Word choice is on my mind. “Word choice.” There’s a concept dear to high school English teachers. The rest of us are mostly indifferent about it until one day we stumble onto the shoals of missed communication and wish we’d used a word other than that one we sent out to do ourselves or another harm.

For my own part, though I tried to be a conscientious high school student, the words I put into assignments had more to do with stereotype and customary usage than with any informed or aware selection. Word choice. What was the big deal?

Experience would teach me.

I learned about word choice the hard way. What Miss Noret, grey-haired, genteel promoter of Elizabethan literature and choice words couldn’t teach me, the consequences of slipshod wording did. Sometimes the lessons were abrupt.

For example: When I was very young, I was a bureaucrat. I labored in the Sacramento trenches of California state government trying to help predict the financial realities of welfare budgets six months into the future. This was not a fun task on its own, but it was made all the more wretched by the particular career bureaucrat who ran the show. You may know his type.

He was stuck. He had got as far as he would go. He would never rise higher than he was the year I appeared as a hireling, callow and earnest and ready to throw myself against rapid-fire numbers for the sake of the people of California and my paycheck. He would never rise higher, and he lately had begun to realize this sorrowful truth. He was destined to herd chirpy, cheeky, upwardly mobile pencil pushers younger than he through the thickets of subventions forever. They would go on. He would not.

The realization embittered him.

On the one hand he judged himself too good for such a fate. On the other hand the civil service judgments that had sealed him there threw him into self doubt. He was better than this! Maybe he wasn’t good enough? The strain of knowing himself proved too much. He bent into a pretzel of a son-of-a-gun and stayed permanently twisted.

We young ones learned to tread softly around the man’s insecurities. But one day, not quite knowing I was even within firing range, I let fly with two misguided words. They struck dead on that shaky heart. All hell broke loose.

It happened, as it will, that a mistake had been made. One of the clerks hired to transcribe long columns of figures (this was at the dawn of time and desktop computers were only science fiction) somehow had gone astray. The Head Bureaucrat’s composure cracked. He yelled. He slammed doors. Any delay in reworking the data would reflect upon him. The clerk cowered. By contrast I could afford to be brave. Unlike the clerk, I wasn’t at the job’s mercy; once my husband finished school we would move on. I recall the righteous nobility with which I stepped up to draw some of the heat. “It’s my responsibility,” I said.

Ka-boom.

The man’s eyes bulged. His nose commenced to flame. His jowls shook. In my memory it seems to me he careened around from wall to wall like Daffy Duck in a cartooned frenzy. Amazed, I waited at the center of the storm. Eventually he screeched to a halt in front of me.

“Your responsibility? Your responsibility? No! No! I’m the boss. I’m the boss. It’s mine! Mine! It’s my responsibility! Mine!

“Okay,” said I.

Now he was out of breath. He sputtered. He gulped. He gathered himself. “I’ve got to get my blood pressure medicine.” He boiled off after it.

You can see where I went wrong.

Instead of saying “It’s my responsibility,” I should have said, “I’ll take responsibility.” That is what I meant. It would have been so simple to say. So simple. Two little words. Word choice. The difference between a noble gesture and a blown cork.

Only one thing came of all this. No harm was done. The blood pressure medicine worked. The clerk went back to copying long lists of figures. The mistake was corrected and no consequences befell anyone. For a couple of days we chirping young ones tiptoed more carefully. Ultimately my husband graduated and we moved away. It’s all the dark dimness of an ancient past now. Except for one durable residue.

I had seen word choice in action. This time I had lived to tell about it. It was an old lesson finally learned.

Miss Noret could have saved me, of course. She tried to. She worked so hard, she and her red pencil, marking “WC” with a little circle round it in the margins of my essays and reports, drawing intricate arrows into the alleys of the text to point out the offending words. But she was too gentle. Her efforts never penetrated to the core of my self interest. It took a meltdown in welfare subventions to get word choice onto my own personal agenda.

Now I live with the next generation of folks indifferent to such esoterica, and I look with knowing eyes on the red pencil marks they bring home. The battle is stil the same. They’re doing their best, these students of mine and their responsible, gentle English teachers, but the resistances of the young are as they ever were.

Someday, however, somewhere, someone will flap around a room over an ill-chosen word from one of these boys of mine, and the light will dawn at last on them, too. Word choice. You can run, but you can’t hide.

Leigh McCarthy is a free-lance columnist who lives in Bangor.