Not long ago, just for fun, I took a trip to a foreign land, Academiaville, where I discovered the titles of published works of Dartmouth College faculty. “Auditory sensitivity of the tufted capuchin (Sapajus apella), a test of allometric predictions.” “Buried Ideas: Legends of Abdication and Ideal Government in Early Chinese Bamboo-Slip Manuscripts.” “A lidar-derived evaluation of watershed-scale large woody debris sources and recruitment mechanisms: Coastal Maine, USA.” “Modeling Dynamic Identities and Uncertainty in Social Interactions: Bayesian Affect Control Theory.”
Ostensibly, the words were in English, but, boy, was I lost.
Anyone who has traveled outside of the English-speaking world and been reduced to hand gestures and facial expressions knows how baffling life can be without words. I am no stranger to that type of confusion. Cumulatively, I have lived in France for nearly five of my 43 years. For much of that time, I was on the edge of bewilderment, clinging to the present tense and monosyllabic life rafts (oui, non, très bien, s’il vous plaît) to get me through the days.
Ensconced among our own jargon and idioms, however, we begin each day under the assumption that the phrases we encounter will make sense.
This notion of total comprehension is, of course, pure folly.
The floor of the U.S. Senate taught me how to find my way when I was lost in my own language. When I worked for the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, I spent a lot of time listening to senators speak. In a tornado of terminology, they would make “parliamentary inquiries,” “suggest the absence of a quorum,” ask permission “to enter into a colloquy,” request that “the concurrent resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate,” and say, “Mr. President, I further ask unanimous consent that the cloture motion on the underlying bill be vitiated and the bill be read a third time.”
The answer from the presiding officer to the last example was swift: “Without objection, so ordered.”
Eventually, I learned the code, and, ahem, I can do a pretty good impression of a U.S. senator employing some verbal tics unique to what William S. White called “the world’s most exclusive club.”
It is just one of the verbal galaxies where I spend my time.
My hunch is that we all have myriad linguistic locales. A wonderful truth about language is that you don’t need to be a senator to use it. Words are, instead, an arrow in our communal quiver, a tool we use and customize regardless of our gender, race, income, age or profession.
When you discover a new passion, you almost always acquire new vocabulary before you acquire equipment. Fancy yourself a potential Ansel Adams? Better get a working knowledge of ISO, white balance, noise and apertures before you traipse off to the camera store. Fired up about cooking? Get ready for for beurre blanc, blanching and brunoise. Trying your hand at knitting? Hello purl stitches, stockinette, and the Mr. Miyagi-esque “cast on, bind off.”
Of course, language sometimes is a huge deterrent to our starting something new. When I was a tour guide in the vineyards of Burgundy, I shepherded hundreds of nervous visitors through a thicket of wine words: terroir, appellation, grand cru, phylloxera. They often appeared stunned, buffeted by the new lexicon. Happily, by their sixth taste of Chardonnay and Pinot noir, they were markedly more relaxed, and dropping plenty of liquid lingo into their speech.
Occasionally, I imagine I will become a woodworker. Then I pick up Fine Woodworking, see an article titled, “A Shooting Board for Case Miters,” and accept that the handyman train left me at the station. The vocabulary scares me away, but also helps me accept some fundamental truths about my limitations.
One great thing about language is we all have different words even when we are standing next to each other. Have you ever ordered a “medium coffee black” and had the college girl behind you order an “iced, half caff, ristretto, venti, 4-pump, sugar free, cinnamon, dolce soy skinny latte”? A flock of busy baristas flutters away, proof that the customer is always right in America, even if you didn’t understand a syllable.
I listen to an ungodly amount of sports radio. It is not a forum for high-brow intellectualizing. It is, however, a marvelous venue for sports nerds of all stripes to use vivid vocabulary. Hockey players mature during games of “shinny.” Every bowler likes turkey, which means three consecutive strikes. My heart still drops when I hear, “Little roller up along first … behind the bag! It gets through Buckner!” When a golf sportscaster says, in shock, “he chili-dipped it,” it’s like a refreshing breeze on my soul, proof that even professionals can make a horrible shot. How can we turn away from the Olympic sport of skeleton? Indeed, in sports, there are enough wonderful expressions that one could spend a lifetime immersed in the vernacular: skyhook, nutmeg, woolly bugger, pigskin, triple lutz, pop fly, hat trick, Triple Crown, slam dunk.
As fun as it is to mash up new combinations of letters to express ourselves, the universal words are the ones I savor the most. After all, at the end of the day, the words that stay with us are the ones that make us feel the best: love, happiness, family, peace, friendship.
Oh, and, of course, pizza.
Mark Lilienthal lives in Norwich. He can be reached at mlilient@gmail.com.