OF A GOLDEN AGE

yesterday afternoon a good friend and I talked about language. it started when I used a particularly convoluted, but completely grammatically-sound, sentence and my friend said, “that sentence is the reason I’ll never be really fluent in any other language.” the old adage says you have to know the rules to break them, and I firmly believe this especially in regards to language. a smart kid I know and like told me last week that he doesn’t know any rules of grammar, but he knows when something sounds right. I think most people would fall in line with this statement — our relationship to language is elusive, intuitive, and usually ineffable. english is right up there with the world’s most difficult languages in terms of abstrusity and opacity, often refusing to conform to rules or systematic study.

my use of language is particularly idiosyncratic. there are certain words I use incessantly, and these usually come and go in phases depending on what I’ve heard and liked. (lately, my word of choice is “befuddled,” which I probably say at least five times a day.) I also use a hilariously high number of adverbs, maybe in some effort to really communicate my meaning with precision, which is obviously sort of impossible. I’ve made an effort this semester to stop using the word “like” as a placeholder when I speak. there is something very sonically pleasing about leaving a little bit of silence in the air while I think of the next word, instead of filling that space with my generation’s token nonsense word. I started this little language quest after listening to my peers make articulate, interesting statements that I could not follow because these statements were peppered with clutter-words.

I learned a new word yesterday through a funny dictionary sequence. it started when I looked up

annus mirabilis, “wonderful year.”

that led to

annus horribilis, “horrible year,”

and

anocathartic, “emetic.”

uh, emetic?, I wondered. that means “inducing vomiting.” anocathartic doesn’t have a pretty meaning, but it is a great example of piecemeal etymology. ano- means “upward” and catharsis means “purging.” the purging upward.

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last night, Beloit’s newest comedy troupe, 12,000 b.c., performed in the Moore Lounge. they’re staging the same performance tonight. the show was pretty funny, largely due to the presence of one particularly hilarious and performance-experienced student. they did a combination of sketch and stand-up comedy.

one stand-up routine involved a standard set of Beloity jokes — commons food, making eye-contact when you’re walking on the sidewalk, drug use — but he made one point that really struck a chord with me. he said that everyone has a vice, and everyone in turn has a vice that they choose to be judgmental about. he also pointed out that people decide which vices to judge based on which ones they themselves enjoy. that part isn’t particularly revelatory. but he said every person has a personal pyramid of vices.

so you might say, “I drink, but at least I don’t smoke weed.”

“I drink and smoke weed, but at least I don’t do blow.”

“I drink, smoke weed and do blow, but at least I don’t shoot up.”

and so on and so on until, the comedian said, you reach “I do all that shit but at least I don’t fuck animals.”

it was hilarious but he’s also spot-on. people’s standards for what they’ll rationalize to their friends is amazing. Beloit students are also remarkably deft at passing these kinds of judgments about other people’s habits.

a good friend and I talk about straight edge pretty frequently because we’re both nondrinkers. (“straight edge” is a subculture based on various subjective tenets but largely defined as people who don’t indulge in any mind-altering substances.) he identifies as straight edge and goes to straight-edge shows. I, on the other hand, usually tell people, “I don’t drink. but I’m not straight edge or anything.” in my mind, it’s as much a protective mechanism as a legitimate subculture — I don’t need a group of people to validate my decision to do what’s right for myself, do I? that seems silly to me. what i notice about nondrinkers, though, is that they often DO need this support. maybe if my friends weren’t so awesome and maybe if my parents hadn’t made me so comfortable with myself, I would want this kind of group mentality. as it stands, I’m always sad to see the divide between kids who drink and kids who don’t. it’s usually out of mutual fear of judgment. sober kids assume drinkers will think they’re squares, and drinkers assume sober kids will think they’re overindulgent.

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