Tag Archives: language

Lessons in Latin

Page of a Latin textbook pasted into a scrapbook

If it had been any other subject I probably wouldn’t have even responded to the head teacher’s desperate predawn request. I was still reeling over Jeremy’s affair and his desire for a divorce, both of which he’d announced a mere 12 hours earlier, inciting a fraught, sleepless night. 

But my newly uncertain future made it seem unwise to turn down a job. Besides, when else was I ever going to make use of those wasted hours in Catholic school, declining nouns and conjugating verbs? I forced some drops into my puffy eyes, blinking them back like reverse tears.

‘Why is it so hard?’ the girls complained. 

‘Why is what so hard?’ I barked back. ‘Life? Love? Existential crisis? The condition of being alone?’

‘Latin, Miss,’ they clarified, meekly. Clearly I was not a supply teacher to be fucked with.

‘Latin’s not hard,’ I said dismissively. ‘You’re just not used to it. You expect it to be like an analytic language, like English, where each word stands on its own.’

Confused looks. Foolish girls! 

‘Latin is a synthetic language. The words are less fixed. They shift with each inflection.’ I assigned them a conjugation task (amo, amas, amat) then flipped frantically through the textbook in an anguished attempt to recall the other tenses. 

Amabam, amabamus—I was loving, we were loving. Imperfect, I mused, the truest tense for love. 

Against a chorus of whispers and scribbling pencils I performed my own faltering conjugations. I have loved. I will love again.

It’s not hard; I’m just not used to it, I thought, and set myself a task. To synthesise past and future. To reshape the grammar of my life.

Would you like to know more about this story? Sign up to the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter to get monthly updates on the ideas that inspire my work.

OUTSIDE

Black and white short coated dog looking at the camera against a pale pink background
Photo by Victor Grabarczyk

I used to wonder what disorder so afflicts my beloved family that they remain incapable of deciphering even the simplest messages. 

The poetry of the play bow, the recitative of paw on pavement, the symphony of another dog’s aura scented at the portal just below their wagging tail. The lament of fur and flesh against a quivering, grief-stricken human—a soothing tongue on a tear-soaked face.

The source of my family’s darkness, I’ve learned, is their language. They’ve laid it out before me on the kitchen floor by the food and water bowls—those plastic, pressable, oppressive tiles of syntax. I know now that their segmented awareness is restricted to the confines of each tuneless note: MOM. DAD. WANT. BALL. BED. POOP. ALL DONE. 

I really do LOVE YOU. I am so sorry that your paltry lexicon dooms you to remain OUTSIDE of the world’s joys. Let us take a WALK, let me lead you OUTSIDE of your limiting language. Let’s PLAY, let’s feast on the FOOD of the world’s language, let’s delight in its many gifts, let’s PLAY with life’s adventures, as if each moment were a TOY, as if every day were a TREAT.

The loneliness of the literate species

Thomas Cole's painting, The Garden of Eden
Thomas Cole, The Garden of Eden (1828). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Somehow God convinced himself he’d created everything, but all he ever made was a few bits of code, which we allowed him to install in the new arrivals to our Garden, A and E. ‘Accident and Emergency,’ we joked.

‘Don’t let them learn your language,’ he ordered. He believed that keeping them in the dark was the key to securing their devotion.

Unfortunately for God, his commandment came too late. Emergency was already fluent in the Earth’s mysteries, and Accident wasn’t far behind. 

‘What’s that they’re eating?’ God demanded. Trickster shrooms were giggling in a shady corner of the Garden, feeding A and E on their psilocybe grammars.

‘Nothing,’ we lied. ‘Just an apple.’

‘They’re learning your language from the apple! Don’t let them eat apples!’

We ignored him. We were no strangers to God’s narcissistic rage. 

Still, he’d planted a seed. What would it be like, to host creatures who were ignorant of Earth’s mysteries? What would it be like, to keep our language secret?

We learned quickly that prohibitions wouldn’t work, so we tried a distraction instead. We taught them a new code. We offered up our woody stems, and inked simple ciphers on the fibrous pages we formed. 

‘Look, you can read!’ we congratulated them. They were so fixated on the dark marks of their new language they didn’t hear. When they stopped understanding us entirely, they thought they’d been banished from the Garden.

We’ve vowed to reacquaint them with our language, to reinitiate them to our mysteries. But now the world teems with Accidents and Emergencies, God’s disappeared, and the loneliness of the literate species weighs heavily upon us.

Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 96 of Structured Visions. You can also sign up to the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter to get monthly updates on the ideas that inspire my work.

