past turns into everlasting regret if you don’t plan for it.”

Finally, physicist Albert Einstein once said, “The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubborn persistent illusion.”

Philosophical explication aside, the above examples lack “the right word” - they are as “lightning” to Augustine’s “lightning bug”:

“Perhaps it would be more correct to say: there are three times; a present of things past, a present of things present, a present of future things. For these three exist in the mind, and I find them nowhere else: the present of things past is memory; the present of things present is sight; the present of things future is expectation.” *

Augustine (354-420) was a giant - not only of philosophy - but of finding “the right word” rather than “the almost right word.”

*Confessions, Book Eleven, Chapter XX (F. J. Sheed Translation)