The Crow's Eye: Language

"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Nov 19, 2011

Language

Sometimes you have to speak the enemy's language, or he won't be able to hear what you have to say. Hell, he might only know about you, in theory. You may only exist to him as an obstacle. Or as a bundle of potential or manipulable reactions. If his response to your existence is a life destroying legal action, he's looking to break you with your fear. If his reaction to your discontent is to send in ten cohorts of the peace legions of the homeland, it's your terror at death and injury, your dread of punishment, your horror at ostracism and recrimination which he is trying to provoke. You aren't human to him. He has no word for your humanity, in his native tongue.

If you play make-nice and do-good with him, he may not be able to comprehend. He might not even speak the language. Perhaps the best response is to use the language he understands.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...: Speak the truth even if your voice shakes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlvLNjQRCVM&feature=BFa&list=ULzXQwoc9kjSY&lf=mfu_in_order

In solidarity
Frances; January 6, 2012 at 2:42 PM

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This one took a while to put into words.

I don't kid myself that I've stumbled upon a unique insight and I have little doubt that someone has already written or said this better than I. Five minutes after I hit the "publish" button, I'll probably regret the choice of words more than I already do now - because it's difficult to get my head outside of English language usage, to comment on a problem with that usage, whilst using the English language to do so.

In the interest of not making more of an ass of myself than necessary, I've pared a very long thesis down to a paragraph:

I find it troubling that, using English, I have very limited choice in expressing how I relate to people with whom I have ongoing interaction. If I want to reference the nature of my relations with the woman who has challenged me to grow in ways I never imagined possible, the woman who howled with a primal, gorgeous, earth shattering, mother bear of a refrain, transcending pain and pleasure in act of creation to which I will never be immediate party, who has with her defiant and proud womanhood still intact forged a family out of disparate parts - I have to write "my wife." I have to reduce her to property. That really pisses me off. I don't own her. I don't fucking want the title or the claim. I don't want to express possession, simply to refer to her (without writing a discursive dissertation). I don't like one bit that the short hand for "association" in English is expressed in the possessive. I don't own my wife or my children. They're not mine.

So, fuck you Latin and Germanic branches of the Indo-European language group.

That is all.