Words about Words

Issue 247

Lisbon, 2017

I.

Here’s one way to describe my age: when I walk past a group of students and notice that they’re agreeing about something, I assume that they must be wrong. And I do think that’s for the best. A little generational tension ensures that the culture keeps evolving. The opposite—clutching at younger styles, mentalities, politics, interests, slang, when you’re long past your springtime years—is always a little sad.

And with language it is certainly an old trope that the old must complain about the language of the young. From the first time a caveman’s grunt was codified into a consistent sound, agreed to mean one thing, there was an older generation of cavemen invested in maintaining that pronunciation, never to be altered merely by fads, just because of what passed for chic on the savanna. Yet this conservatism is easy to understand. If you’re educated in one way, if you toil to learn a particular language, to perfect the grammar that’s drilled into you as a child, you want that education to persist: it shapes how you see the world, it feels correct, factual, not malleable.

Gripes about the language do, of course, always look foolish with the passage of time. To complain about the language changing is a surefire way of ensuring that you’ll look silly in one generation, but few people can resist: there are style guides that attempt to solidify correct usage from thousands of years ago, and they’ll keep coming, the teacher forever screaming at the class. Because as long as the world keeps evolving, shifting, the pace relentless, we’ll use language to reflect our hopes, fears, excitements, worries, our haphazard, frenetic state on this spinning rock. The alternative—the grandchildren listening to the same music, using the same vocabulary—is a stasis that’s even more frightening.

II.

Here’s a fatuous sentence: That’s just semantics! It comes in different flavors, depending on the discussion. We’re just talking semantics now. You’re arguing semantics! But what’s troublesome about these complaints—once you stop to think—is that they can be said anytime, anywhere, by anybody, while always having the same meaning.

Sharpening your language, finding distinctions, never seems like a waste of time, especially since the point is communication. It is remarkable that we can manage to communicate at all—so expending a little effort to ensure that we get the words right seems perfectly reasonable. Everything, you might respond, is semantics. The supposed discussion about semantics isn’t the exception. If you’re scrunching the muscles in your face and expelling air from your mouth, the subject is semantics. Besides, sometimes the thing itself is much less interesting than what the thing happens to be called.

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III.

Aristotle claimed that metaphors were a form of knowledge. They permit unexpected connections rather than mere embellishments of language. Often, it is this combination, this coalescing, that reveals something new. Reasoning by analogy, thinking in terms of how something you don’t know is a bit like something you already know, isn’t the worst use of your time.

Although there’s a stricture against mixing metaphors that I prefer to ignore. At this point I’m convinced that the primary reason people dislike mixed metaphors is because they’ve been told to dislike mixed metaphors. Occasionally they work just fine, laying meaning atop meaning. I especially like staccato descriptions—when the picture that’s created is immediately surpassed by another picture, such as in Lydia Davis’ translation of Madame Bovary:

A carriage with drawn blinds that kept appearing and reappearing, sealed tighter than a tomb and tossed about like a ship at sea.

That’s a tricky technique to balance, as you’re in danger of leaving the reader befuddled, or overwhelmed, but I can picture the tomb inside the ship, with the second picture amplifying the first. The same sensation comes with this quote from John Banville’s The Sea:

I had a sense of a general, large, soft settling, as of a sheet unfurling and falling on a bed, or a tent collapsing into the cushion of its own air.

Two images, layered, the degree of difficulty and potential for disaster at its maximum. Here’s Mircea Cărtărescu in Solenoid:

They are scattered more or less evenly through my entire world, like bits of food that await me here and there in the laboratory maze where I live, like signposts along my tangled route toward the exit.

Nabokov, of course, got here first—providing the distinction between holding a thought poetically and holding a thought in a drunken stupor. He begins this sentence after describing a simile about mist:

If you go on to say the mist was like the veil of a bride, this is a sustained simile with elements of mild poetry; but if you say, the mist was like the veil of a fat bride whose father was even fatter and wore a wig, this is a rambling simile, marred by an illogical continuation, of the kind Homer used for purposes of epic narration and Gogol used for grotesque dream-effects.

Notice, incidentally, that Nabokov, who isn’t known for efficiency, requires only two sentences to give both Homer and Gogol a mild slap—because the language game is forever changing its rules, there’s always a worthwhile argument about semantics, and no gods are permitted.