American writer Gary Lutz describes the moment in his early teens when he began to read “in silence and in private”:
Many of the words were unfamiliar to me, but the words fizzed and popped and tinkled and bonged. I was reading so slowly that in many a word I heard the scrunch and flump of the consonants and the peal of the vowels. Granted, I wasn’t retaining much of anything, but almost every word now struck me as a provocative hullabaloo. This was my first real lesson about language—this inkling that a word is a solid, something firm and palpable. It was news to me that a word is matter, that it exists in tactual materiality, that it has a cubic bulk. Only on the page is it flat and undensified. In the mouth and in the mind it is three-dimensional, and there are parts that shoot out from it or sink into its syntactic surround.
From The Sentence Is a Lonely Place, a lecture by Lutz published in The Believer in 2009. It’s a long read — almost 7,000 words — but before a paragraph has elapsed you’ll either have had enough or you won’t want to stop reading until you reach the end.
Irish writer Oliver St. John Gogarty was kidnapped at gunpoint by the IRA on a cold winter night in 1923, during the country’s Civil War. His escape is the stuff of modern romantic legend. W. B. Yeats — who thought Gogarty “one of the great lyric poets of his age” — gives the following account of events:
Oliver Gogarty was captured by his enemies, imprisoned in a deserted house on the edge of the Liffey with every prospect of death. Pleading a natural necessity he got into the garden, plunged under a shower of revolver bullets and as he swam the ice-cold December stream promised it, should it land him in safety, two swans. I was present when he fulfilled that vow.
[from the Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes]
George Moore called Gogarty “author of all the jokes that enable us to live in Dublin”. Even during the abduction his tongue was unstill: on arrival at the house, he is said to have asked his captors whether he should tip the driver. Conduct was for Gogarty “a series of larks”, in Ellmann’s phrase; little wonder there was soon a popular ballad celebrating his Liffey adventure.
But the gift of swans is what I like most about the story, the gesture showing both Gogarty’s poetic sensibility and his talent for myth-making. The Liffey was not just a means of escape but an entity to be honoured with a ceremonial offering of further life (though the swans seemingly took some persuasion to make the river their home).
Who knows, maybe they’re ancestors of the one that nibbled my hand on the other side of the Shannon some decades later.
I’ve written about Daniel Everett before, in a short post titled “Languages live like bread and love”, the purpose of which was to share a talk he gave on Pirahã and other endangered languages. Since then, I’ve read his book Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle, and found it an enthralling, affecting portrait of a remarkable language and culture.
Everett’s original motivation in living with the Pirahãs, which he did for many years, was religious: he was a missionary who wanted to translate the Bible into Pirahã and convert the people to Christianity. (That the last chapter is called “Converting the Missionary” will give you an idea of how that turned out.)
The book skilfully blends linguistic fieldwork, ethnography, and memoir. Here’s a snippet:
The first time the Pirahãs brought me something to eat, roasted fish, they asked me, “Gíxai soxóá xobáaxáaí. Kohoaipi?” (Do you already know how to eat this?) It is a great phrase, because if you really don’t want something, it gives you a way out without causing offense. All you have to say is “No, I don’t know how to eat this.”
A little later, the same construction appears in another context. Everett and five Pirahã men are returning to the village from the jungle, where they have been gathering roof materials. The path is long and narrow, with vegetation hanging low over and around it. Each man is carrying a heavy bundle of wood and thatch. Though the Pirahãs do not seem at all tired, Everett is struggling:
I realized that I was getting very tired and again perspiring profusely. I was wondering if I could make it back to the village with this load. My thoughts were interrupted by Kóxoí, who came up alongside of me, smiled, and then reached and took my bundle of palm wood onto his shoulder, adding it to his own load. “You don’t know how to carry this” was all he said.
*
Further on in the book, there’s a chapter on different channels of communication. Everett writes that because the Pirahã language makes extensive use of pitch, it has communication channels, or “channels of discourse”, that are lacking in most European languages.
Everett describes five such channels, each of which serves particular functions in Pirahã culture: whistle speech, hum speech, musical speech, yell speech, and normal speech. Hum speech is what the Pirahãs do instead of whispering. It’s spoken at low volume to disguise what’s being said or who’s saying it, and it’s also used by mothers talking to their children, or when someone’s mouth is full.
