Along with its various derivatives, “misspeak” has become one of the signature verbal workhorses of this interminable political season, right up there with “narrative,” “Day One,” and “hope.” It carries the suggestion that, while the politician’s perfectly functioning brain has dispatched the correct signals, the mouth has somehow received and transmitted them in altered form. “Misspeak” is a powerful word, a magical word. It is a word that is apparently thought capable, in its contemporary political usage, of isolating a palpable, possibly toxic untruth, sealing it up in an airtight bag, and disposing of it harmlessly.
Such a feat of modern hygiene is impressive in a word of such ancient origins. The Oxford English Dictionary finds it in Chaucer (“I me repente / If I mis spak”), but the hoary examples involve meanings that are either obsolete (to calumniate) or irrelevant to the present case (to mispronounce or speak incorrectly, a specialty of George W. “Misunderestimated” Bush). The last item in Oxford’s half-column entry, however, gets us where Senators Clinton and McCain want us to go:
3.b. refl. To fail to convey the meaning one intends by one’s words.
This use of “misspeak” is of American origin. Oxford’s first example (“I believe he misspoke himself”) is drawn from, aptly, the Congressional Record, 1894; its second (“The President misspoke himself”) is from Richard Nixon’s iconic press secretary, Ron Zeigler, in 1973, annus mirabilis of the Classical period of American misspeaking.
