Capering Word Puppets

I was reading A.S. Byatt’s Babel Tower this afternoon, when my eyes got tangled in a description of a class studying Howards End and Women in Love:

These grown up human beings speak wisely and foolishly of other human beings: Margaret and Ursula, Forster and Lawrence, Birkin and Mr. Wilcox, as though they were (as they are) people they know (and don’t know).  They know perfectly well, if reminded, that four of these six beings are actually made of words, are capering word puppets, not flesh and blood.

This passage made me realize, abruptly, that to the individual there is no difference between a character in a work of literature and a real human being whom he has never met.  There are numerous people–friends of friends, great-grandparents dead before my birth, authors and artists and intellectuals whose works are their only public presence, famous historical figures, etc.–whom I know only by description.  In my understanding they, too, are nothing but linguistic constructions, “capering word puppets” less developed, probably, than the meticulously woven characters of my favorite authors.

Our willingness and effortless ability to treat these language-sketches as real people whether we may someday encounter them as such (a friend’s boyfriend or J.K. Rowling) or not (George Eliot or Julius Caesar) suggests that literature is as valid a forum for the study of human nature as history or current events.  This is, of course, a position that I tend not to dispute, although there are certainly people who set up fiction in opposition to “real life.”  They may scorn the study of “nonsense,” but fiction, I think, is often as real to the individual as “real life” itself, sometimes more-so.

I need to think more about this–the fusion or distinction of the real and the fictional–and whether it is at all important, where the boundaries lie, and what lies inside those boundaries (King Arthur, Robin Hood, Jesus–man? myth? inseparable fusion of the two? (manth?)).  Anyway, it interests me, and it is a pleasure to think once in awhile.

Pride

A sentence in the first chapter of Joseph Shapiro’s No Pity, an assigned text for my class on disability, made me stop and think today.  Discussing the disability rights movement in America, Shapiro writes, “The 35 million to 43 million diabled Americans have come to take a growing pride in being identified as disabled” (13-14).  My mind balked at the notion of taking pride in the lable of disability.  Pride.  It is a word with many, many meanings (I looked them up).  Besides being a type of freshwater lamprey and a regional term for male genitalia (yes really), pride has 11 definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary, most with numerous sub-definitions.  Two main senses come out of this slew of specific definitions–first, pride in the deadly-sin sense of over-confidence and arrogance, and second, pride as “the feeling of satisfaction, pleasure, or elation derived from some action, ability, possession, etc. which one believes does one credit” (def. 5).  This second definition is the one that most commonly comes to my mind when I think of and use the word pride in daily life.

Notably absent, however, is a definition of pride as “the opposite of shame”.  Yet this is the sense in which the term has come to be used quite frequently.  Phrases like “Black pride” or “Gay pride” are examples of this apparently unofficial sense of the word.  You can force this use of pride to conform to the old definition–say, for example, that people are proud of struggling through and overcoming the challenges of being a minority in contemporary society, and that their doing so is an action that does them credit–but I really don’t think that is necessarily always what is meant by pride in this sense.  I think, often, it is intended to mean “without shame,” as in the expression, “I’m X, and proud of it!”.  Why are you proud of it?  Proud of the struggling/overcoming, yes of course, but of it?  It, be it disability, race, or sexual orientation, is just a part of who you are, and really is nothing to be proud of.  Can I say, “brown hair pride” or “straight pride”?  No, I cannot (the second example would probably be taken as offensive, in fact*).  It doesn’t make sense to say that I’m proud of my brown hair (even if I think it’s the prettiest kind of hair out there) because it is not something that “does me credit”.  I could be proud of the healthy shininess of my hair, because that stems from actions that I have taken to achieve that desired effect, but it doesn’t make sense to say that I’m proud of the color when I never had any agency in the matter.

My conclusion is that this is all very confusing, and either the OED had better update its entry for pride posthaste, or a different word should be used in phrases like “gay pride” or “pride in being identified as disabled”.  For now, politically incorrect and probably rude as it is, my first response to someone who said to me, “I’m proud to be a person with blindness” (or epilepsy, or schizophrenia, or even cancer) would have to be, “Why?”

