Pity and Fear?

Why are we compelled to watch tragedies when we know they all end badly?

Aristotle tells us that a "perfect tragedy" should "imitate actions which excite pity and fear, this being the distinctive mark of tragic imitation" (p. 75, Aristotle's Poetics, tr. S. H. Butcher, Hill and Wang, New York: 1961). He goes on to specify that "pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune, fear by the misfortune of a man like ourselves," and that this misfortune "should come about as the result not of vice, but of some great error or frailty" (p. 76).

His advice is perhaps more practical than philosophical, for he doesn't delve here into why the great poets should aim to elicit pity and fear in the first place. Instead, the Poetics explores the mechanics of tragedy: its constituent elements, its sequential parts, and the irresistible motion of its plots, which proceed, not like flowers unfolding to reveal a single, secret truth, but like strange engines coming to life. Each action -- each lever falling, each gear turning -- emerges necessarily from the preceding action; the end is always inevitable, inscribed both in the very first movement and in the structure of the machine itself. "Fear and pity may be aroused by spectacular means," he says, "but they may also result from the inner structure of the piece, which is the better way" (p. 78).

According to Aristotle, the end of a tragedy, although inevitable, is evident neither to the characters as they stumble forward nor to the audience, as they watch, riveted. The end thus lays bare our collective ignorance and our inability to understand the genealogy of events, to anticipate the progeny of our decisions.

And yet, the majority of tragedies, even in Aristotle's day, were based on popular myths and the histories of a few well-known families. Imagining an audience watching "Medea" without knowing how it ends is like imagining Eve in her garden, lounging, willowy, among the trees , deciding she's really just not that into fruit. The myths founding most tragedies are defined by their endings: Oedipus is guilty from the start, as Medea, as Eve; they are made up of guilt, as days are made up of minutes. Furthermore, although Aristotle points out that fear is stirred by identification with an ill-fated hero, there are few characters in these classical plays I can relate to. They are all noble and rich, damned and lost. Theirs is a passion distilled. There is no "everyday" in tragedy, none of the familiar routines or patterns or moods or moments that I recognize. Without surprise and without identification, whence the pity and whence the fear?

I think the pleasure of tragedy lies entirely elsewhere, and I would analogize it with the pleasure of S&M. It is the pleasure of aesthetic awe and structured excess. The aesthetic awe is inspired by the poetry of tragedy, laced tight along the spine of the characters' desire, and by the careful design of the plot in which each element is necessary and none are missing. The excess is of emotion, structured by both the plot and the verse. This structure, in which we know the fate of each character, allows us to experience -- even to wish for -- their demise without being afraid that their misfortune will spill out of the play and onto us. Their loss is contained. Even the ir passion, infinite, reaches the edge of the stage and drops off. We can sink into emotions we might not otherwise have access to, condemning the frail, reciting their downfall, grieving for those whom we chose to watch fall. The characters' pain, and our own, is sharpened through constraint, but the points of its constraint, like the ribs in a corset, are also objects of beauty.

The more things change...

How do languages change? Certain errors persist; words, expressions, conjugations, entire tenses fade. Perhaps we hear something new, snatch up a cute saying on a trip abroad or adopt a locution we hear on TV. Scorn gives way to apathy: soon we can't remember how we used to say things, and what was once an exception is now accepted; soon, everyone else is saying it, too.

Some people assume that one of the driving forces behind language change is laziness, and that more difficult constructions will always fall away in favor of easier ones. I'm not sure that's true: after all, two of the most common verbs, "to be" and "to have," are irregular in all the language I know, and therefore more difficult to learn and retain, but because we use them so often we remember their forms and aren't tempted to police them into the standard mold (I am, you am, he/she/it ams, we am, you am, they am; I ammed, I was amming, etc). So I think frequency has something to do with forestalling language change, or at least with helping difficulties endure. Perversely, frequency can also lead to language change, at least according to wikipedia, which blames the irregularity of "to be" on its very prevalence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_be). The more something reproduces (ie, the more a word is spoken and written), the more chances it has to mutate.

Recently, a coworker of mine who studied historical linguistics explained the phenomenon of language change to me in richer terms. According to him, there are two forces constantly pushing against languages that work to change them: the first is the set of phonetic rules that dictate which sounds precede or follow one another. Now here's where it gets sticky: sometimes, through chance, a verb conjugation that is inflectionally correctly may be phonetically incorrect. This verb conjugation will have to be modified: it will become irregular. So the force of phonetics is a central source of irregular verb conjugations, plurals, possessives, etc. In an attempt to regularize the sound patterns of the words themselves, morphemic patterns are disrupted.

The other force at work is the tendency that speakers have to regularize verbs by analogy. It's why little kids say "I sleeped." Why should some words not follow the rules that others do? As these two forces do battle for the souls of verbs, irregularities rise like air bubbles, only to be smoothed out down the road.

Furthermore, certain changes are cyclical, occurring and reccurring like seasons. The example he gave was a comparison between the French passé composé and futur simple tenses. The first is what we refer to as the present perfect in English: I have burnt the pie, and is made up of the conjugated auxiliary verb "to be" or "to have" followed by the past participle of the main verb. The second is a future tense for which we have no equivalent. Je brûlerai le gâteau means "I will burn the pie" but looks something like "I burnill the pie," in that the ending of the auxiliary verb has been stuck onto the end of the main verb. In the passé composé , only the auxiliary verb is conjugated. In the futur simple, the main verb itself is conjugated.

So learning and using the passé composé is in some ways easier than the futur simple, because there is far less conjugating to do, and, as everyone knows, conjugating is a pain.

HOWEVER, some of you may have noticed that the endings of the verbs in the futur simple are the same as the endings of the various French conjugations of "to have." The reason for this is that long ago, in Latin, the future was formed like this: "I read will." Over time, those words got smushed together, so what was a simple conjugation (infinitive + auxiliary verb) became a somewhat messier affair. Perhaps, in a few hundred years, the passé composé will be a similar mush; perhaps other complicated tenses will sprout auxiliary verbs only to absorb them further down the line.

I thought about this news for a while; I found it somewhat astonishing. All of a sudden, the thick, static bodies of verbs flew apart and their inner bits seemed to fill the air, and all these shreds still shift before me, joining and shedding each other like the shapes at the end of a kaleidoscope.
But the question remains: who, exactly, is turning the lens?

According to Legend

Myths rarely end in surprise. I am speaking of the Greco-Roman myths, the ones I grew up reading, the ones so often adapted by authors of the Western cannon. We do not read them for their unexpected twists and turns. Like classical tragedies, many of which are based on myths, we fall into them and they lead us back.

Myths have an interesting relationship to time. They posit origins, offering us the stories behind the things we can't not remember being part of our lives. Their writing necessarily post-dates the objects they create. There was no myth to explain the Earth before the Earth was here, and even once it arrived, how could there be a myth without people to tell it and people to hear it? All myths explain, then, at least indirectly, why we are here. We are here so someone would tell the story of how we got here.

I have been rereading recently Ted Hughes' translation of Ovid's Metamorphosis, called "Tales from Ovid." The first time I read it, a year ago, I was fascinated by the idea of people enacting rhetorical figures: the lean, ragged man, as fierce as a wolf; the willowy, tearful woman, as clear as a stream; the vain, young hunk, beautiful as a flower. I decided that some of the heroes' transformations were metaphors and some similes.

A metaphorical death was sudden, it would cast you up into the stars. Your constellation had little to do with a particular attribute. Rather, one minute you were a person, and the next, a cluster of stars. Your forever arrived swiftly.

Metamorphosis by simile was the gradual process of your new shape engulfing you inch by inch, first grabbing a finger and then slithering up your arms, over your head. Your new form was either a punishment or a gift, but it stemmed directly from whatever was most true about you.

Two rhetorical figures, metaphor and simile, like two sides of a silhouette with one meaning: the afterlife of fiction is reality.

Now I am more interested in the fact that a myth is not just the story of a thing but the story of that thing's name. It is etymology personified. Are they really separable, a thing and its name? Or are they two sides of the same coin, two incarnations of the same being? Narcissus was a man, long ago, and now he is a flower. Or was there a flower, long ago, and now there is the story of a man? Can you recall which you heard about first -- the flower or the man? Are they really separable, a thing and the story of how it got there?

Some conversations are like bridges. Conscious of the steep drop into the unsaid and unsayable on either side, we put one word gingerly in front of another, concentrating. It is easy to lose your balance. It is impossible not to think about falling.

Often these conversations are somehow formal: they are discussions with or in front of a group, with people you respect or admire or who are just older or more important than you are. Sometimes they are about admittedly delicate matters that people might not agree on or might take very seriously, and require all parties to come to a fragile and fiercely won agreement about what is proper to say and what is not. It seems we walk over a carpet of toes.

And sometimes these conservations or situations tempt us -- practically beg us! -- to jump.

I would characterize these jumps as different than Freudian slips. A Freudian slip is supposed to reveal a deep-seated truth. Writing "girlfiend" instead of "girlfriend" indicates a marked lack of affection, bordering on resentment and, perhaps, fear. It's not an accident or a joke or an unmotivated burst of vulgarity. It's a bit of yourself peeking out from behind your words. A jump is compulsive or pathological or just plain absurd.

One night in my German class we were discussing the way that telephones are answered in Germany. Instead of just saying: "Hello?" or "Hi, how are you?," the German on either end of the line says their name, generally their last name. eg:

Ring ring. Ring ring.
Schonberg.
Hallo, DiCaprio.

or

Ring ring. Ring ring.
Schonberg hier.
Leonardo DiCaprio.

Sort of like characters in a film noir. In any case, our teacher, an Austrian woman so sweet and gentle she makes Peppermint Pattie look like Kim Jong Il, was demonstrating this exchange and she said:

Ring ring. Ring ring. (holding hand up to ear as if it were a phone)
Hallo. Eva Braun.

After she said it, she kept talking at the same pace, as we exchanged slow glances: "Did she really just say that? But that's...I mean..." And then the moment's formality broke and she apologized profusely, pinkening, explaining that she didn't know why she had said it, that she didn't mean it. I believe her. I don't think this was a slip in the traditional sense, nor that she secretly harbors Nazi sympathies, nor that she revealed anything about herself. Instead, I think she jumped, intentionally or not, into the tempting space of the worst way to end a sentence her brain could produce. If we learn anything from such a jump, it is not what lies hidden within us, but what lurks in the waves below.

"Ich weiss jetzt, was kein Engel weiss" -Damiel, The Wings of Desire

Wim Wenders’ film The Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin, literally "The Sky [or Heaven] over Berlin," in German) takes place in Berlin, but the film's characters speak and think alternately in English, French, and German. The female lead, Marion (Solveig Dommartin), works as a trapeze artist at a run-down circus in a dusty field beneath an overpass in some abandoned corner of the city. She wears a leotard and wings in her act, a mortal sketch of the transcendent figures invisibly circling the city.

In her first scene, the ringleader tells her the circus will be closing the next day. Shaken by the sudden disappointment that tonight’s show will be her last, she retreats to her trailer and, before climbing inside, looks up at the gray sky and thinks, “Die Angst. La peur, la peur, la peur. Die Angst,” alternating between her native French and the language of the city around her. Unexpectedly earthbound, Marion is scared.

English subtitles might unhelpfully translate Marion's private lament as “Fear,” or, worse, “I’m afraid;” a more literal translation would read: “Fear. Fear, fear, fear. Fear.” But her irreducible plaint cannot be dissolved in the medium of any one language. Her fear does not transcend both French and German but is instead located in the fact of their irreconcilability, the dim space they each shadow without shaping. She does not articulate her fear as a single being, a monster or a dark wood, because her fear of leaving the circus, like her safety as a trapeze artist who is part of it, suspends her.

When I first moved out to San Francisco, when I was still looking for work and a nonsubletted apartment and had just started taking German, Marion became an important figure for me. My first attempts to write about her were in an essay on prepositions and how I found them to be the most intractable parts of my new German vocabulary.

She led me to remember an afternoon in Paris when I overheard a conversation that sounded like English while riding the Metro. I tried to follow, out of habit, and found I couldn't. I strained to catch even a single word I recognized, but none stuck out. The familiar sounds refused to fall into recognizable words. That's when I panicked. What if I had lost my fluency and would only speak now as if my mouth were full of sand, hear as if underwater, read in thickened, muddy light? What if the words never seemed themselves again? What if I were lost?

The moment passed: I realized they were speaking Dutch. But I remembered the feeling and so when Marion said, "Die Angst. La peur, la peur, la peur. Die Angst," I said, "Aha. I know this. This is the fear of no longer belonging, of being trapped between worlds."

It was many weeks before I began to see her statement as hopeful, too. The medium of Marion's art is uncertainty: she flings herself, a brief arc, into.

And becomes the very preposition she must cross over.

1337

I came to 1337 (pronounced "leet") late.

1337 is an orthography (a "sociolect variety" or a cipher or a language, according to wikipedia) invented and used by online gamers and computer hackers in the early days of computers that has been expanding and evolving ever since. I call it an orthography because, although it has certain words and affixes that don't exist in standard English, English leetspeak (note that leet can be used to modify many languages and is not just an English phenomenon) largely sticks to English grammar but betrays its alphabet by replacing letters with numbers, symbols, and keyboard functions. 1337 or l33t, is an example; so is: 7h3 qµ1(|{ br0wn ƒ0x jµmp$ 0v3r 7h3 £42¥ Ð09.

Leet (short for "elite") seems to have evolved in part because of the difficulty of typing quickly on early machines and the need for a shorthand, but also because of the desire for a mode of communication exclusive to hackers and gamers, which would sift out the truly devoted from the mere dabblers. It is also used in order to evade online software that limits certain content from discussion boards, filters spam, or prevents the selling of pirated material.

Leet is a product of the relentless evolutionary pressure the internet exerts on language, as emails, instant messages, and chatrooms breed written words: spellings mutate, slang is passed down from blogger to reader, and new species of sentence are born. This evolution both brings us together and is a symptom of our togetherness. Leet changes quickly, is highly unstable, and yet remains readable. In part because it looks like English, in part because it is being developed in communal spaces by many minds at once.

What I find most interesting about leet are the challenges it poses to our conception of the alphabet. In leet, there is no one-to-one correspondence between a symbol and the platonic idea of a letter, ie, many characters can be used to indicate the same "letter" and vice versa: I, i, l, 1, 7, /, and ! are essentially interchangeable as more or less narrow, vertical beings.

Even more interesting is the fact that in leet, the method of producing a given character often comes to represent the character itself. For example, on a keyboard, an exclamation point is produced by pressing the "shift" key at the same time as the number "1" key. When a user wants to communicate excitement using many exclamation points, the string often looks like this: "!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11" because, in their excitement, they fail to hold the shift key down as long as is necessary. This typo has now been incorporated into leet. Not only do users intentionally type "!!!!!11!!!!1!1!!!!!," an intention that is hard to discern from the original accidental production, but also: "!!!!!!!one!!!!!!!!eleven!!!!!!!!!!oneone!!!," or even: "!!!!!!!!!!one!!!!!!shift+1."

These permutations draw attention to a user's knowledge of common typing patterns and establish her as an elite hacker. They're more than a little snarky. However, they also highlight the fluidity of signs and the performative possibilities of written language. Using the signifier "!" to indicate excitement is standard; typing "!!!!!!1!!!!!!!!!!11!!!" unintentionally is a performance of excitement; typing "!!!!!!111!!!!!one!!!!!!!!eleven" is a mime of that performed excitement. The mime adds layers of meaning to the original sign, indicating a user's participation in a given community, referencing the emotions and behaviors (excitement, carelessness) of other members of that community, and revealing the mechanics of the production of the sign itself.

When the way you create a sign comes to stand in for the sign itself, it becomes a meta-sign, signifying both the original meaning of the sign and the bare fact of the sign, the fact of the signer. Really, it's quite exciting.

I went to college with an individual named Craig Plunges. He was an English major, interested especially in contemporary poetry, and quite tall.

I bring this individual to your attention because of the remarkble fact that his name is both a proper noun and a full sentence. What if your name were "Bobby Goes to the Store"? Or "It Rains"? In his natural state he's both grammatically correct and ambiguous -- either a name or a sentence; however, once you try to add him to a sentence, you have to decide which is which. Either, "Craig Plunges is coming over" (name) or "Craig plunges for a living" (sentence).

I once worked briefly with someone whose full name, though not spelled this way, was pronounced "On the Loo," but that's just a prepositional phrase and so not at all in the same league.

My own last name is an adverbial phrase, though I assume by accident. "Schön" in German means pretty or beautiful, and if you drop the umlaut in English, you're supposed to add an "e" -- schoen. But "schon" means "already," so my last name -- Schonberg -- now means "already mountain," which doesn't mean much, as far as I can tell. Not only am I far from sentencehood, but the pieces of name I do have can't even be cobbled into recognizable phrases, a sorry state of affairs. Perhaps if my middle name were "is"...

The Corrections

I definitely made up the word "declent." It should be "decline," as observed by astute reader, Liztraut. I'm feeling quite foolish right now. Thank you Mz. Traut, wherever you are.

"She likes her hair to be real orange / she uses tangerines" - The Flaming Lips

An orange is orange and that's what makes the word orange into not just a fruit or a color but a state of being: the state of being in which you feel no disjunction between what you are and what you're called, the state of filling your name completely, perfectly, so that no gaps of doubt, of "what if I were..." or "will I ever be...," remain. Who is lucky enough to count their name as an objective and recognizable condition? Even those whose names have other meanings -- Grace, Claire, Auburn. Can they claim to be contained within those words and can those words claim to be satisfied by them?

An orange is orange. And that's what I envy.

Translator, Adulterer

I used to wonder whenever I met couples what they were like when they were alone. I assumed they behaved differently alone together, that they shared a secret private life, a life of shorthand references to oft-mentioned stories and of solid, true explorations of whatever was most important to them, whatever defined them. I used to wonder what they saw when they looked at each other's faces, what they understood in the cadences of one another's voices, what meaning each of them bore for the other in their material details alone. I was fascinated by this projection of the intimacy between them and by the fact that although I could see them, I would never see them as they saw each other.

There is, however, no intimacy to rival that between a speaker and her native language. Sometimes I imagine English fitting me as skin, not just covering me but holding the spilling and glistening parts of me together, making a solid out of so much liquid and slime. Other times, I picture English as a liquid or gas itself, a lake, the air of a city. Too, I like the image of a small, curled thing, a kitten or a bird, snuggled within me, wrapped tight against the curve of my skull. Closer than any confidant is what makes confidences possible, and lying closer to me than anything else is English.

This is not to say that I feel affection for English itself; rather, that English is inseparable from what I experience, constituent in all my evaluation, interaction, emotion. And so none of these spatial metaphors really works: English is not a reed I whistle through, not a being within me, nor a layer around me. I don't know how to figure it, exactly, except to say that its sounds transcend sound. I cannot peel the words back.

If this intimacy exists between each speaker and her language, then learning a foreign language is the closest we ever come to being inside someone else's head. When first introduced to us, a new word has no meaning, seems random: why should "langweilig" mean "boring" or "marrant," "funny"? They shouldn't for any particular reason, and the first time we hear them, they don't. A new language is a mess of sounds that we have no particular attachment to. But with enough repetition, those sounds become words and those words become...objects, states, causes, effects, loved ones, lost ones, memories, stories, desires: the trail of our fluency.

In those moments when we start to hear a foreign word as a meaning but still remember when it was just a sound, when we speak a language proficiently but not instinctively, it is as if we are entering someone else's mind but without having to leave our own. We feel what it might mean to be a French or German or Arabic or Japanese speaker but we feel too a certain thrill that no native speaker feels. We have broken out of ourselves. Suddenly, the features that seemed so foreign are suffused with a familiar blush.

Put another way, learning to speak another's language is like sleeping with someone else's lover.

Now I Lay Me

In English, "lie" is a present tense intransitive verb. That means that things can lie or lie down, but they can't lie something else down. You have to lay something (or someone) else. "Lay" is a transitive verb. Not so bad.

The past tense of "lie," however, is "lay," as in: "I lay down in the barn but could not sleep for all the mooing."

The past tense of "lay" is "laid."

So I laid a blanket over all the cows. That shut them up.

This distinction may seem not only arbitrary but wilfully confusing; it's certainly going out of fashion. But I was comforted to learn today that the confusion is not native to English, but inherited almost directly from German. It's their arbitrariness and illogic, not ours.

In German, "liegen" is the intransitive and "legen" (pronounced LAY-gun) is the transitive. The past tense of liegen is "gelegen" (guh-LAY-gun) and the past tense of legen, "gelegt." Somehow, everything makes sense when you can blame its nonsense on someone else.

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.