Don’t Sleep… has an amusing anecdote of the first time Everett heard the Pirahãs use whistle speech. They had allowed him to go hunting with them, but decided to leave him alone by a tree because his noise (“clunking canteen and machete and congenital clumsiness”) was keeping the animals away.
As I tried to make the best of my solitary confinement, I heard the men whistling to one another. They were saying, “I’ll go over there; you go that way,” and other such hunting talk. But clearly they were communicating. It was fascinating because it sounded so different from anything I had heard before. The whistles carried long and clear in the jungle. I could immediately see the importance and usefulness of this channel, which I guessed would also be much less likely to scare away game than the lower frequencies of the men’s normal voices.
In a previous post, “Silbo Gomero and whistled languages”, I mentioned how whistle speech develops naturally in response to certain activities, such as shepherding and hunting, and environments, such as mountains and dense forest. If you’re curious, you’ll find links, sound files, and video there.
For a few years in the 1950s, independent publishing company André Deutsch rented the top two-thirds of a doctor’s house in London. Diana Athill, then an editor at the company, describes them as “happy years, but still a touch amateurish: did proper publishers have to put a board over a bath to make a packing-bench?” (Stet: An Editor’s Life*).
During its time in that location, however, the company did well enough to buy Derek Verschoyle’s firm and to move into its premises in Soho. Athill recalls one consequence of the deal:
One of the more burdensome books we inherited from him was a pointless compilation called Memorable Balls, a title so much tittered over that we thought of leaving it out when we were arranging our stand at The Sunday Times’s first book fair. Finally one copy was shoved into an inconspicuous corner – where the Queen Mother, who had opened the fair, instantly noticed it. Picking it up, she exclaimed with delight: ‘Oh, what a tempting title!’ André insisted that it was his confusion over this that made him drop her a deep curtsey instead of a bow.
As you’ve no doubt guessed, Memorable Balls has nothing to do with sport or anatomy but concerns formal dances. It was edited by James Laver, an author and fashion historian who came up with a system he called Laver’s Law (Taste and Fashion, 1937) to describe popular attitudes to fashion:
Was the author’s tongue partly in cheek when he composed this table? I don’t have a copy of Taste and Fashion, or any of Laver’s other books, so I can’t infer his tone from context.
It is in any case a revealing list of adjectives, some of which I often see applied to language usages. “Language is like dress,” wrote Simeon Potter in Our Language. “We vary our dress to suit the occasion.”
In honour of Laver’s Memorable Balls, I propose Balls’ Law: Bawdy double entendres never fall fully out of fashion.
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* For another anecdote from Athill’s marvellous memoir, see this earlier post.
A night to remember
The news from Ireland;
Something under the bed is drooling.
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These two bring the bookmash count to 10. Nos. 1–8 are here.
Thank you to the authors: Declan Hughes, Seamus Deane, Hermann Hesse, Joe R. Lansdale, Eric R. Kandel, the war poets, and Nuala O’Faolain (Dead Voices Reading); Walter Lord, William Trevor, and Bill Watterson (The News from Ireland); and special thanks to Nina Katchadourian, whose wonderful series of Sorted Books got me started.
J. R. R. Tolkien’s deep interest in language is evident to his readers and to anyone familiar with the broad facts of his professional life: as well as being a famous and well-regarded author, he was a professor of language and literature, a philologist, a poet, and a translator. He once wrote in a letter that his work – all of it – was “fundamentally linguistic in inspiration”.
Tolkien was also an avid and prolific conlanger: a creator of conlangs, or constructed languages. Though he liked Esperanto, and approved of the idea of a unifying artificial language for Europe for political reasons, his interest in conlangs was primarily creative. It was an artistic urge rather than a practical or commercial consideration.
He placed great stock in the authenticity of the languages he invented. This made for painstaking work, “an art for which life is not long enough”, as he put it. Christopher Tolkien described how his father would proceed
from the ‘bases’ or primitive stems, adding suffix or prefix or forming compounds, deciding (or, as he would have said, ‘finding out’) when the word came into the language, following it through the regular changes in form that it would thus have undergone, and observing the possibilities of formal or semantic influence from other words in the course of its history.
