cleve callison’s blog

AP Photo/Jim Prisching

Thursday’s perfect game by White Sox pitcher Mark Buehrle was the 18th in modern baseball history, with an amazing 9th-inning catch by outfielder Dewayne Wise to preserve the historic game. It called to mind a piece I wrote for WMUB’s old “Words and Meanings” series a few years ago. Obviously the first paragraph could use a little updating, but you get the drift..

“Baseball season is in full swing and so far, at least as of the time this is being recorded, we haven’t seen a perfect game. Well, we can always hope, but until we do I’d like to explore that term perfect in today’s Words and Meanings, and ask what it means to you.

My American Heritage dictionary gives perfect as one meaning of flawless; that is, “being entirely without flaw or im-perfection.” Well, OK, a perfect game could easily be described as flawless — no mistakes. However, these two words don’t always carry the same emotional content. Let’s try again, this time by approaching the verb form perfect. Here, American Heritages gives us “to bring to perfection or completion.”

Aha. Now we’re on the trail. Here we have an active verb — to “bring to.” The adjective perfect, you see, is formed from two Latin roots — the verb facio/facere, ‘to make,’ as in manu-facture, originally to “make by hand,” now meaning almost the opposite, combined with the prefix per-, which gave Latin verbs the sense of ‘entirely, thoroughly, completely.’

So, while their dictionary definitions resemble each other, there’s a real difference between flawless and perfect. Flawless implies an ideal original, not marred in any way; but perfect can carry with it the sense of something originally flawed having become purified through conscious action. A jewel, or a beauty, can be flawless — but its perfection has to have been there from the beginning. But most of us have to struggle toward perfection with rather more humble beginnings, and probably won’t ever quite get there. Not many pitchers pitch ever get that perfect game, and the ones that do work mighty hard at it.

So I’m going to draw one moral from this discussion — and then I’m going to turn it on its head. The first moral is easy: don’t assume that one word means the same as another. In fact, they never do. Language is a great natural system and the DNA, if you will, of each word is different. But don’t count on the dictionary or thesaurus always to tell you that. DNA is, after all, rather extraordinarily complex.

If that seems too grim, then take comfort from my second moral, which is almost the reverse of the first. In this little ramble I’ve actually committed before your very ears a horrible linguistic blunder that goes by the name of the etymological fallacy. We can use etymology, or the history of words, to tell us where words come from. Flawless is part of the good old English word hoard, of ancient origin. Perfect is, as we’ve seen, more-or-less a borrowing from Latin in the long run.

But most speakers of those words won’t know that and often use the words interchangeably. Does that matter? Yes, in a profound way, it does, because language is in the final analysis a mutually-agreed-upon set of symbols and significations. If we all agree that they’re the same, then they are. Not only that, you could even make a counter case, which I did not, from theology, which uses “perfect” to describe entities which have not been per-fected, but are perfect from eternity.

Still, those who love language and the play of words like to know where our words come from and what auras they still give off. If you’re like me, flawless will always have an aura of iciness and stillness, and perfect seethes with restlessness, tension and hard work. Just like a perfect game.”