*I don’t actually think “straight pride” should be offensive (or “white pride” or “male pride”) for that matter.  In my opinion, celebrations of gay pride, black pride, whatever pride are simply celebrations of a facet of people’s personhoods (a facet that happens to be misunderstood or maligned, and thus requires public acknowledgment and celebration).  If we’re going to define pride as “not ashamed of, and in fact quite happy and content with ____” then I think everyone has a right to be proud.  I am not ashamed of (and in fact quite happy and content with) my gender, my race, my sexuality, my socioeconomic class, my nationality, my region, and most of my physical attributes.  So I think if offense is taken, it is because the meaning of pride is so terribly muddy and confusing.

“Thank you for yesterday night”…personal language quirks

Mowing duty at works gives me lots of time alone in my head with whatever deep or shallow thoughts happen to be passing through.  I use the time to plan things (my day, my future, my stories), to daydream, to ponder useless questions (what would I do with an unlimited supply of money?), and essentially to entertain myself in whatever way possible while my body carries out the tasks that win me my paycheck.  Today I found myself thinking about personal language quirks.  There are some that come of living in my family–for instance, bopper.  Now, a bopper is any sort of device with buttons that are pushed (or “bopped”).  It is most commonly applied to remote controls and to the portable garage door openers that you put in your car.  Now, perhaps outsiders would look at me funny if I were to ask for the bopper (sometimes called a bebopper) to flip through channels, but I think it could find a place in the mainstream English language.  What is more succinct, after all, garage door opener or bopper?

There are also some quirks that are distinctly mine.  The most notable, perhaps, is my use of the phrase yesterday night instead of last night (actually, I use them interchangeably, but yesterday night is probably used more frequently).  I didn’t know that this phrase was nonstandard usage until last year.  People say yesterday afternoon, not last afternoon, so I don’t see why it would be changed with regard to night, but I guess I’m in the minority on this issue.  Oh my god…I hope people say yesterday afternoon…what if I’m wrong on this one, too?!  I’ll have to ask someone.  Anyway, thinking deeper I realized that my nonstandard usage issues referring to the night preceding the current day are more complex than just this one phrase.  As a young child I used to say yesternight, which, if you think about it, makes a lot of sense.  Yesternight (sometimes used in its corrupted form, yumpsternight, which I cannot defend as logical in any way) is a rational counterpart to yesterday and much more succinct than either yesterday night or last night. Anyway, looking it up when I got home today, I discovered that yesternight is defined by Merriam-Webster and other online dictionary resources, thus legitimating it as a word choice.  I think I shall use it in the future to avoid the difficulty of choosing between last night and yesterday night.  I wonder if there’s  branch of linquistics that studies personal/family language quirks?

Whom do you love?

I was shoving massive strawberries into my mouth this morning on the drive to work while singing along to the song “Who Do You Love” when I realized that the lyrics really ought to be “whom do you love?”, and then I realized that I’m a gigantic nerd, and then I also realized that I couldn’t listen to the incorrect grammar any more and I changed the station.  It’s strange that I reacted so strongly, because usually grammatical license in songs doesn’t really bother me.  Bob Dylan is constantly saying “ain’t” (which, of course, ain’t grammatically correct) and yet he remains my favorite songwriter ever.  I fully realize that singing “whom do you love?” would be incredibly distracting to listeners, but I think that is actually what bothers me about the situation.  Sometimes I get so worried for “whom”.  If it sounds so wrong to say “whom do you love” in a song, then clearly mainstream listeners are not accustomed to that usage in common speech.  And if that is the case, then I worry for the survival of “whom” as a word, even though it sounds so nifty and has that awesome Old-English-ending-remnant-m thing going on.  I, for one, will persist even if the little heart-rate-monitor thingy blipping to the sluggish heartbeat of “whom” goes flatline.  But I may never be able to listen to that song again (no great loss…I wasn’t too attached).

P.S. I actually don’t have a problem with the word “ain’t” because I’m pretty sure it’s just a (possibly corrupted) contraction of older words meaning “is not” and I don’t have a problem with contractions.  I actually think there should be more contractions.  When I was a kid I used “imn’t” for “am not” and I still use it every once in awhile when I’m feeling nostalgic.  English is an ever evolving language…I’m just not willing to concede that “whom” might fall prey to survival of the fittest.