Arika Okrent, in her book In the Land of Invented Languages, writes that for Tolkien, “language creation was an art all its own, enhanced and enriched by the stories”. The book’s last chapter includes a memorable excerpt from Tolkien’s lecture A Secret Vice that shows how strongly language invention affected him – even when it was someone else’s, casually overheard. Here’s the anecdote in full:
What value do we place on the sound of our own voice? How does that affect who you are as a person? – Roger Ebert
In a recent post titled “Speech as a river of electricity” (the analogy is Emerson’s), I wrote that language is an intimate part of our identity which for most people begins with speech and stays centred there. The act of speaking is impressively intricate – a marvel of biological mechanics in tandem with the complex cognition by which our species is privileged.
This struck me anew when I watched Remaking my voice (embedded below), Roger Ebert’s gracious talk at TED2011 about the importance of communication and how he achieves it since permanently losing his voice. With the help of his wife, Chaz, two friends, and a computer voice generator, Ebert describes the loss, the challenge of coming to terms with it, and the efforts made to replace, rediscover, and recreate his voice by various means.
“All my life, I was a motormouth,” he says. “Now I have spoken my last words, and I don’t even remember for sure what they were.” He says there was
no particular day when anyone told me I would never speak again. It just sort of became obvious. . . . Because I had lost my jaw, I could no longer form a seal; and therefore my tongue, and all of my other vocal equipment, was rendered powerless.
Good humour, care and generosity radiate from Ebert and suffuse his words whether he writes them or has them delivered by someone else or by a computer. Chris Jones wrote in an Esquire article last year that Ebert’s anger “rarely lasts long enough for him to write it down”. His is a happy presence, quiet and thoughtful but also demonstrative and lively, his eyes sparkling and alert. He talks about how lucky he feels that his condition, while it sometimes slows his expression, does not prevent it. Far from it.
We are social creatures, most of us, with an intense need to share our thoughts and experiences. Ebert, via Chaz, mentions a Twitter friend who can type only with his toes. I’m reminded of Christy Brown, who wrote and painted with his famous Left Foot, and Christopher Nolan, who typed books with his forehead. Imagine the patience. In company that is divided by language, we will gesture, mime, and draw, improvising ways to break linguistic boundaries and tell stories to one another. Online, we are spoilt for choice. Ebert again:
Writing on the internet has become a life saver for me. My ability to think and write have not been affected, and on the web my real voice finds expression. . . . If I were in this condition at any point before a few cosmological instants ago, I would be as isolated as a hermit. I would be trapped inside my head. Because of the rush of human knowledge, because of the digital revolution, I have a voice, and I do not need to scream.
Christine Kenneally, in The First Word, writes that “for all its power to wound and seduce, speech is our most ephemeral creation.” It is a breath of (normally) meaningful sound, gone in an instant unless recorded or committed conscientiously to memory, in which case it is but a distorted echo.
Writing is different. It survives directly. Ebert, a writer of considerable skill and experience (he is the first film critic to win the Pulitzer prize), will be well aware of the peculiar and intimate alchemy of writing, the hushed endeavour to translate, arrange, and set down our thoughts to our satisfaction, and of the clarity it can bestow when we do it well.
In Writing as Thinking (PDF), a paper published in 2008, Keith Oatley and Maja Djikic put it like this: “Paper can be like a conversation partner, but with the enhancement that the words do not dissolve into the air”. They quote I. A. Richards’s great line that a book is a machine to think with. To paper and books we may add other writing and recording media. Oatley and Djikic continue:
What is written can also be taken up by someone else who does, as it were, the backward translation of words into mental models within which he or she can think. In this way, thought can be passed from mind to mind. Also the writer can be the reader, can replay an externalized thought in language form back to himself or herself, and take part in the iterated movement by which thoughts can be improved.
I’ll stop here before I’m tempted to ramble on again. Here is Roger Ebert’s talk. If you can set 20 minutes aside for it, you’ll be very glad you did.
Posted by Stan 
