by It happened again this week. Someone said something sarcastic to me, and I, as usual, didn’t catch it. When they tried to tell me they were just being funny, I looked at them and said that I am literal about a lot of things and assume people mean what they say; that I have a different sense of humor. They just shrugged and gracefully clarified, and we continued our conversation. But things don’t always play out this way.
Sarcasm is hard for me, not only because I don’t seem to recognize it when it happens. But because the fact that I can’t or don’t appreciate the intended cleverness of it drives some people crazy. I used to think that my inability to understand it or find it funny meant there was something wrong with me. While I now know that’s not the case, I have spent a good deal of time wondering why.
What I’ve uncovered for myself is that how we use language is often a function of who we interact with, how we interact with them, and what ways of speaking, joking, and engaging are most influential in the early stages of our lives. And, my interactions fostered a relationship with language that causes particular things to elude me…
I did not grow up in a multilingual household or community, but my mother did. Raised in a neighborhood of families who had immigrated from all over the world, she was exposed to many languages and cultures. Her own parents spoke Spanish to her and she spoke English to them. In the process, she developed a particular use of language. Her incorporation of Spanish words, of her Japanese and Polish and Italian friends’ terminology, and of interesting pronunciations of English carried over to me and my brothers, alongside the mix of languages my grandparents would use with us and the culturally-nuanced language of my father’s family. It was our secret way of communicating, unique to our family, full of meaning discernable only to those that could dip into the different cultural worlds from which it was constructed.
The first time I used some of our familial words in public contexts, I realized quickly that not everything we say is understood by others. That assumptions about how people understand a thing are often the basis for misunderstanding. And, that if you want to be understood in a given context, finding and using the group’s agreed-upon definition of a thing is important. Sometimes it means being willing to explain yourself, which means you have to understand your own definition of things first. But, I also learned the beauty of private languages and intimacy of insider understandings, and that they can only emerge with time and trust, explanation and shared experience. Language, in these ways, is a negotiation of meaning, both to clarify and to create understanding.
Language is a negotiation of meaning. Click To TweetIn third grade, I signed up for the school spelling bee. It began a several year involvement in studying the spelling, pronunciation, etymology, and various meanings of words. Words like anemone, and diaphanous, and raspberry with a p. Precision of language and meaning was important. Knowing the difference between consciousness and conscientiousness meant the difference between winning and losing. But, the practice I developed of dissecting, analyzing, speaking and relating to individual words didn’t just increase my ability to compete well, it fostered a deep love of words and a caring for how they are and can be used.
Learning the background of words, for example, turned what seemed like magic–how words come to exist–into a technology of creation. It showed me how letters and sounds and root words are stacked and combined; how a word’s potential for saying a thing that feels exactly right is often the product of its component parts but also the meaning we attribute to it; how new words are born and old words die in synchrony with our human need to push the boundaries of and accommodate our ever-changing world; and the way words of enduring quality travel from culture to culture while other words take on new meaning.
Take onomatopoeia, for example. It is not only fun to say and spell quickly, but defines a class of words that are spelled like the sound that they represent (e.g., pop, fizzle, snap, boing). And, though we use onomatopoeia in modern English language, it comes from the combination of the ancient Greek onoma meaning “name” and poiein meaning “to make.” To create names for things is the essence of spoken language itself…an essence that remains important to my work as a researcher and a writer, as well as, I believe, to my life as a human.
As a voracious reader of fiction and poetry, I was exposed early on to the way that words create worlds…that words have power to connect, to affect, and to evoke, as well as to erase, inflict and incite. The masterful use of metaphor, analogy, and synonym–creating pictures in the mind, explaining the ineffable in terms of the mundane, describing other in terms of the known–can inspire playfulness of thought, elevate the beauty and the complexity of a seemingly simple thing, amplify experience and connect diverse ideas, and show us how alike things (people?) really are. And, experience has shown me, that words can also inflict pain and hurt, can harm or berate, and, for the sake of humor, exclude, belittle, or otherwise narrow understanding of a person or situation in a way that denies the possibility of their wholeness. Personally, I feel all of these things deeply and am drawn to, and err on the side of, language that conveys beauty and joy, possibility and connection.
