4 posts tagged “language”
One evening, feeling oddly energetic, I thought I would wade through my book collection - intending to dip my hands into the glinting river of words and photographs, to lift each book up and then tell it to its face whether it could stay or not.
A hard job, but a necessary one. It had reached a point when I would have to use a blasting compound (oh, how the neighbors would fuss) to mine the desired book. And of course, if any room was freed up, it meant that I was now able to buy more. A Catch Twenty-Who Cares situation, actually.
In the course of my burrowing I extracted, delicately and with a dentist's art, many titles. Titles that taught me dialogues, dialects, style, how to think and how to see: beyond my life, beyond my time, beyond my city, beyond the black of my dreaming eyelids.
I found books that I had forgotten:
A pocket-sized 'Cyrano de Bergerac' (with owner's signature and date: 1900)
'The Edwardians' by Vita Sackville-West (signed, "To Claire Beresford, Christmas, The Antibes - 1930. From D.")
'The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion In The Year 1764-1765' by her 'kinsman' Alexander Blacker Kerr ("To Helen with much love, Aunt Janet - 1926")
And then I took out a very sorry littlte thing.
It had lost its cover. Tape yellowed the binder. The edges were thin: like tissue, like skin. The brown pages were weak and torn. It smelled musty, woodsy - thinking perhaps of the forests where those pages were born, shaved from fragrant acres of fallen trees. When I picked it up, it fell apart in flakes - words and phrases scattered into my hands.
It was my Roget's Pocket Theasurus. I remember using it in college, when I wrote my history papers - a cup of tea at my elbow, pretending I was a scholar. I used it for my English compositions, when a word would stop me with the efficiency of Becher's Brook.
Sometimes I would just read it - its Plan of Classification was my Periodic Table. The trails of definitions and uses were a word's DNA. It was a book of alchemy, a guide to magic.
Now, I use the thesaurus on my computer - always with a twinge of guilt. But I always remembered how this little book used to lead me through the tangled path of my language to find its hidden, living words.
I looked at it gently - I feared that even a hard glance would shatter it - before putting it carefully back.
I'd like to take this moment to wish the members of the legal profession a very Happy Holiday. I've gathered some gifts together, with you in mind. Finding some of these things were not too easy, but I knew you'd appreciate them, and would be able to put them to good use.
Oh, I can't wait any longer! I'll just tell you now - I got you some Grammar, Vocabulary, Common Sense and Reasoning. I hope you'll excuse the bags - they were kind of hard to wrap.
And don't worry about shelf life. These things will last and last.
(the following examples were taken down verbatim in courtrooms throughout the U.S.)
ATTORNEY: What is your date of birth?
WITNESS: July 18th.
ATTORNEY: What year?
WITNESS: Every year.
_____________________________________
ATTORNEY: What gear were you in at the moment of the impact?
WITNESS: Gucci sweats and Reeboks.
____________________________________
ATTORNEY: How old is your son, the one living with you?
WITNESS: Thirty-eight or thirty-five, I can't remember which.
ATTORNEY: How long has he lived with you?
WITNESS: Forty-five years.
_____________________________________
ATTORNEY: Do you know if your daughter has ever been involved in
voodoo?
WITNESS: We both do.
ATTORNEY: Voodoo?
WITNESS: We do.
ATTORNEY: You do?
WITNESS: Yes, voodoo.
______________________________________
ATTORNEY: Now doctor, isn't it true that when a person dies in his sleep, he doesn't know about it until next morning?
WITNESS: Did you actually pass the bar exam?
_______________________________________
ATTORNEY: So the date of conception (of the baby) was August 8th?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: And what were you doing at that time?
WITNESS: Uh....
______________________________________
ATTORNEY: How was your first marriage terminated?
WITNESS: By death.
ATTORNEY: And by whose death was it terminated?
_ _____________________________________
ATTORNEY: Is your appearance here this morning pursuant to a deposition notice which I sent to your attorney?
WITNESS: No, this is how I dress when I go to work.
______________________________________
ATTORNEY: Doctor, how many of your autopsies have you performed on dead people?
WITNESS: All my autopsies are performed on dead people.
______________________________________
ATTORNEY: ALL your responses MUST be oral, OK? What school did you go to?
WITNESS: Oral.
______________________________________
ATTORNEY: Do you recall the time that you examined the body?
WITNESS: The autopsy started around 8:30 p.m.
ATTORNEY: And Mr. Denton was dead at the time?
WITNESS: No, he was sitting on the table wondering why I was doing an autopsy on him!
_____________________________________
ATTORNEY: Doctor, before you performed t he autopsy, did you check for a pulse?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for blood pressure?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for breathing?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: How can you be so sure, Doctor?
WITNESS: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
ATTORNEY: But could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless?
WITNESS: Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law.
No, I'm not talking about myself - for once.
Just this: I was walking to work, after a rather harrowing bout of shopping at Whole Foods, and I happened to look up at the sky. Which not enough people do, I'm convinced. It had been raining that morning (yay) but the afternoon had turned clear and windy. I thought, 'well, that could mean two things: the clouds will come back for more rain tonight, or the wind will breathe the clouds away.'
SEE? See what I did there? I inadvertantly replaced an expected word (blow) with an unexpected one (breathe). Now, whenever a word slips in which I hadn't intended on using, I'll inspect it, look it over, before deciding to throw it in the bin. This time, I thought that word made for a very pretty replacement.
There are lots of words out there - they deserve a chance.
It's a very fine line between acting languid and sounding sarcastic. But should you ever be able to straddle that line and so be able to embrace both characteristics, a) you would be very fortunate indeed, and b) you will be able to rattle off a fine line like this, without any trouble:
"I find you refreshing, (insert name here). You're not in the least witty, but you have a kind of obvious facetiousness which reminds me of the less exacting class of music-hall."
This was taken from "The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club", by Dorothy Sayers, a book abounding with languidity. I always look to the Sayers mysteries whenever I feel that I need to brush up on my early 20th century upper-class slang.
I worship wit and words. I adore dialogue. I've heard it said that too much of an emphasis on cleverness and wit merely succeeds in cloaking the words' honesty. Not so. You'll get to the truth; only at a slower pace. What's the rush? You'll get there, and when you do you will not only be enlightened, but you will have also been entertained.
As Dylan Thomas once said, "Love the words."
