Renaming

I love the way families have special words, usually coined by the children. We call a billfold a bofield thanks to our oldest son. He also gave us smell-good for cologne, as in “Dad, can I wear some of your smell-good?” Our daughter renamed the elbow the bowain. And, yes, we do still use these words, but we try not to do it in public.

Right now, I’m reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and she shares a couple of her family’s special words:

In a few months we’d be drunk on the scent of Lizzie Webb’s mock oranges and lilacs, but the show begins modestly in April with her tiny Lenten roses, white–petaled snowdrops, and the wildish little daffodils called jonquils that have naturalized all over the grassy slopes. As Lily and I walked single file up the path to the greenhouse, I noticed these were up, poking their snub, yellow-tipped noses through a fringe of leaves.

“Oh, Mama,” Lily cried, “look what’s about to bloom—the tranquils.”

There went the last of the needles of ice around my heart, and I understood I’d be doomed to calling the jonquils tranquils for the rest of my days. Lily is my youngest. Maybe you know how these things go. In our family, those pink birds with the long necks are called flingmos because of how their real name was cutely jumbled by my brother’s youngest child—and that was, yikes, twenty years ago.

Ah, the joy of children and language.

Gleanings from My Readings

“How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!”
---Jane Austen, in Persuasion

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NEW WORD: orthorexics—people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating

“...nutritionist thinking has become so pervasive as to be invisible. We forget that, historically, people have eaten for a great many reasons other than biological necessity. Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology.”
---Michael Pollan, from In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto

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“There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.”
---Aldous Huxley, novelist

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“To me the mark of a great book is that it can move a variety of people, even though each person is connecting in a different way. The purpose of a story is to be a crowbar that slides under your skin and, with luck, cracks your mind wide open.”
---Jodi Picoult, novelist

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From Andrew Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress”:

“Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime.
[. . .]
But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.”

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From Henry Vaughan’s poem “The World”:

“I saw Eternity the other night
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm as it was bright;
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,
Driven by the spheres
Like a vast shadow moved; in which the world
And all her train were hurled . . .”

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Happy Reading!

Richness and Complexity

One really good definition of poetry is “condensed language.” A poet chooses words and images that are deep, and wide, and richly textured, and to “translate” the poem into prose would take many, many more words that the poet used to get across the same idea.

Think about the twenty-third Psalm, a pastoral poem. It only has six verses, and you could read it aloud in, what, two minutes? Now think about how many preachers have preached half-hour or forty-five minute sermons on that psalm. Go to a Bible bookstore and see how many books you can find attempting to explain the richness and complexity contained in those six verses. See what I mean?

Well, some words themselves are like that. They are deep and complex. If you look them up in the dictionary, you find a paragraph rather than a simple phrase.

But it gets even more complicated when we try to translate certain words from another language. When foreign words are translated into English, what we often get is the literal, exact meaning of the word, minus all its cultural connotations. Often, no one English word quite manages to convey all the associations the word brings forth in its original language.

One such word is the German heimat. Translated literally into English, we get the word “home,” but this translation is woefully short of a German’s understanding of this complicated word. Heimat includes all these ideas and more: home; origin, birthplace of oneself and one’s ancestors; security, attachment, and joy; an uncontaminated space, a realm of innocence and immediacy; ideas of language and regional identity are encompassed in this term; it implies patriotism without nationalism; it is a somewhat sentimental term, yet it encompasses a history that is not always pleasant to recall.

I ran across another interesting foreign word in the book I’ve been reading by Krista Tippett. She shares the South African word ubuntu, a word that, she explains, “is suggestive of humanity. It means ‘I am through you, and you are through me. To the extent that I am estranged from another person, I am less than human.’” I don’t think that will translate to any one English word that I know, but isn't it a beautiful word?

Well, after being introduced to the word ubuntu, I wondered about other hard-to-translate words. According to Today Translation, who consulted one thousand linguists, these are the ten hardest to translate words:

1. Ilunga: Bantu language of Tshiluba for "a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time." However, there is no independent evidence that the word actually means what the translation company claims. When asked for confirmation by one reporter, representatives of the Congo government recognized the word only as a personal name. Furthermore, the translation company failed to respond to inquiries regarding the survey.

2. Shlimazl (שלימזל): Yiddish for a chronically unlucky person. (Cf. Schlemiel). (NOTE. In colloquial Italian, it is very common to use the word sfigato with exactly the same meaning, in Dutch and German one says pechvogel, also used in colloq. German is the word schlamassel, if you are in an unlucky situation)

3. Radiostukacz: Polish for a person who worked as a telegraphist for the resistance movements on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain. It is not a real word, only a mistake or a hoax.
4. Naa (なぁ or なー): Japanese word only used in the Kansai (関西) area of Japan, especially in Osaka (大阪府), to emphasize statements or agree with someone.

5. Altahmam (التهمام) †: Arabic for a kind of deep sadness.

6. Gezellig †: Dutch for cosy (room, house, chair, etc.), pleasant (evening spent with friends), friendly (atmosphere).Gesellig German for spending time with friends.

7. Saudade †: Portuguese for a certain type of longing.

8. Selathirupavar † (செல்லாதிருப்பவர்): Tamil for a certain type of truancy.

9. Pochemuchka (почемучка): Russian for a person who asks a lot of questions (usually a kid).

10. Klloshar †: Albanian for loser. Could be derived from French clochard.

I don’t recognize any of these words, except for number Six, which has obvious ties to our old friend gezelligheit, and possibly number Two, which sounds like a word in the old Laverne and Shirley chant, “Shlimeel, shlimazl, . . . .”

Tune in tomorrow for their list of the hardest English words to translate.

Words Matter

I guess it’s pretty obvious by now that I think words are important. Before I ever even had the desire or ability to analyze why, I realized that beautiful words can move us and give us great pleasure.

They can inspire us to praise . . . GLORY be to God for dappled things—For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow . . . .

They can give us courage . . . Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never-in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. . . .

They inspire us . . . And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

They make us smile . . . Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.

Words are wonderfully powerful. But that power is not always used in ways that ennoble us as human beings. Christa Tippett, creator of MPR’s radio show Speaking of Faith, says in her recent book:

“I’m committed as a journalist to political neutrality. . . . I’m profoundly disturbed by the language of ‘collateral damage’ which has been invoked most recently by a Republican administration. But I hear it as a symptom of a larger tendency, across the liberal-conservative spectrum in this country, to describe our enemies as less than human. Since shortly before the 9/11 attacks, the notion of ‘hunting down’ terrorists has become accepted lingo. In Abu Ghraib, tortured prisoners were posed as animals. Those soldiers and commanders were unconsciously emboldened, I am sure, by language of less-than-humanness that has become routine in our political life and on the pages of liberal as well as conservative papers of record. And yet this mode of attack is doomed to failure, certainly against our current enemies.”

Tippett is right, and she is not alone in her views. Thomas Vincent, in his article, “Dangerous Words," explains, “It is dangerous enough when we use iconic words that have evolved naturally in our language. But when such words are created out of whole cloth by governments the phenomenon takes on truly Kafkaesque dimensions.”

We have examples from history of how control of language can change minds and then behavior: “Many commentators have noted that in order to murder their victims, the Nazis had to murder the German language first, associated as it was with high culture, rationality, and philosophical thought. A new, degraded form of German came into being, first in Germany itself, then in the camps, where it found its most brutal expression. . . . It is an obvious observation that where violence is inflicted on man, it is also inflicted on language.” Thus we have the Final Solution, and “medical experiments,” and Arbeit Macht Frei.

Published in 1949, George Orwell, in his novel 1984, examines the negative power of language. The purpose of Newspeak, his fictional language, is to control the way people think and behave by controlling the words they use, their vocabulary. Lois Lowry’s young adult novel, The Giver, is also about a dystopia that uses language to deliberately cloud meaning, thereby controlling citizen’s behavior and shaping their reality.

As children, we were taught the chant, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” and repeating this phrase might have increased our courage in the face of verbal abuse, but as a maxim for life, it falls woefully short. I think the wise man Solomon more truly understood how much words matter: “The tongue has the power of life and death, and those who love it will eat its fruit.” (Proverbs 18:21)

Yada, Yada, Yada

I’ve discovered another great word: pleonasm. It means “the using of more words than are required to give the sense intended . . . often resorted to deliberately for rhetorical effect.”

Barbara Wallraff, the Ms. Grammar of The Atlantic, points out an interesting contradiction: “Oddly, the two main ways to be forceful in English are to be succinct and to be wordy. The latter is out of fashion, and people who don’t like it call it redundancy. Those of us who do sometimes like it call it pleonasm.”

I totally agree. One of the biggest problems that my Comp students have (besides atrocious grammar, but we won’t go there now) is wordiness, which I faithfully mark in the margins beside their run-on sentences and multiplicities of repetition. “Conciseness is a virtue!” I frequently remind them.

But, verbosity can be wonderful in the hands of a language virtuoso. The key is in the definition: “for rhetorical effect.” The author who can get by with wordiness doesn’t just run off at the mouth because he has no control. He has talent, skill, and a plan. It’s like grammar and usage—you have to master the rules before you’re allowed to break them. You have to be able to write succinctly to be able to expound at length in a way readers will appreciate. (Of course, since one of my focus areas in my doctoral studies is 18th century British literature, I have to believe this.)

Just think about it. Abraham Lincoln could have said “87” instead of “four score and seven years ago . . .” The crowd would have understood Martin Luther King, Jr. if he’d said “I have a dream” just one time, but would they have felt his passion? Would Moby Dick or Les Miserables have been quite as beautiful without the long digressions? Henry Fielding and Lawrence Sterne had fun with wordiness, using it to mock the pretentiousness of other authors. I could go on listing examples of skillful garrulousness, but I’ll stop with one word: Faulkner.

Now I’m scared to post this without running Word Count first.

There's a Word for That?

I’m not quite sure how easy it will be to work this word into your everyday conversation, but it’s a great word, nevertheless:

Accismus (n): An insincere refusal. As in, “No, please, I want you to have the last chocolate chip cookie. Really.”

Of Words and Lines

My new favorite word:

gezelligheit (Dutch) – the pursuit of small pleasures


Best line in Daniel Silva’s The Secret Servant:

“Forgive me, my friend. Now that you are no longer striking me, I was just trying to make polite conversation.” (36)


From Natasha Trethewey's poem "Again, The Fields" in Native Guard:

The wheat falls beneath his scythe--
a language of bounty--the swaths

like scripture on the field's open page. (11-13)

(Trethewey was the 2007 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Poetry)