The bells we want to unring take their toll
You know how this goes, dear reader: You hear or read a distinctive turn of phrase, apparently for the first time, and then it pops up again two or three more times in just a couple of days. So it was the other day for me with 鈥淵ou can鈥檛 unring a bell.鈥澛�
It first came up in an story on the US Supreme Court hearing a case involving racially tainted testimony. A lawyer described the problem of trying to get jurors to put impermissible evidence out of their minds, as if they鈥檇 never heard it: It鈥檚 鈥渋mpossible to un-ring the bell,鈥� she said.聽
The song 鈥淵ou Can鈥檛 Unring a Bell鈥� includes a line that alludes to the courtroom background of the idiom: 鈥淵ou鈥檒l need an attorney for this journey, Junior.鈥� But the line has moved well beyond the courthouse and is used to mean broadly, 鈥淲hat鈥檚 done can鈥檛 be undone.鈥�
It does seem, though, a particularly satisfying way to encapsulate the specific problem of tainted testimony. An early example comes from an opinion in a 1912 case before the Oregon Supreme Court: 鈥淚t is not an easy task to unring a bell, nor to remove from the mind an impression once firmly imprinted there....鈥澛�
As one contributor to the website carefully put it, 鈥淲hatever the age and whoever the author, it is an inspired and memorable metaphor, and not yet, I think, actually a clich茅.鈥澛�
Part of what makes the bell metaphor so apt is that it captures the way sound waves move through the air to our ears, leaving no evident physical change 鈥� unlike, say, an ocean wave that breaches a sea wall 鈥� but rather creating a perception.聽
A peaceful village looks the same just before the church bell tolls the hour as just after. But once you鈥檝e heard the bells, you know it鈥檚 10 o鈥檆lock 鈥� or whatever hour.
A more pungent variation on the idea is often quoted in connection with tainted testimony: 鈥淚f you throw a skunk into the jury box, you can鈥檛 instruct the jury not to smell it.鈥� (One quoting this venerable principle of jurisprudence actually includes a link to a sheet of tips for removing skunk odor.)聽
Ah, but you can unring a bell.聽
A biomedical engineering student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison came up a winner some weeks back in GE鈥檚 鈥淯nimpossible Missions鈥� innovation challenge. This contest invited science, technology, engineering, and math students to come up with a common idiom of 鈥渋mpossibility鈥� and then demonstrate how the task could indeed be accomplished.
Christopher Nguyen chose 鈥淵ou can鈥檛 unring a bell.鈥� As explained, he 鈥減laced [a] bell on one side of an anechoic chamber 鈥� essentially a foam-padded room that traps any sound 鈥� and placed a microphone at the other end. In between them was a speaker, which Nguyen pointed at the bell. Whatever sound the bell produces, the speaker is programmed to emit the acoustic opposite.
鈥淲hen the system works properly, the microphone picks up nothing. The bell gets unrung.鈥�
