“Making the green one red.”
Macbeth on washing the fathomless blood from his hands; Shakespeare on the dual troves of English, the multisyllabic, grandiloquent Latinate and the blunt, earthy Anglo-Saxon.
This was shown to us in my life-changing freshman English class, Humanities 6. (Contrary to Harvard’s reputation for scorning undergraduate education in the snooty pursuit of higher scholarship, everything about freshman year was life-changing. I walked out of there fully equipped for a long and fruitful mental life in, as the faculty was called, “Arts and Sciences.” The rest was dispensable.) I’ve never forgotten that revelation of the unique resources of my language, laid down by the layers of English history: the Angles and Saxons, the Danes (who gave us the word “die”), the Catholic Church, the Norman French—and, buried at the bottom and squeezed to the margins, the druidic Celts—the amulet, the wild card queering the lot. What a pig-out for poets! The best of them land their most stunning punches using these contrasting palettes.
Over the centuries, though, something sad and strange has happened to English. Latin languages are beautiful, flowering with mellifluous flourishes; but in the dour climate of industry and commerce our Latinate words have dried out and stiffened into bureaucratic abstractions. Too many of them end in “–tion.”
I noticed the problem while trying to translate, or failing that, to show why it’s impossible to translate, Rilke, a German poet of immense tenderness. In Rilke’s hands German, of all things, is as rosy and warm and pliable as young flesh by candlelight in a Latour painting. I was trying to convey the intimacy of the words “Inneres der Hand” that begin one of his poems. “Palm of the hand” is a correct translation, but bare of the sheltering, sharing, confiding overtones, the trusting touch, of the word Inneres. Here, I’ll show you my secret, just the two of us. “Palm” is anatomically accurate and pleasantly tactile, a word that blends Fingerspitzengedâchtnis (“fingertip memory”—I just made that up) with the involuntary movement of the tongue rolling over in bed beside the silent “l,” as in “balm.” But next to Inneres it’s Samson without his hair, Saturn without its rings.
How do you translate that word? “Interior”? That’s from a real estate ad, not even Vermeer anymore. “Inside”? Bones and blood vessels. “Inwardness”? Awkward, and means something else, more disembodied, more solipsistic than shared. On the spectrum. Do you coin a word (as Rilke may have coined “Inneres“), like “innerness”? Too precious, and lacks the double whammy of being at once physically literal and emotionally resonant. “In-side,” with a hyphen, maybe, except it isn’t a side. It’s more like a face. Or an underbelly.
It’s worth noting that a German academy of the seventeenth century had as its mandate “to maintain the purity of German through the purging of foreign words (mainly French and Latin).” This obliged Germans to translate Latinisms into German or construct new abstractions out of German roots, which in turn keeps German abstractions closer to their roots. Their roots are showing. Few of us any longer see the weighing scales in the verb “to deliberate,” or, in “inexorable,” the child-eating monster under the bridge who “can’t be talked out of it.”
Purity be damned. English was born bastardized; it didn’t even exist until the Normans aristocratically raped the smallholder Saxons. “Inexorable” has taken on its own stony beauty:
and the light seems to be eternaland joy seems to be inexorableI am foolish enough always to find it in wind
From this delightful article on the checkered history of the semicolon:
For most of the history of the English language, punctuation was a matter of taste. Writers relied on their ears and their instincts to judge where best to mark a pause.
I still use it that way! (So did Abraham Lincoln: “With educated people, I suppose, punctuation is a matter of rule; with me it is a matter of feeling.”)
I know I have written before about the physicality of punctuation (and I know I have written before, “I know I’ve written about this before”) . . . and looking it up, I was amused to find that while my impression of different punctuation marks hasn’t changed, the feeling tone I attribute to them has changed by 180 degrees.
I still see a colon as two eyes looking straight at something, full stop, and a semicolon as turning its gaze aside. (As an aside, a semicolon is used to portray a wink in an emoticon [ ;-) ]). But in 2013, I saw the colon as cool, respectful regard, giving the looked-at phenomenon its due but also its space, and the semicolon’s deflected gaze as a cold shoulder.
Now, I see the colon’s bald stare as intrusive, inquisitory, almost accusatory—a blinding pair of headlights—and the semicolon’s glance aside as tactful, respectful of privacy.
WTF.
My impression of the comma hasn’t changed. It’s like a pawn in chess. The working class of punctuation. The one who does all the plain work. nearly unnoticed. It’s in constant, humble motion, loading and unloading trucks. (You could even see the Oxford comma as three, instead of two, people carrying a railroad tie.) The period is plain, too, but it at least resists. It sits down in the middle of the street and stops traffic. It has lead in its butt and the power of civil disobedience. Unbudgeable as a stone, it says no.
Please provide a wisecrack to go with the delicious piece of unintentional ambiguity.
Boom: The economy added 304,000 jobs in January — significantly more than the 170,000 economists were expecting
—from Axios, February 1, 2019
Copying this from a Facebook post and comments.
***********************
I get a notification in my e-mail that someone has messaged me on Facebook. The e-mail says at the bottom, “You’ll need to use Messenger to see and respond to this message.”
Note that word “need.” That word was carefully chosen. Hours were spent chin-stroking and chortling evilly in a conference room placing that word. Meant to activate subconscious anxiety and craving.
No, I don’t NEED to use Messenger. I will never, ever NEED to use Messenger. I NEEDED to throw it out of my phone because the goddamn voracious data-mining implant monster was eavesdropping on me.
Annie Gottlieb They seem to count on the fact that it costs energy, time, and hassle to fight these things and so we will be trained and reinforced to capitulate.
Douglas Harper Right. The default setting in the virtual world is to let the machine be in charge, even of your expression. The deliberate infantilization of the adult mind, or perhaps just a reduction to the common denominator. I suspect the mass of internet users wants it this way, and we’re the curmudgeons. Whether the mass was manipulated into that, to some degree, is the third question. My opinion of the species is sufficiently low that I think democratization alone explains it, mostly.
Annie Gottlieb They may think of it as a convenience that’s just in its early stages and so gets it hilariously wrong at times. AI will keep improving until it merges seamlessly with our wishes. But it is in fact a deliberate undermining of our autonomy.
The Compulsive Copyeditor 