English - not the mess we thought it was

 Unlike Will Rogers, I may have met a man or two I didn't like, but I've never met a language I didn't like.  Every language has its own music, its own aesthetic, its own cultural history wrapped up in its lexemes and idioms.  Icelandic shudders at loan words and prefers to revitalize ancient phrases or invent new compounds for new elements of culture--the nation has declared its linguistic independence from the world.  Latin fits together like a jigsaw puzzle, completely opaque to any but the elite few who are worthy to tread the hallowed footsteps of Virgil, Ovid, Caesar, Augustine.  I can't imagine how it was ever spoken by people with brains as ordinary as my own.

 

But English!  What a wonderful beast is English!  A hybrid creature half Germanic and half Romance--like a griffon with claws at one end and golden feathers at the other.  It can sing, it can march, it can threaten, it can woo.  English welcomes practically every newcomer as one of its own: to the linguistic world, it offers the sentiments of the Statue of Liberty.  All are welcome here, if they are willing to bear an -s in the plural or an -ed in the preterit.

 

English has its troubled past and its troubling present--its grammar bears the scars of half-forgotten conquests, of oppression and rebellion, of the vacillating fortunes of its speakers.  Once, King Alfred had the Bible translated into English when most of the world insisted it remain in Latin (which was, of course, itself a translation from the original).  Then, generations of continentalized elites declared English incapable of expressing the complexity of theology, of court, even of love.  Now, we might more properly speak of Englishes in the plural, as this omnivorous creature has caught footholds all over the world, changed and adapted itself (some might say cuckoo-like) to its new surroundings in the mouths of new speakers.  Pedants fear that English is in decline--that the fact that some speakers don't generally us the verb "to be" is somehow going to cause us to forget what it is "to be," or as if saying "two deers" instead of "two deer" somehow represents a dumbing down of a more intelligent system.  To the former, one must point out that many languages have gotten on just fine without ever having a "to be" verb--and august Latin barely ever used the one it did have.  To the latter, I would just point out that, if we hadn't always regularized odd words based on our normal patterns, we would not say "had helped" but rather "had holpen," and the plural of "book" would now be "beech."  Enough said.

 

All the same, as a student of linguistic history, what I think is loveliest about English is this very hodgepodge heritage that comes down to us in what seem like the arbitrary rules and spellings of our strange and hybrid language.  Isn't it fascinating that we spell "taught" with a "gh" not because we're perverse and like to confuse students in spelling bees but because those letters were once pronounced--with the sound of "ch" in Scottish "loch"?  And isn't it wonderful to know that we don't mispronounce "subtle" when we ignore the "b" but that it was always pronounced our way, and the "b" was added retroactively to make it look more Latinate?

 

So this is a love letter to English.  Here are several things, dear language, that are wonderful about you:

 

* Some languages, like Thai, have different "registers"--a completely independent set of vocabulary for talking to a sister versus a teacher versus a political leader.  English, while too disorganized for that, still has its approximation.  I can "say you have pretty hair" or I can "compliment your elegant coiffeur" and, while both mean the same thing, one sounds significantly smarter than the other.  The fact that the former is Germanic and the latter Latinate doesn't mean that all Germanic formulations are inelegant.  One of the most evocative phrases in English, "to wreak havoc," is entirely native Anglo-Saxon: it literally means to set one's hawk loose upon songbirds.  What an image!

 

* English, along with some other languages, has this wonderful ability to take the past tense of an intransitive verb and turn it into the root of a new transitive verb. So the verb meaning "to perform an action oneself" makes a new verb that means "to cause something else to perform that action."  Examples:

"To fall" (as in, I fall down) becomes "to fell" (as in, I fell a tree--I cause the tree to fall)

"To lie" (as in, I lie down) becomes "to lay" (as in, I lay the fork down--I cause the fork to lie down)

 

* Most of the time, a verb means the same thing no matter what tense or inflection it.  ("to walk," "I walked," "I have walked" all refer to moving at a slow pace.)  But English seems to find this dull and predictable.  Hence, we have wonderful oddities like this:

 

"To strike" means to hit something.  "Struck" (past tense) means the same thing.  But "stricken" (the past participle) is almost always used as an adjective of emotion.  One can be "stricken" by the death of a loved one, but when one has been hit by a foul ball, we usually now say he was "struck" (where long ago it would only have been proper to say, he was "stricken").

 

"To smite"--this is something pretty much only God gets to do these days.  And although in medieval literature people "smote" each other all the time (usually on the "helm"), I don't know if anyone has done so more recently than when Gandalf "smote" the Balrog on the mountaintop.  However, anybody with half a heart can be "smitten"!

 

That is the wonder of English.  Well, one of its wonders.

Snow: Remember When?

Remember when we used to do the snow dance in hopes of getting a day off from school?


Remember when your first thought about snow was “Sledding!” and not “Shoveling”?

Remember when coats were nothing more than an encumbrance to playing on the monkey bars at recess? (In my school we always used to bundle up under Teacher’s watchful eye, then go outside and promptly dump our coats in a pile, no matter how cold it was, because the recess monitors didn’t stop us.)

Remember when wet socks, runny noses, numb fingers, and wind whipping through zippers were no reason not to lie down in the snow to make snow angels?

I remember those days. They seem very long ago and I’m not entirely certain I want to recover them. (I like being warm, dry, and weatherproofed, thank you very much.) But when we had an unexpected snow storm over Presidents’ Day weekend, I did the best I could to do justice to the weather.

I made myself a cup of hot chocolate and watched the snow fall (from indoors), and the next morning I took pictures like no one’s business.  (I have many more, but apparently there's a glitch in the program I used to change orientation, so everything upright comes out sideways on the blog: these will have to do for now!)

Twas the Season (recently)

Do you know what I like about Christmas? Well, what I like about the celebration of Christmas, “apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin”? What I like about Christmas…is presents.


I like giving presents: I like sitting down around Thanksgiving time and thinking about my favorite people in the world, about how I can show them what they mean to me, pondering what they enjoy or need that I might be able to find for them. I like fibbing, finagling, and faking to discover the perfect gift, the right shirt size, the favorite color. I like making things for people—baking, painting, crocheting, or sewing. I like taking price tags off of boxes and wrapping them in festive paper (or last week’s comics, if I haven’t got any paper). I especially like it when my gifts are square or rectangular, because then I can make the package look nice without using half a roll of tape (the overuse of tape is a family trait). I like curling ribbons.

I like leaving packages on door steps or in mail boxes for the friends I don’t catch in person. I like putting the presents under the tree at home (this year at least we knew that we didn’t have a cat who would systematically go through the packages, eat the ribbon, and then give it back to us in cold, wet surprises on the carpet). I like waiting on Christmas morning while the recipient negotiates through my varying amounts of tape to unwrap what I’ve kept secret for a month. I like getting hugs in return.

And I like receiving presents—not because I want more “stuff,” not because it saves me having to buy something for myself—but because every year I’m caught off-guard by at least one gift. It wasn’t on my list, I hadn’t even thought about it, but it’s just right. It usually isn’t expensive; it’s often home-made—but it’s perfect. That kind of gift tells me that someone knows me very well, they notice me, and they care. I was caught off-guard several times this Christmas, and I was profoundly touched. I have a feeling my mother will read this post and immediately start worrying about how she’ll manage next year, but she doesn’t need to be concerned: the best thing about these “perfect gifts” is that they always happen, probably without the giver even planning it to be as special as it is. Something given from the heart and not the pocket always bears the mark of its origins.

I always hope to catch a few people off-guard myself.

All I Need to Know in Life I Learned from Ramen

Not having had time to cook proper meals for the past week or so (I never lived like a college student until I went to grad school), I have been eating a lot of ramen. Call me unsophisticated, but I actually quite like the stuff. I mean, it’s noodles and massive amounts of salt—two of my favorite things! But regardless, feeling philosophical the other day, I realized that ramen offers a whole host of valuable life lessons. For instance...


I only ever use half the packet of seasoning.
*Life lesson: you can, indeed, have too much of a good thing.

Every packet of seasoning comes with a single, tiny piece of dried parsley.
*Life lesson: one green fleck does not a serving of vegetables make.

I can tell when the ramen is perfectly cooked just by the feel of the noodles against the spoon.
*Life lesson: if you do anything often enough, you will become an expert at it (or, I suppose, stop doing it).


Some people like their ramen soupy, some people like it with an egg, some people (like me) like it without any extra water in the bowl.
*Life lesson: to each his own, and each will establish “his own” no matter how few the options might be.

I once left a bowl of cooked ramen on my desk while I had a lengthy conversation with a flatmate. When I returned, it was cold, congealed, and inedible.
*Life lesson: you can mess up anything, no matter how simple.

My ramen package boasts that it contains 0g of trans fat.
*Life lesson: anything (I mean ANYTHING) can be marketed as health food.

Anyway, that’s just a little food for thought (pun fully intended) to get you started thinking about where you’ve gotten your own life lessons. You might be surprised what the mundane and quotidian elements of life have to teach us—I just wrote a whole post about ramen! Anything is possible!

Take a Hike!

Old Rag is something of a legend around here: it’s an 8-mile hike (10 if you count the mile-long walk from the parking lot to the trailhead) up the side of a mountain, right to its rocky bald top, and back down again in a winding loop. I’d heard about it many times from friends and colleagues here, but after living only an hour’s drive away from it for more than five years, I had never hiked it. Until last Sunday.

A dear friend of mine was able to take some time out of her busy schedule to visit town on her way from Florida to DC, and since Old Rag was on her “bucket list” as well as mine, we teamed up and made the hike together. It was perfect weather for it, and the trees were just turning colors. (When I was younger, I always thought it looked like someone had spilled a giant box of Trix cereal all over the hills in the fall. The impression hasn’t changed, though the comparison is a little less apt since Trix went from being round to being fruit-shaped.)

When we checked in with the Park Service folks, they gave us a map and said, “Now, you know about the rock scramble, right?” We did—it’s part of the legend, though I must admit that I had only the vaguest notion of what a rock scramble actually was. The rangers said no more and pointed us on our way.

The first part of the hike was leisurely, through cool, shady woods on a nice, gently sloping path. Then it started to get a little rocky, to the point that we were crawling on our hands and knees up steep stretches of smooth stone. Having gotten past that hurdle with only a bruised knee or so, we said to each other, “Was that the rock scramble?”

It wasn’t. When you hit the rock scramble, you know it. The trail disappears into a mass of Mordor-like standing stones marked only by laconic blue paint swatches (some of which helpfully have an arrow, most of which do not). It really is rightly called a scramble, since one traverses it by slipping and sliding down narrow crevices, scooting on one’s backside down boulders with no footholds, and scrabbling up rock walls like clumsy cat burglars trying to reach the second story. At one point, the steady stream of hikers bottlenecked to a standstill as, one at a time, we all had to find some way of getting ourselves up a six-foot wedge in the rock to where the trail picked up and continued climbing.

I am not six feet tall. Nor is my friend. There was supposed to be a rope anchored into the rock to assist the vertically challenged, but it was broken, and only a frayed stub of purple cord gives witness to the Park Service’s efforts at accommodation. Neither of us would have made it if it hadn’t been for a couple of taller, burlier hikers who were willing to climb up ahead of us and drag us bodily by the arm up to the top of the crevice. Even the tall folks had trouble: one fellow managed by taking something of a running start, pushing off one rock, and catching himself, splay-legged, between the two boulders at a height where he could hoist himself up the rest of the way with his arms. This feat of acrobatics was even more impressive given the fact that he was toting an infant in a papoose on his chest.

It was quite the adventure, really—a harder hike than Mount Esja in Iceland (though we had the distinct advantage this time of not hiking in a gale) and an honest-to-goodness full-body workout. Other folks who are more outdoorsy than me will laugh at how shocked I was to find boulders so inconveniently positioned as to necessitate crawling, jumping, and being boosted by strangers, but for a born-and-bred suburbanite, I think I can claim some credit just for making it to the top! And the view was worth it, let me tell you.

I’d even do the hike again, in fact (as soon as I can once again forget about all those muscles that are currently crying, “Abuse!” every time I move). I enjoyed every minute of the ungainly scrabbling and slipping and gasping for breath—honestly, I did! But next time I’ll bring shoes with better traction, a backpack that’s less likely to get wedged into the narrow places, and a spare camera battery. Oh, and somebody really tall.

And I’d Never Been to Boston in the Fall

I was happily able to take advantage of a timely Fall Break to spend this past weekend in Bean-Town with my sister, who moved there in August to study book-binding! (I know, right? Where did she find this program and how do I get into it?) Homage to Veggie Tales aside, I actually never had been to Boston in the fall before this weekend, and I’m very happy to say that it more than exceeding my expectations.

Let me first say, however, that I don’t very much like trains. My dislike began on an overnight Eurail trip in college, when I was separated from my friends and had to spend a night bunked with three surly 30-somethings, two of whom were men and none of whom spoke English. (Keep in mind this was not only my first time in Europe, it was also my first train ride ever.) They didn’t announce the stations and I was petrified I would miss my stop in Paris and end up in Belgium or Finland.

I figured things had to be better on a train from Virginia to Massachusetts, even though I knew that eleven hours was going to be no picnic. Yet once again, on the ride north they did not announce the stops, and for whatever reason, train stations on the East Coast have little or no (most often no) signage. I only knew when to get off the train because I kept asking other people who looked like they knew what they were doing. No conductors to be seen, of course. By way of being fair to Amtrak, the way back was much better, both because that engineer deigned to announce stops as we pulled up and because I located the Quiet Car: no noisy undergrads drunk at 10 a.m., and no kicking, biting banshees whose poor beleaguered mothers thought were human children.

Boston, on the other hand, was lovely in every way. Perfect, unseasonably warm weather, a commuter-friendly public transportation system, and (best selling point of all) my little sister as hostess and tour guide. We did some of the classic tourist things—lunch in Quincey Market, afternoon at the Museum of Fine Arts, an accidental detour through a movie set (oops!), ice cream at J.P. Licks—but we did some less-classic tourist things too.

We spent Sunday at “The King’s Renaissance Faire” (the extra “e” is obligatory, so that you know it’s authentic), which wasn’t quite as good as the one in Maryland but did have the distinct advantage of having a tiger show. (Not a whip-cracking, big cats jumping through flaming hoops sort of show, but a “look at the pretty tiger: reduce, reuse, recycle, and don’t buy furniture made from illegally harvested timber in Southeast Asia” sort of show. How it ended up at a Ren Fest is beyond me, but the spokesman was wearing satyr horns, so that clearly signalled his belonging.) By the way, the joust was completely fixed (a bit of a disappointment after being to jousts where the winner was not determined beforehand to suit a hero/villain storyline), but it ended with a staged beheading, complete with spurting arteries, which was quite exciting.

We also spent Columbus Day at the Arboretum near Jamaica Plain: it has a wonderful view of downtown Boston from the top of one of its hills, and all its plants are labeled: I now know what ash and plane trees look like. That pleases the linguist in me, not the botanist; I don’t care where the ash trees grow or what their life cycle is, but I, like our ancestor the first Gardener, am still in the business of knowing things' names. And besides all the dozens of dogs being walked on the trails (most of whom my sister stopped to pet), the Arboretum offers some lovely shady spots under oak trees just perfect for sitting and reading aloud. We started on The Pickwick Papers and, despite the fact that Dickens can run a sentence to the full length of a paragraph, he makes for excellent recitation. Just try A Christmas Carol this December and you’ll see. It was a perfect way for two bibliophiles to spend an afternoon.

I wish I could have stayed in Boston longer, but duty called, and they haven’t yet invented voicemail for that sort of thing. If they ever do, I’ll be first in line to let duty leave a message: I’ll be in the park reading Dickens with my sister!

A Thought about Forgiveness on 9-11

In the lead-up to this 10th anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks, I’ve been thinking a lot about forgiveness, and it strikes me that our language does a great injustice to the concept by giving us only one phrase that we generally use to offer it: “That’s okay.” There are times when it really is “okay”—when someone offends us unintentionally and our indignation dissipates upon realizing that no slight was intended. But in all other cases, when we say, “That’s okay,” we’re lying.

Because it almost never really is “okay.” When a friend speaks cutting, hateful words in a fit of anger, it is not okay. That friend’s apology may soothe our pain, and his genuine contrition may mend our relationship, but that does not make it “okay” to have said those things in the first place. When he realizes that fact as well, that’s when we might reconcile—forgiveness can be one-sided, but reconciliation has to come from both parties. Reconciliation is a beautiful thing, all too rare: it agrees to leave the offense in the past, resolves to move onward, puts estranged travelers back on the road they had been walking together. It is the workings of the divine in man, because we all need forgiveness for something. But even reconciliation does not make it “okay.”

And when a small group of disenfranchised extremists attack unarmed, innocent people out of pure hatred, it will never be “okay.” Ever. But our weak-willed verbal construction of forgiveness makes us feel that forgiving these unimaginably unforgivable people would be a sign of defeat, an invitation for anybody with a grudge to walk all over us because, after all, we’ll forgive them in the end.
That is not what forgiveness means. Forgiving those darkened souls does not mean saying, “That’s okay.” It does not mean, “I condone what you did” or “I will let you go free of the consequences of your actions.” It does not mean, “I will not seek to stop you from hurting anyone ever again.” It means only this: “I do not want your hatred to become mine. You have sought to make me like yourself, and I refuse. I will not allow the venom in you to poison me. I will not take your dark burden onto my shoulders: it is yours alone to bear, and it will drive you into the depths. My hatred is not necessary to bring about your destruction, and I will not lose my soul in an effort to deprive you of yours. You have already lost it.”

For my part, I will live in love, and I will hope and pray that the hearts of our enemies will be turned back and reclaimed for the cause of goodness and peace.

Ellen DeGeneres, after 9-11, said that the terrorists could not take our humor from us, and she made laughter a symbol of our fortitude: the most devastating thing we could do to the extremists was laugh at them. I think the most devastating thing we could do is to forgive them.