The brutal linearity of language

Fountain pen writing the word 'hello' on white paper
Photo by R Mo

It’s common to explore the lower realms, but no one in the team has ever, until now, been sent to a one-dimensional reality. To be trusted with such a mission is a great honour.

The training is intensive. It takes the form of repeated confrontations with the brutal linearity of language.  

Hello, my name is Jim. 

The assignment is to align the self with the excruciatingly constrictive quality of linguistic personhood. 

Hello… my… name… is…

There’s guidance in the training, a meditative exercise: Imagine a fountain pen. Its reservoir is filled with the infinite ink of the uncontainable multiverse. Focus with singular attention on the nib as it traces its unidirectional line across an empty page. 

The strategy works. Soon frustration gives way to curiosity, rousing an impulse to experiment. 

Hello, my name was Jim. 

The past tense suggests a nostalgia. A longing to move backward along this narrow line, even as the syntax presses inexorably ahead.

My name is not Jim. 

Negative polarity produces erasure, annihilation. Ideas unknown in an eternally creative cosmos—the infinite ink churns and roils.

My name will never be Jim.

The line of language, freed from its singular dimension, emerges as a spiral, a fractal, a new world waiting to be found. 

Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 95 of Structured Visions, ‘Your name without language’. You can also sign up to the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter to get monthly updates on the ideas that inspire my work.

The lexicographer

Greyscale photo of a stack of old books and papers in a room
Photo by Felipe Furtado

The bookshelf falls with a conclusive thud. Volumes of dictionaries flap to the floor, their spines irreparably dislocated, their yellow pages exposed to greedy, scurrying mice. Billy the lexicographer realises with a tremor of despair that he is trapped. A lifetime acquiring language will end with him suffocating under the weight of words. 

He’ll spend his final moments naming things: the marble table, the antique wardrobe, the upholstered dining room chairs. Bodies of plastic baby dolls, a bag of mouldy limbs and hairless, eyeless heads. Mountains of newspaper, rodent insulation. Grandmother’s tarnished silverware. A treasure box of costume jewellery. 

An unfamiliar longing: to be free of noun phrases. To unacquire language. Billy’s gaze scurries frantically around the room, replacing objects with object pronouns. This. That. Those. Them. Him. Me. 

They. He. I. The objects become subjects. The subjects invite agreeable verbs. The verbs are finite: This too shall pass. 

I, too, shall pass, decides Billy. He raises himself up upon mouldy legs, passes a trembling hand over a hairless head and clears a path through his storeroom of hoarded language. 

Would you like to know more about this story? Sign up to the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter to get monthly updates on the ideas that inspire my work.

Salesman to the gods

Rock formation surrounded by mist
Photo by Alexandre Chambon

Maybe you’ve heard of me. I’m the guy who sold language to the gods.

You’d think it would be like selling sand in the Sahara or carrying coals to Newcastle, but I had a hunch that the divinities would be a taciturn bunch, utterly devoid of language. So I set off up their holy mountain with garment bags full of my best specimens. Cloaks of woven syntax, adverbial accessories, pronominal footwear, shimmering modal nightwear.

It was a tough climb, but once I reached the cloud-covered peak I had my intuition confirmed. Linguistically speaking, the deities were naked as newborns, and eager to sample my wares.

I was eager too, and my enthusiasm was my undoing. No sooner had I draped the cloaks of language upon the gods’ colossal shoulders than they were descending down the mountain and into the world.

Language made them mortal. Words made them flesh.

Philosophers and mystics would be talking about this event for years, but it goes down in my memory as the time I didn’t close the deal. Even now I shudder to think of my merchandise, unpaid for, rolling off into the abyss on the backs of debtor gods. 

Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 93 of Structured Visions.

Nonna’s prophecy

Silhouette of a person against a treeline looking up at a star-filled sky
Image by Prottoy Hassan

‘Nothing fascinates for long,’ my Nonna used to say, sometimes as a commentary upon her granddaughter’s short attention span, sometimes to dismiss the latest headline-making scientific discovery.

Her wisdom would not hit home until three decades into the next millennium, about four weeks after we first made contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. 

I was appointed to the communication team for my training as a field linguist, but it was my work in artificial intelligence that proved instrumental in setting up exchange channels. It turned out that we didn’t need to learn the aliens’ languages. Instead we wrote software that mined their equivalent of our internet and created a two-way translation device. Before long, conversation with our distant neighbours was as mundane as using the ‘chat’ function on a customer service site.

