Word of the Day, or The Illusive Five-Syllable "Or"

Last night in German class, we encountered the word beziehungsweise, abbreviated bzw, which, according to my German teacher, means "or." I was initially upset by this syllabic imbalance (5 to 1!) but my discomfort soon gave way to fascination with the five-syllable "or."

Beziehungsweise means, alternately, "alternatively," "and...respectively," "as the case may be," or "or rather." We have combinations of words that serve the same function in English but none in exactly the same way. For example, if you want to say: "The 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections were respectively disheartening and terrifying," then you need both the adverb "respectively" and the conjunction "and." In German, the single conjunction placed between the adjectives "disheartening" and "terrifying" would suffice.

The word literally means "related-wise" or "concerned-wise," built from the noun "concern" -- beziehung -- and the German equivalent of the suffix "-wise" -- weise, which means "wise" as in "intelligent" in German just as it does in English. Revising our previous example, we get: "The 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections were disheartening andrelatedwise terrifying."

In any case, equating beziehungsweise with "and...respectively" does balance out the count: 5 to 5. And the five-syllable "or" is still at large.

What's in a Name?

My colleague is having twin boys, due sometime in the next two months. Some of my favorite suggestions for names so far are:

1. Name them both the same thing
2. Name them both the same thing but spelled differently (ie, Sean and Shawn)
3. Name them both different permutations of their parents first and last names so everyone in the family has a name composed of the same set of elements
4. Name them "First Name, Last Name" to make filling out paperwork easier (or simply surreal)
5. Name them different things but switch their names often (ie, if one is Adam and the other is Sam, decide one day to start calling the first Sam and the second Adam)

Which made me wonder: if you and your identical twin were to switch names with each other at the age of 30 or 40, that would constitute a recognizable, clearly defined change. Likewise if you switched places at the age of 15 or 12 or 7 or 5. But what about at the age of 3 months? What about 2 months? Some babies don't have names at all for several weeks, so what difference could a change make after one or two weeks or even a few days? And yet, imagine bringing 2 babies home from the hospital and, several days later, reversing what you call them? It seems questionable at best. I guess what I'm really asking is this: at what point do you become your name?

The woman who works at my neighborhood market speaks many languages. She speaks to me in English and always asks me where "my honey" is or how my project at work is going. She speaks to other customers in Spanish, Arabic, Khmer. I once asked her how many languages she spoke and she just laughed; she said she talks to everyone who comes into her store in their own language. And I thought: How lucky, and what a nice thing for her to say.

Some nights ago while I was waiting in line she started talking about how she left her native Cambodia at eight. Both of her parents were already gone; when she was six she didn't understand her mother had died and she lay down on top of her still body, touching her face.

After leaving Cambodia, she lived in Thailand for a year, then came to the United States. Her brother-in-law was a soldier in the US Army and the government paid for everything -- their trip, their rent. Now she lives here and sends her children to the local public schools and sells me fresh fruit and vegetables and milk and yogurt and bread and almost everything else I eat each week.

She started telling me this because she is planning a trip back to Cambodia. After so many years of being away she will finally recognize her mother's death. She told me all of that while putting my dinner and my breakfast and my lunch in paper bags inside plastic bags and swiping my credit card and handing me the receipt to sign and then taking the receipt back and pulling the yellow copy from the white copy.

The man online behind me had been to Cambodia before too, he said, long ago, in '68, near the border with Vietnam. He wanted to talk about his experience but I don't think she did because she hardly responded to him, and when I looked up at her she slapped me lightly on the side of the head: "Do you want to make me cry?" she said, although I hadn't said anything, only looked, only caught her eye. "No," I said, "no," and I looked down and I took my food and I left.

And I thought: Speaking just one language, just one's own language, is a luxury in the way that safety and peace are luxuries, and speaking many is not just the province of professors and travelers but also of those who must leave places in the middle of the night or without a say in when or without those whom they love, even when they are still very young.

Declenchuns

In German, nouns declent, which is not as inappropriate as it sounds. Each noun comes in 4 flavors (aka cases) depending on its role in a sentence. In Modern English, only pronouns and the word "who" still declent, although in Old English, all nouns did. Quick example: in the sentence "I used to like elephants until one sat on me and ruptured my spleen," "I" is the subject, "me" the indirect object, and "my" either the irregular genitive of "I" or a possessive pronoun. (Wikipedia has an even dirtier name for the use of " 's " to form the possessive, which I won't discuss here. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clitic.) In short, English prounouns change how they are written and spoken according to a set of morphological rules in order to indicate a change from subject to object.

Imagine for a moment that every noun did this:
Is that your coffee?
Were you enjoying that coffeen?
Because I think I just put salt in your coffeem.
Exciting, huh?

What I like about declensions are not the endless fill-in-the-blank exercises it takes to learn them nor their basic function, which, as far as I can tell, is rendered obsolete by a rigid word order.

What I like is the word "declension" itself, because it is something nouns do and not something that is done to them (as with verbs and the act of conjugation) and because it contains, if only when spoken and only by accident, the word "clench," and so makes me picture hundreds of nouns wearing matching pinneys and sweatpants, lined up in a high school gymnasium clenching and unclenching as they do their noun calisthenics: Day doing her sit-ups; Night stretching to touch his toes; Patience stumbling through squat-thrusts; Sidewalk trying to do a back-bend.

This image is comforting. If I have to work so hard on these damn declensions, then godammit so should they.

La Petite Madeleine

Two years ago, during my junior year of college, I spent a semester living in Paris. During this time, I often babysat for a two-year-old American girl named Madeleine. Madeleine and her parents were in Paris for the first of a two-year stay related to her father's work; I inherited the job from a girl who attended the same study-abroad program the semester before I did.

I have yet to encounter any buttons (or other types of fasteners for that matter, including snaps and toggles) who could take Madeleine in the "cute" department: blond curls, blue eyes, etc. I soon took to calling her "la petite Madeleine" behind her back to my francophone friends.

Madeleine often seemed lonely to me -- she hadn't yet mastered French and was only starting to make friends at her preschool. She was a fan of the dramatic reenactment, and whenever we played with her dolls they did the same thing: took a train from Berkeley, California (where she was from) to Paris with all of their friends and all of their belongings. I hesitate to weigh in on exactly what this behavior meant, but I'm sure it was something big.

In any case, what I remember Madeleine most fondly for is using the word "what" in place of the relative pronoun "that," a usage that has made it into dictionary.com but is listed as "nonstandard." "What" can replace "that which" as in "What I would like is a grilled cheese sandwich" or "whatever thing that" as in "What happens at camp, stays at camp" but when it stands in for a lonely "that" it sounds almost woefully adorable: "The horsey I want is the horsey what's missing!" Madeleine would lament, or, "My favorite dress is the one what's yellow," or, "The song what you sang to me wasn't long enough." Although the idea of Madeleine herself, dunked in tea or otherwise, isn't particularly evocative, the phrase is one I've been trying to incorporate into my vocabulary ever since.

The Blogo-rectangular-prism

Just a thought...

Good Old Penelope

I often get the following words confused so I thought it might help to make a list, to settle the matter once and for all:

An epitaph is the message engraved on a tombstone. Here lies, etc., etc. From the Greek, epi (according to the online etymology dictionary: upon, at, close upon in space or time, in addition) + taphos (tomb).

An epilogue is a short essay at the end of a book, or a poem at the end of a play; like a prologue but stuck onto the back. From the Greek, epi + logos (word, speech). To have the last word (my paraphrase).

An epigram is a saying, a nugget of wisdom wrapped tight in wit, such as "Hell is full of amateur musicians" or "If all economists were laid end to end, they wouldn't reach a conclusion" (George Bernard Shaw). From the Greek, epi + graphein (to write). If you have any favorites, feel free to send them to me.

An anagram is a word formed by rearranging the letters of another word; Santa and Satan are anagrams of one another.

An aphorism is like an epigram, but better. From the Greek, apo (from) + horizein (to bound). Horizein is also the word that brought us horizon. So while epigrams are merely amusing, aphorisms are actually supposed to mark off the boundaries of our knowledge; a tall order.

An epigraph is a quotation preceding a literary work that often indicates the theme or mood of the work. For example, one of the epigraph's to my boyfriend's thesis on comic theory and narrative was: "Just because you can't tell jokes doesn't mean they don't exist." (I said that). Also from epigraphein, whence some of my confusion...

An epithet is a descriptive name for a person or thing -- not a nickname -- more like a title that denotes an attribute or characteristic instead of a rank. My favorite author, Anne Carson, calls epithets (or adjectives, their first cousins) "latches of being" in her novel "An Authobiography of Red" because they are used to fix each object to whatever is most true about it, the way that sodium sulfates fix a photograph, the truth of a moment, onto a square of paper.

In high school, my friend dated a girl named Sarah, who shaved her head. This was clearly her defining characteristic in our eyes. She didn't go to our school and so when she came up in conversation, it often took us a moment to remember who she was. "Sarah?" we would ask quizzically. "You know -- Sarah...bald Sarah." someone would inevitably reply. So she became Sarah bald Sarah -- in this case, "Sarah bald" was her epithet.

In college, epithets became even more useful, as it seems everyone I went to school had one of two names: Emily or Mike. So we renamed our roommates, our classmates, and our teammates accordingly: Crew-guy Mike, Squash Joanna, My Emily. The epithets themselves weren't meant to reveal anything about the people they were attached to, but simply to distinguish them when their first names proved inadequate. I think the most interesting thing about epithets is how they fill the space between name and adjective, filling a little of each function.

These days, most of us are introduced to epithets when we read the Odyssey; Homer was a big fan of the device. The other night, during dinner at a local brewpub, a few friends and I were trying to list all of the epithets we could remember from the poem, which most of us hadn't read since high school: rosy-fingered dawn; grey-eyed Athena; cunning Odysseus; the wine-dark sea. Then we came to Penelope and all drew a blank. The best we could do for her was "good old Penelope." I blame the beer.

I've not thought of a title yet

This is an exploration in grammar: not the grammar of grade school slapping us on the wrist or the grammar of copyeditors relentlessly standardizing, agonizing over that which seems minute and mutely chastizing us with each stroke of red pencil, but an exploration of a system that both connects and allows us to define ourselves as individuals. We all speak according to a certain grammar, whether we recognize it or not, whether we can explain it or not. Thanks in part to these grammars, we are each capable of uttering and understanding an infinite amount of sentences. There is literally no limit to what we might say, and this chaos of possibility is made possible by grammar's underlying order: we are free because of the rules and not in spite of them. Grammar is social, uniting friends and families and towns and cities and regions. And it is personal, the seam along which our inner worlds and our outer selves meet.