A beautiful and empathetic use of language can help us feel deeply, see differently, and know that we are not alone in our experience or perception of the world. The way we employ and consume language–or better-stated, the way we linguistically express and experience thought and feeling–is both highly relational and deeply personal. Speak to me from the heart, and I will not only hear you, but experience who you are and find myself in your words.
Speak to me from your heart, and I will not only hear you, but experience who you are and find myself in your words. Click To TweetWanting to learn the language of my grandparents, I moved to Venezuela when I was 15. I studied Spanish, French, and Latin there. In college, I pursued a degree in Russian language and literature and a minor in Spanish literature. I did research in Finland, was a Peace corps volunteer in the republic of Moldova where I worked in Romanian and Russian, and spent time volunteering in Armenia. While I did not learn to speak all of the languages in these places, I did study them enough and spent enough time with people who do speak them to understand that language is contextual, cultural, diverse.
In my attempts at each new language, I was forced to speak like a child would until I mastered the basics and had sufficiently grasped the language and culture to be able to play with my words. I also had to learn to use my primary language in a way that could be understood by those for whom English was a second, third, fourth, etc., language. This meant avoiding jargon and slang, contractions and colloquialisms, and, instead, being very precise in how I understand and articulate words, the meanings of which I’d previously taken for granted. It also meant learning how my definition of a thing differed or was similar to someone else’s definition of a thing so that we could map the points of connection and disagreement in how we understand it. And, it meant learning how people use body language and to anticipate what someone might say in a given context — like, a taxi driver asking where I’m going or cashier asking for money, such that I knew what was being said even when I didn’t.
Learning other languages, speaking with people who spoke other languages, is an empathetic process that allowed me to connect with others, expand my understanding of the world, anticipate others’ intentions, and to see things through others’ eyes…as well as to better understand myself. But it meant first stripping down my own language to its core and appreciating the core of others’ languages in order to gain fluency; understanding nuance and complexity is hardly possible otherwise.
And, what is a language anyway? That core that I wrote of is not really all that common except in language learning books…a single version of a spoken language only existing in our minds. But regional dialects, familial words, blended languages like Spanglish, slang, the jargon of communities and professions, contractions, colloquialisms, adaptations, adoptions leading to the peppering of meaningful-to-some-alone words, the patois of je ne se quois that the multi-lingual or multiple-identitied weave into our patterns of speech, making it colorful, personal and fun.
Language is malleable, a symbol of identity and upbringing, a product of education and circumstance, but also a tool of engagement and creation. But, language is not something we communicate through words alone.
How we look at people, our experience of shared emotion, facial expression, form of dress, musicality and rhythm, how we move through the world and inhabit our bodies, the engagement of others in ritual, our actions, and the way we touch–physically or emotionally, in care or confrontation–are forms of expression unto themselves…highly fluid languages that allow us to communicate with, gain a sense of, and understand a person whether or not we understand their words. In the language of dance, for example–another great love of my life, one must learn to communicate next steps with ever-so-slight movements and eye contact to lead and connect effectively, while a follower must learn to read the information that is held in their partner’s arms and rhythm of breath, tension and slack and directional nudges as guides.
Language, to me, is expansive and beautiful. I want to know, precisely, what you mean. I want to hear and feel the language or languages of the life you lead come through you. I want to experience how you use words and when you use particular gestures. I want to see how your eyes light up, or don’t, and how you hold your body and modulate your voice when communicating a thing.
Why? Because these things tell me something about how you see and experience and understand the world around you and yourself in it…and that allows me to see what you see, to feel what you feel, to experience the essence of who you are.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.
When I frustrate a person with my literalness, when I fail to laugh at a particular use of language, when I ask someone to tell me how they are using a word, it is not an indictment of their humor–though it might be read as such–so much as a search for clarity and connection, and a reflection of my own relationship to language.
I seek the beauty in you and in what you say. Click To TweetI try to seek the beauty in people and take them at their word. So, when you tell me you don’t literally mean what you say, I will ask you what you do mean, without guile, and with the hope that you will tell me with the power and beauty of your words.