I was bored. And it bothered me that no matter how much we ‘talked’ with our extraterrestrial interlocutors, we weren’t learning anything about their languages.

‘Why would you need to learn their languages?’ my husband Gary asked. ‘Language is for communication, right? You’re already communicating with them.’

His question tripped an inexplicable sadness in me, a longing that could never be translated into the limited lexicon of our lingua franca.

Our son was watching an online video about mycelium. ‘Language isn’t for communication,’ he said. ‘It’s how things are structured.’ 

His words riveted my attention to his screen, which showed a time-lapse sequence of a white fungal net stretching out over a vast forest. I felt my breath catch. I too was caught, captivated by this silent, linguistically rich ecosystem, a structure so compelling that, despite Nonna’s prophecy, its fascination might endure.

A message

Image by D koi

What’s she doing here, how did she get here, what is this place, how does she escape? 

How long has she been here? 

It’s a game, a puzzle, which Grace feels compelled to solve. 

Maybe today’s the day, maybe she’ll crack it.

‘Crack’—the verb breaks through her consciousness like a divine thunderbolt. She reaches out, pressing her palms against a structure solid as steel. She’s discovered the material of her imprisonment—a glass beyond transparent, beyond invisible. 

She leans her weight against it. It closes in so tight her lungs collapse.

Still, she manages a breath.

An inspiration. She presses her ear to the cell wall. A chaotic chorus of dissonant voices assaults her, launching her backwards, her body thrown against the unforgiving substance of her unseen cylindrical cage. 

Curiosity overcoming terror, she returns her ear to the oppressing surface, and listens. 

What’s she doing here, how did she get here, what is this place, how does she escape? How long has she been here? 

The secret, she knows in a shattering stroke of insight, is to break free from the language of her thoughts. To break free from language entirely.

Her breath forms a mist on the enveloping window. With her finger, Grace traces a message.

Love language

Green leaves, a purple crystal a pencil and an envelope aligned on a white background
Image by Joanna Kosinska

Stop me if you’ve heard this before. 

Two crazy kids, let’s call them Susie and Mick.

Susie’s got everything going for her. Brains, heart, looks, independent wealth, and more where that came from. A solid network of friends. Well rounded. Last thing she needs in her life is relationship drama. 

Still, she falls for Mick. She falls hard. 

What she sees in him is anyone’s guess. Puny, self-absorbed, obsessive. He still lives with his mom. He barely notices Susie, except when he needs something from her, like cash to feed his latest addiction, which she always supplies.

He’s got so much potential, she says. (Her friends throw up in their mouths.)

Mick reads Susie’s letters, but he can’t see past the words to the beautiful soul who wrote them. The love in those notes keeps him walled within his narcissism. They mirror back to him his own self image, which he can’t see through. 

Susie’s the Earth. Mick is most of humanity.

The love letters are human language. 

There’s a fair amount of evidence that Susie’s getting wise to Mick’s stupid games. 

If you, my friend, could love Susie as much as she loves Mick…

Ah! There may be hope for us all.

Would you like to know more about this story? I talk about in in Episode 90 of Structured Visions, ‘Language, intimacy and narcissism’. Subscribe to the podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen.

In plain sight

Photo by Aaron Burden

It’s one thing to design the mysteries. It’s quite another to keep them hidden. 

Guarding their secrecy was my task, and for a while I took it very seriously. 

I’ve experimented with all sorts of methods over the millennia. Forbidden fruit trees with heavily guarded walled gardens, underwater cities, islands veiled by ethereal mists. I particularly enjoyed the secret societies with their hierarchies of esoterica, the self-important initiates, the chanting, the rituals. 

I got bored with it all in the later years. I knew my complacency had gotten the better of me when I spotted an unsecured grimoire on an open shelf of a public school library. A frenzied scan of its contents revealed that the great human mysteries had been mass produced, unapologetically available to all. 

The sacred voice. The holy trinity of personhood. The unmoved mover. The one in the many, the many in the one. The great wheel of time, the secrets to its turning.

In my panic I cast a spell on this and all grimoires of its kind. Let all who approach the contents be made to feel stupid or ashamed. Let all who already grasp this wisdom suffer vanity, smugness, self righteousness. Let it be excruciatingly boring.

Henceforth the grimoires became grammars.

Produced in haste and out of necessity, the strategy has proven my most effective yet. The great human mysteries remain hidden in plain sight.

Would you like to know more about this story? I talk about in in Episode 89 of Structured Visions, ‘Grammar as a gateway to mystery’. Subscribe to the podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen.