PLAYING WITH

LANGUAGE
A Collection of Short Stories

Madeleine Kando, M.Ed.

~*~*~*~
 COPYRIGHT LICENSING

Playing with Language

A Collection of Short Stories

Copyright © 2018 Madeleine Kando, M.Ed.

All rights reserved in all media. No part of this book may be used or
reproduced without written permission, except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

They have asserted the moral right of Madeleine Kando as the authors
of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act of
1988.

Photos by Ata Kando

http://www.atakando.org/

Cover Revision & Interior Layout: Laura Shinn Designs

http://laurashinn.yolasite.com

~*~*~*~

To my grandmother, Margit Beke Görög

 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MADELEINE KANDO, M.Ed is an educator specialising in language.

She has developed her own teaching methods both for children and adults.
Throughout her life, she lived and worked in many countries, before
finally settling in New England to raise a family.

Ms Kando is mostly known for her easy to read writing style, full of
humor and creativity, which came about through her unique career as an
international language teacher.

Her previous work includes non-fiction books published by Harper

Collins and over 150 articles published on her blog at:

https://www.facebook.com/Madeleine-Kando-2028634583828468/

http://european-americanblog.blogspot.com​.
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE: LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY

IS ENGLISH A KILLER LANGUAGE?

I DON’T HAVE A THPEECH DITHORDER

THE CURSE OF THE ‘R’

CHAPTER TWO: THE POWER OF LANGUAGE

VIVE LA DIFFERENCE!

THE DUTCH OBSESSION WITH DIMINUTIVES

OH LA LA! WHAT TO DO WITH THE VOUS?

THE BAD BOYS OF LANGUAGE

AMERICAN ENGLISH: THE MOST POLITE LANGUAGE ON

EARTH

I SPEAK, THEREFORE I AM

WORDS ON STEROIDS

CHAPTER THREE: THE EVIL USE OF LANGUAGE

LANGUAGE AND ANIMAL LIBERATION

EUPHEMISMS

EVIDENTIALITY: A CURE FOR PATHOLOGICAL LIARS?

FAKE NEWS, POST-TRUTH AND LIES

THE GESTAPO OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS

 CHAPTER FOUR: THE SOUND OF LANGUAGE

GHOST SPEAKERS

VOICES

THE INTRUDERS

CHAPTER FIVE: THE NUTS AND BOLTS OF LANGUAGE

THE FANBOYS

CAUTION, ARTICLES CROSSING!

AN ODE TO THE LETTER A

CHAPTER SIX: WRITING LANGUAGE

THE LOST ART OF LETTER WRITING

LANGUAGE AND COLORS

SISTERS AND THEIR FAMOUS BROTHERS

CHAPTER SEVEN: LANGUAGE STORIES FOR CHILDREN

MILLY THE WUG

PEQUEÑO

AZUL

BOY OR GIRL?

CONCLUSION

NOTES
 DEDICATION

This is a collection of personal essays. It is not an academic book and is

purely a reflection of my own fascination with language and how it
influenced my thinking and my personality.

This fascination stems from my grandmother Margit Beke-Görög

(1890-1988), to whom this volume is dedicated. She was a renowned
Hungarian author and translator, who taught herself Swedish, Norwegian
and Danish, and was the first to translate Scandinavian literature into
Hungarian directly from the original languages. Her translations include
works by Knut Hamsun, Sigrid Undset and Selma Lagerlof.

She also translated Russian classics, including Dostoevsky’s ​Crime and

Punishment​. In total, she wrote, read and translated from ten languages,
and was still actively working at the age of 98. During her long career, she
translated nearly 500 works, which included classical novels, historical
works, children’s and young adult literature.

In 1944, she wrote a manuscript ​‘Letters from the House of the Yellow
Star’,​ addressed to her then 2-year-old grandson, my brother Tom.
Together with her husband, Imre Görög, she was sent to one of the
‘yellow-star’​ houses, a network of almost 2,000 apartment buildings
where 220,000 Budapest Jews were forced to live for half a year, from
June 21, 1944. She did not expect to survive and wrote those letters as a
record of what happened then.

I would like to thank my sister, Juliette Kando, and my brother, Tom

Kando, for giving me feedback and encouragement throughout the process
of writing this collection, and Tamar Karet for editing the final version.
 INTRODUCTION

Language has always fascinated me. When I was four, my family

moved from my native Hungary to Paris, and my way of making sense of
the French alphabet soup thrown at me was to play language games in my
head. New words were immediately taken apart. Trying to get at the root
of words was my favorite pastime. With my magnifying glass, words were
scrutinized for similarities until an ‘aha’ moment followed, when I
discovered a connection with my rapidly growing French vocabulary.

As I was learning how to navigate the four-year old dominance

hierarchy of my new country, I realized that my native Hungarian was as
useful as a sandbag in the desert. ​‘Haute-toi!’​ my classmates would say.
Move! I obliged, not because of what that word meant, but because
playground body language indicating that you are not wanted is universal.
This resulted in completely erasing my knowledge of Hungarian in the
span of just a few months.

Thus, French was my only language throughout the time we lived in

France. I had simply replaced one language with another. But Hungarian
was always there, lurking in the background of my daily life. Our home
was culturally bilingual, if not linguistically. My mother, who spoke
Hungarian with my father, gave the French in our house a special flavor.
The way she pronounced the harsh, guttural French ​‘r’ ​gave it a melodious
quality. To this day I associate the singsong quality of Hungarian with the
women in my childhood, my mother and her female friends, but even my
father sounded warmer and more sensitive when he spoke in his native
language.

There were many ​‘miaz’ ​(what is that?) and ​‘hogy vagy’​ (how are you?)
peppered throughout my mother’s speech and her telephone conversations
with her Hungarian friends were always suspenseful, even though it
sounded like gibberish to me. Since Hungarians tend to be melodramatic, I
never knew whether something tragic or happy was being discussed. After
what seemed to have been an upbeat, happy telephone exchange, my
mother informed me that her friend’s friend had just died. ‘​Quel
desastrrre’​ my mother would say. ​‘Jeanne est morrrte.’

Forgetting one’s mother tongue is like losing a security blanket. It

created a sense of insecurity that compelled me to overcompensate by
excelling at my new language. Realizing at a young age that there are
more ways than one to skin a cat, my fascination with the way things were
said took hold for good.

But for now, once the problem of what to speak was settled, the
business of growing up became my primary focus. Even though French
became my second native language, I didn’t really feel French. The
predominant characteristic of the French is knowing that they are French
and even at the tender age of four, I knew I wasn’t the genuine article. I
was a mutt.

~*~*~*~

My parents found a place to live in Sèvres, a suburb halfway between

Paris and Versailles. It was on the top floor of a four-story house, perched
high on one of the hills flanking the village. The iron gate mortared into
the wall surrounding the property opened onto a lovely manicured garden
with rose bushes and an arch covered with lilacs. Our apartment, a sort of
attic, was ​in sharp contrast to the idyllic scene below. We had no warm
water, hardly a kitchen worthy of the name, and straw mattresses that had
to be fumigated regularly for fleas and lice. Without having our own
bathroom, we had to go down three flights of stairs to use the landlady’s, a
long narrow space twice the size of our one bedroom, with a beautiful
marble tiled floor. Every time I had to pee, it was like going for an
audience with the king. The only perk of our Cinderella attic ​was its
incredible view of the valley below.

A series of long stone stairs had been carved out of the hill to create
shortcuts between the steep, winding streets to the village which gave me
an opportunity to practice counting in French as I was going down ​‘les
144 marches’​ on my way to school.

Higher up the hill was the Parc Saint Cloud, a forest crisscrossed by
wide ​‘allées’​, reminiscent of the grounds at Versailles. It was our private
playground; we climbed trees and ran down steep hills until our legs
couldn’t keep up with the speed of our descent. We spent hours gathering
chestnuts, crushing their sharp spiked husks with a rock, until they
revealed a shiny brown ​‘marron’​, as if little gnomes had spent the whole
night polishing them and carefully putting them back in their husk.

My mother enrolled us in the ​‘Ecole Sainte Jeanne d’Arc’​, an

elementary school where we received a thoroughly traditional education,
which consisted mainly of memorizing La Fontaine’s fables and reciting
our multiplication tables before we knew how to multiply. There was a
great deal of attention paid to our writing skills. I have fond memories of
the French-ruled ​‘Seyes cahiers’​ which French preschoolers still use to
learn how to write. It felt a lot like writing music, the lined paper guiding
us to make sure that the capital letters reached to the third line and our
lower case letters didn’t exceed the first line. We were all calligraphers in
the making.

My father did not find a job and decided to return to Hungary where it
was easier for him to find work. He would find a place to live, after which
we would join him and be reunited as a family. But fate had other plans
for us. Soon after he went back, the Iron Curtain fell. He was trapped in
Hungary, which became a satellite country of the USSR. My mother made
the wise decision not to return to Hungary, which was now under
Communist rule. Besides, she had met someone else, a young
photographer from Holland. He was ten years her junior and only a few
decades older than we were. His name was Ed van der Elsken. Ed became
the most important Dutch black and white photographer of the 20th
century, but back then he was a pimple-faced young adventurer, who fell
madly in love with this beautiful Hungarian with three children in tow.

Life in Sèvres had become increasingly difficult. We were several

months behind with the rent, which prompted our landlord to take drastic
measures in an effort to evict us. The heat and electricity were cut off in
our Cinderella attic and although spending evenings in candlelight seems
romantic, having to eat dinner in our winter coats was not our idea of a
comfortable existence. It was time for us to move.

Thus, before I had time to learn my multiplication tables, my newly

acquired language skills had to go under the knife again. Another move,
another jolt, another journey. My fluent French was safely tucked in the
bottom of my backpack, as we moved from Paris to Amsterdam.

Thinking back on my life in Sèvres, I do not find anything out of the

ordinary. I just lived my French life like everyone around me. It is only
after I left and began a new Dutch life that I realized how much language
had influenced who I became. Had I stayed in France, I would have been a
French Madeleine, and although I probably would have learnt other
languages in school, I would have become a Madeleine without the twists
and turns of being truly multilingual.
 ~*~*~*~

Our new Dutch world was organized, and affluent. For a few months
we stayed with my new stepfather’s parents in an Amsterdam suburb
called ​‘Betondorp’​ (concrete village). The row of houses looked like army
barracks, but ​‘Oma and Opa’ ​lived in a spic and span, spacious apartment.
There was a bathroom with a bathtub and two bedrooms, one of which I
shared with my sister Juliette. It was as if we had woken up on a different
planet.

We entered a world so different from the one we had left in France

where the aftermath of the war was still around us. In Paris, food was still
rationed and we were dependent on clothing issued by the Red Cross.
Holland, however, had quickly recovered from the devastation of World
War II. Our new friends were mostly from affluent families who
considered us colorful, but we remained outsiders and just as poor as
before.

I was now eleven. I unpacked my French, ready to trash it like I had my

native Hungarian, but to my surprise, my new Dutch friends took me for
an exotic foreign creature who had suddenly appeared in their otherwise
fairly dull lives. My French offered me a spot on the higher rungs of the
jungle gym and for a while I magnanimously accepted my friends’
admiration. But it didn’t last. No matter how you slice it, nodding and
smiling only takes you so far. When a boy asked me if I ​‘wanted to go
with him’ (wil je met me gaan?),​ be his girlfriend in other words, I replied
‘where to?’ ​The laughing on the playground was a clear sign that it was
time to learn this new awkward sounding language.

Except for the occasional ‘ja’ and ‘nee’, I spent the first 6 months in
elementary school in complete silence. Our classroom teacher was a
warmhearted, middle-aged woman with a big, soft bosom and a tendency
to spit when she spoke. She must have wondered if I was feeble minded,
but one fine day, I decided I was ready and surprised everyone, including
myself, by babbling in perfect Dutch.

My Dutch stepfather Ed kept speaking French to us, just like he had

done before we moved, and although fate had tossed my mother into a
multi-national existence, learning languages didn’t come naturally to her.
Unlike what we had experienced in Paris, there was no social pressure to
speak Dutch at home, so French remained our ‘native’ language, which
saved us from the fate of forgetting yet another language.

Ed’s parents had rented and furnished ​a house for ​us on the
‘Achtergracht’, a short canal on the outer edge of the ‘canal ring’ in
Amsterdam​. It was a cute, gingerbread-like house, its white façade
standing out against the more traditional red bricks on either side. It was
so narrow that​ only one room could fit on each floor. The kitchen and a
small shower cell were on the ground floor. There was no stoop or buffer
between the sidewalk and the house, and when the window was open, it
felt like anyone walking by was inside our kitchen.

My parents’ room was on the floor above. A wall had been built to
create a dark room, which left enough room for a bed and a table. My
sister and I shared the third floor, one room and a toilet whose door could
only be closed if you sat sideways. My brother’s ‘floor’ was the attic. To
enter it, we had to climb a steep ladder and push open a horizontal door
serving as a hatch. The stairs were much too narrow and steep for anything
larger than a mid-size table. However, like many Dutch houses, ours had a
hook and arm sticking out of the gable to which a pulley wheel and rope
could be attached to hoist up furniture and other large items. We couldn’t
resist rappelling down the facade holding on to that rope. We spent our
afternoons throwing bread crumbs out of the third floor window to watch
the seagulls circle around and catch the crumbs in mid-air.

Opposite our house was a row of 13 identical looking ​‘pakhuizen’

(warehouses) known as the ​‘Kalender pakhuizen’​, named after the months
of the year, with one extra for some obscure reason. We watched with
fascination as burly men covered in soot hauled off sacks filled with coal
from a conveyor belt on the barges docked in the canal.

In high school my sister Juliette and I were known as the ​‘Kando

twins’​. Boys couldn’t always tell us apart and our French background
added to our popularity.

In reality we were snotty and became our French teacher’s nightmare.

Madame Moussault occasionally made grammatical mistakes, which,
thanks to us​ ​became the joke of the classroom. It was a cruel and cowardly
way of asserting our linguistic abilities.

By the time I reached puberty, I had become fully bilingual. I used my

languages like costumes. When the need arose, I put on my French attire
to sound sensitive and romantic, and could change into my Dutch costume
whenever I needed to be practical and matter of fact.

As a teenager, I realized that my Dutch wouldn’t fit all the future

Madeleines I was planning for myself. My Dutch attire fit this small, clean
nation perfectly, but I realized that it was time to shop for a new outfit.
Once you realize that there is an unlimited variety of ways you can dress
in the world, you are hooked. Some teenagers experiment with drugs, I
wanted to get a taste of other languages and cultures.

~*~*~*~

At 18, I had my first taste of independence from my family when I left

for England. Via one of my mother’s connections, I ended up working as
an au pair for the Chief Editor of the Daily Mirror. His was a strict Kosher
household, which meant I had to do the dishes twice, separate utensils into
“fleishig”​ and ​“milchig”​ and was often scolded for mixing things up. His
six and eight year old offspring acquired the habit of kicking me in the
shins when I tried to get them ready for school and the lady of the house
told me in slowly articulated English that I wasn’t to fill the tub beyond a
certain height. It took me all of two weeks to realize that this was not the
environment I wanted to be in to practice my new language skills. I left
the offspring, the bathtub and the dishes and didn’t care that I had no place
to sleep that evening. My bohemian genes served me well that day. I
wasn’t afraid of the unknown.

After this first hiccup, my stay in London was one of the best times of
my life. They were liberating times. Roaming the streets of this beautiful
city, my soul and I could disappear and I discovered the exhilaration of
anonymity –nobody cared where I came from or where I was going, least
of all myself. I met reserved, polite but colorful Englishmen who didn’t
judge me or care about my schizophrenic past, and who thought my accent
was charming.

But I was thirsty for more adventure. I met Michelle, a petite French
woman from Paris, who was also on a mental and emotional journey. It
didn’t take long before we agreed that England was too English and that it
was time to immerse ourselves in a non-Anglo-Saxon culture. We decided
to hitchhike to Spain, a thoroughly stupid thing to do, in the middle of
winter, but that is the privilege of youth – to do stupid things and survive
them.
 ~*~*~*~

With a brief stopover in the suburbs of Paris, where Michelle’s wealthy

parents served as our ATM, we started our descent through Europe, two
young girls blissfully naïve, convinced that bad things only happen to
other people.

We made it as far as the crest of the Sierra Nevada, but after waiting on
the side of the snowy road for a few hours and losing all feeling in our
hands and feet, we caved in and took a bus to Malaga. We were not the
only passengers who lost the contents of their stomachs on the steep road
winding down to the coast.

Spain, in those days, was a much less civilized country than the
Northern European culture that I was familiar with. It was ruled by
Franco, and the intimidating ​‘carabineros,’​ with their tricorne hats, long
black coats and mustaches, were on every street corner. It was clearly still
a police state.

We arrived in Malaga, tired but ready to start our new life. I didn’t
speak a word of Spanish, but my resume showed that I spoke three
languages fluently, which landed me a plum job selling apartments on the
pristine beach of Marbella.

I had lied about my typing ability, not expecting to get the job, but once
I was hired I borrowed a typewriter and taught myself how to type in a
matter of a few days. Every night, my fingers were still tapping away
under the blankets: ​‘Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of
the party’​, over and over again.

I had no clue about selling apartments, or anything else for that matter,
so I was flown to the company’s headquarters on the pristine island of
Palma de Mallorca, all expenses paid. I was supposed to get my training,
but I felt like the character in Jerzy Kosinski’s story ​‘Being There’​. I let
everyone think that I was a brilliant, multi-lingual, savvy saleswoman,
since that is how they desperately needed to see in me.

Michelle, in the meantime, had found her destiny, a future husband

with a beautiful beach house on the coastal road between Marbella and
Malaga. Her Spanish adventure had turned into a success story.
 So had mine, temporarily. I spent my two-hour lunch breaks in my
bikini, getting a tan on the beach in front of the half-built apartment
building. I don’t think I sold more than two apartments during my entire
six months of employment. Management finally caught on to my bluff and
politely said that my services were no longer required, which was ironic,
since by then my Spanish was quite acceptable.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was in search of a place that

would accommodate all my conflicting pasts and Spain under Franco was
as unforgiving of mutts like me as my previously adopted countries. I
moved on.

~*~*~*~

After a brief rest period between travels, to catch my breath so to speak,

I decided that I should extend my search beyond the boundaries of the
continent. I left for America.

I arrived in the New World during a summer heat wave. I stepped onto
the tarred pavement of New York City, which felt like marshmallows
because of the heat, and boarded a greyhound bus that would take me to
Boston, my final destination. The shock to my system when we drove
through Harlem was so great that I wondered if I had landed in a war torn
country instead of New York. I saw a big black man with only one shoe on
crossing the street, barely able to keep his balance, piles of uncollected
garbage, beat up cars, and dirty streets.

I feverishly tried to calculate how much an immediate return ticket to

Amsterdam would cost me, but once I left the inner city, my initial
reaction gave way to my inborn sense of adventure. I knew I had made the
right choice. But all this is for another story.

Here in America, with all its ugliness, its beauty, I was able to safely
unpack all of my assorted costumes for everyone to see. Everyone here is
like me, a mutt.

My fascination with languages has only grown in the years since I

moved to America. I realize that what defines me more than anything else
is the languages and cultures to which I have been exposed. The following
pages contain some of my linguistic observations and adventures.
Madeleine and Juliette Kando, Budapest, 1943. © Ata Kando
 CHAPTER ONE:

LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY

IS ENGLISH A KILLER LANGUAGE?

Every time I visit Holland, the country where I grew up, it takes me a
few days to adjust to a language that is no longer natural to me. It feels
like I have stepped into a pair of shoes that don’t quite fit me anymore.
Luckily for me, it just takes a gentle nudge and most people I meet will
switch to English, sparing me the effort to adjust to them. Let them do the
work, my reasoning goes. After all, who doesn’t speak English in our
civilized world?

This must sound like nails scraping down a blackboard to you, but it is
true that English has become the ​lingua franca​ ​[1]​, the dominant ‘inter’
language of the world. You meet a nice French gentleman, but you don’t
speak Français? Never fear, English is here. Russians communicate with
Spaniards, Germans sprechen with Italians, all thanks to English.

There are at least a billion people in the world who speak and use
English that way, and they outnumber native speakers, who number
around 370 million. So why is it that English has become so widely used?
Is it simpler to learn than Italian? Is it easier to pronounce than Icelandic?
Was English meant to become the global superstar because of some
inherent quality in the language itself? Anybody in their right mind would
agree that English is easier to learn than ​Nahuatl​ or ​Urdu​. This is a typical
line of reasoning for anyone who already knows English.

But English has emerged as the dominant inter-cultural language as a

result of history, not because it’s easier to learn. Look at Latin, a language
so difficult that nobody really spoke it, but it was the lingua franca for
almost a thousand years, used in theology and science. Vulgar Latin was
the spoken version, a kind of pidgin Latin.

As the Anglo-Saxon influence grew throughout the world, so did the

use of its language, and many native languages have had to make way for
this expansion. 200 languages have died since I was born, and of the
approximately 6000 languages that exist today, only 600 will remain by
the end of the 21st century.

A language can cease to exist for several reasons: it can be murdered

(when it is forbidden to speak a language), it can commit suicide (when a
language is renounced voluntarily), or it can die of old age, like Latin and
ancient Greek. It can also morph into a new language, as in the case of Old
English into Middle English and Modern English.

When English is trying to push out other major languages, like French
or German, there is a struggle, sometimes creating a sense of inferiority
and resentment on the part of the weaker language, and there is an attempt
to artificially keep the onslaught of English at bay. French has its
Académie Française​, Spanish has the ​Real Academia Española​ and
German has the ​Rat für Deutsche Rechtschreibung​. There is no Academy
for English, probably because English doesn’t need protection from itself.

It is ironic that, although the use of English has expanded, the relatively
small number of people who speak English as their native language soon
will be the only monolingual group in the world. Since there is no need or
much opportunity to learn another language, native English speakers will
lack the double dimension that speaking another language gives you.
Many foreign born parents living in the United States insist that their
children be raised bilingually, even though there is no practical reason to
do so.

Growing up bilingual or multilingual is a bit like having a closet full of

different sets of clothes. In my case, I can dress French one day, Dutch the
next and American the rest of the time, but even though I speak French
fluently, when I put on my French attire I definitely don’t feel like it fits
me all that well. Childhood memories of feeling like an outsider keep
tugging at my sleeves and I put on my French attire only when I really
have to in my work or when my daughter wants to practice her French.

What about my Dutch attire? I learnt Dutch at a critical age, when

hormones were raging through my body and I was feverishly trying to find
my own identity. My Dutch attire was supposed to make me fit in, but
something had gone wrong with the measurements. The Dutch are
historically a tolerant people, but I kept butting up against a day-to-day
petty, small-mindedness that made me suffocate. On my frequent visits to
the country I grew up in, I sometimes pretend I don’t speak Dutch. Getting
the locals to speak English is my way of taking revenge for all the
unhappy years I spent in Holland growing up.

My English attire is my most recent purchase. If there is a favorite in

my wardrobe, it is definitely this one. It is a designer piece, and fits me
like a glove. ​I am often told that I speak it with a French accent, which I
blissfully cannot hear myself and it is only when someone starts speaking
slowly to me, articulating her words carefully, that I realize it is my accent
that compels ​them to treat me like I am feeble-minded.

I wear this attire day or night, secure in the knowledge that no one will
judge my appearance. English is the ‘casual’ wear’ of the world. Millions
of people wear it, to the opera and to the gym. It has given birth to a
multitude of offspring, each one perfectly adapted to its speakers’ needs
and character. English represents know-how and pragmatism and has all
the hallmarks of a language that was destined to become the lingua franca
of the world.

I communicate with my mother in French, but I speak Dutch to my

husband and English with my siblings. What does that say about me?
Does it mean that I am a different person when I Skype with my mother
from when I talk to my husband? Do I truly suffer from a personality
disorder? Cannot I get my ducks in a row, even when I have a normal
conversation with a family member?

But I am in good company with my accent, since the majority of people

who speak English speak it with a foreign accent. English might take over
the world, but it sure doesn’t sound the same everywhere. There is Indian
English, American English, Irish, Cockney, Creole, Spanglish and
Singlish. Comedians would run out of material quickly if all these accents
didn’t exist.

Is English the language of power and authority or is it the language of

ordinary people? Although English is used to communicate
cross-culturally, you don’t hear a sheepherder in Afghanistan speak it.
Linguist Robert Phillipson calls it ​‘linguistic imperialism’​ ​[2]​, a way to
impose your will on another culture.

Could English as an ‘inter’ language be replaced by machine

translation? Soon we’ll be able to push a button on our iPad when we
arrive at a hotel in Paris and automatically be able to translate ​“Good
evening, I have a reservation” ​to ​‘Bonsoir, j’ai une réservation’.​ But try
to use Google to translate the Dutch expressions: ​‘Ben je met het
verkeerde been uit bed gestapt?’​ (Literally: did you step out of bed on the
wrong leg? Meaning: did you wake up on the wrong side of the bed?), or
‘Nu komt de aap uit de mouw’, (​literally: now the monkey comes out of
the sleeve, meaning the cat’s out of the bag,).

So, does English kill or make peace? Will the spread of English as a
‘second’ language herald the demise of other languages? The more people
understand each other, the less chance there is for misunderstandings,
which so often are the basis of conflict. On the other hand, whether
Jihadists communicate in English or Farsi, it doesn’t change their terrorist
aims. There is no language barrier for the culture of death.

Language is a talent that all humans share, and babies can learn any of
them. So, why don’t we all speak one language? Author David Bellos, in
his book ​‘Is that a Fish in your Ear?’​ ​[3]​ says that ​‘Linguistic diversity is
in the nature of language itself because we use language to define who we
are, as groups, as nations, as families.’

We want to sound like the people we identify with. We don’t want to

speak like​ ​our parents, but like our peers. When I first learnt how to speak
Dutch, it wasn’t enough to just sound Dutch; I wanted to speak like my
best friend Henriette.

My Dutch friends are not less Dutch just because they speak English.
They do this for my benefit, and it comes in handy when they have to
conduct business, but among themselves they are as Dutch as they have
always been. The Germans will always be Germans and the French…
well, need you ask? It’s like trying to ask a cat to be a dog.

~*~*~*~

I DON’T HAVE A THPEECH DITHORDER

 Accents are the spice that gives language its flavor. Can you imagine if
everyone sounded the same? We would all fall asleep listening to each
other.

Speaking with an accent has many physiological and psychological

causes. Linguists will tell you that a human baby is capable of producing
and perceiving all of the sounds of all human languages. The tongue,
which is, after all, just a muscle, is what determines how the flow of air
from our lungs will be shaped. By the time you’re a year old, your tongue
has learned to ignore most distinctions among sounds that don’t matter in
your own language. German speakers learning English will find their
greatest challenge when trying to pronounce the English W. Most of them
can never have a wonderful weekend, no matter how they try. They will
always have a ​vonderful veekend​. Isn’t that sad?

Take my husband for instance. He is originally from the Netherlands

and has difficulty with some sounds in English. We visited a nursery the
other day, and he asked the salesman if he had any Jews for sale. The poor
man’s face lost some of its color until we explained that we wanted to
build a hedge in our yard and were looking for some yews.

My husband also likes to tell yokes. But his difficulty making the
distinction between a ‘j’ and a ‘y’ often gets more laughs from his
audience than the punch line. He talks about the jellow birds that he saw in
the yard and how he is going to wear his favorite yacket that day.

I, myself, have difficulty with the English ‘th’. I safely stay away from
using words like ‘clothes’ or ‘sloths’. I prefer to say ‘garments’ and ‘that
slow monkey’ for fear of being ridiculed. More than two consonants in a
row are just not acceptable in any language, except maybe Welsh. My
sister used to live in Wales, in a place near ​Cwmllynfell​, pronounced
Kumchlinvech​. Even though finding her remote cottage was almost
impossible, I refused to ask for directions.

Yes, the English ‘th’ is a real toughy for a lot of non-native speakers.
The French are the worst offenders in that department: ​‘Zis weekend we
went to ze beach’,​ they’ll say. But it’s not easily mastered by many other
nationalities. My mom, who is Hungarian, likes to talk about her past:
‘When I was dirty’​ she’ll say, ​‘I was very beautiful’​. Since she was given a
new denture, she also has difficulty pronouncing the letter “s”. When the
guests arrived at her dinner party recently, she welcomed them into the
dining room: ​“Please Andrea, you can shit here, next to George”.

Someone with a heavy lisp must have invented the English ‘th’. In
Dutch at least the ‘th’ sound is usually represented by a decent, single
consonant, the ‘d’. (Dutch for ​‘the’​ is ‘de’, ​‘thin’​ is ​‘dun’​ and ​‘than​ks’ is
‘dank’​). To pronounce a ‘th’ your tongue has to protrude between your
teeth and it makes you look like you are mentally challenged.

The parent of one of my young ballet students called me today to ask if

there was a ​‘pass’ ​that came to my dance studio. I told her I didn’t
understand, so she said: ​‘I live in Belmont, is there a pass that goes to your
studio?’​ I finally realized that she meant ‘bus’. She was Korean and had
trouble with the ‘b’ and the ‘p’.

In English, you have to be able to distinguish between ​‘seat and sit’​,

‘set and sat’​, ​‘sought and soot’​ and ​‘suit and sot’.​ Insert an ‘h’ in some of
those words and you enter dangerous territory. When my mom skyped me
in a panic, telling me that there was a shit stuck in her printer, I laughed so
hard, I almost fell off my chair. I told her to pull on the shit gently and pull
it out from between the rollers.

So you see, it’s almost impossible to become totally fluent in a

language that you are not raised in. Even for speakers of other Germanic
languages, like Dutch, German or Swedish, these subtle differences are
hard to hear, let alone pronounce.

Things could have been worse however. We could have ended up living
on Iceland. Try pronouncing the name of the volcano that spewed all that
ash into the stratosphere. It’s called: ​‘eyjafjallajokull’​.

~*~*~*~

THE CURSE OF THE ‘R’

 In many languages, but especially English, the most difficult letter to
pronounce for a non-native speaker, is the letter ‘R’. That little rascal will
always give you away. Take me, for example. I had to learn French,
Dutch, German, English and Spanish and it would have been a cinch for
me to masquerade as a native had it not been for the cursed ‘R’.

It doesn’t help that we are all deaf to our own voice. If you want to
know what you really sound like, you have to record your voice first.
Either that or travel to the Grand Canyon and shout something to hear it
echoed back. Even then, you might think: ​‘Wow, that person sounds
weird. I am glad I don’t sound like that.’​ Yes, if non-native English
speakers knew what they really sounded like, they would stop talking
altogether.

I have to admit that things could have been worse. Had I been born in
China or Japan, instead of my native Hungary, my battle with the ‘R’
would have been lost the day I was born. I would have been doomed to
order ​‘flied lice’ ​for dinner for the rest of my expat life.

The thing is, the ‘R’ is a mischievous little bugger. It knows that it is a
consonant, but the sneaky bastard enjoys getting a free ride on the back of
the vowel that precedes it.

Take the word ​‘part’,​ for example. In many languages the ‘R’ has the
decency of standing on its own, so that a Frenchman will correctly say:
‘parrr’, ​pronouncing the ‘R’ as a third, distinct, sound in that word. The
‘R’ in English, especially British English, will often ride piggyback on the
vowel in front of it. ​‘Did I hear you fawt?’

If you live in Boston, the ‘R’ becomes particularly lazy and the word is
pronounced ​‘paht’​. But it isn’t satisfied by just riding piggyback; it also
changes the sound of the​ ‘a’​ in front of it, and the way the word is
pronounced by native Bostonians brings shivers down the spine of any
‘normal’ English speaking person. It is pronounced: ​‘paaht’​. See what I
mean?

So what’s a foreigner to do? Well, it depends on which language you

spoke originally. The expression ​‘you cannot teach an old dog new tricks’
surely applies here. If you are from Spain or France, there is no way you
will lose the habit of pronouncing your ‘R’s like rolling marbles in your
mouth. That’s what ‘R’s are meant to do, or they wouldn’t be called ‘R’,
don’t you agree?

You are supposed to say: ‘Bears are usually barred from bringing beer
to bars before breakfast.’ You don’t say: ‘beahs are usually bahed from
bringing beeh to bahs befoh breakfast.’ (Unless you have the misfortune of
being Bostonian or a New Yawker.)

So, if Americans cannot agree on how to pronounce their own ‘R’, how
do they expect foreigners to learn the correct pronunciation?

My advice to you is to not to even try. Just lay it on thick with your
foreign accent. Usually it will charm at least a certain percentage of the
people around you, and the rest? Well, you can please some people some
of the time but you cannot please all of the people all of the time. So there!
Madeleine with cat, Achtergracht, Amsterdam (1956-1960).

© Ata Kando
 CHAPTER TWO:

THE POWER OF LANGUAGE

VIVE LA DIFFERENCE!

There are words and then there are WORDS. My favorite words are
actually not English but French. The way the French language describes
life can be so endearing that it gives me goose pimples just listening to it.
Take the words of one of Edith Piaf’s more famous songs: ​‘Milord’​. When
she sings it she pronounces it ​‘Meelor’​ as if it were someone’s name like
Frank or Joe. None of the British snobbishness of the words ​“My Lord”​.
Because it is in French, in a few sentences Piaf pulls us into the world of a
harbor prostitute and her love for a gentleman who does not know she
exists. In her song she tells him to come in and make himself comfortable.
To ​‘put his feet up on a chair and his sorrows on her heart.’​ (‘vos peines
sur mon coeur et vos pieds sur une chaise.’)

What is it that makes French so good at describing matters of the heart?

Why is it so poetic? French has the ability to describe reality in such rich
detail that you could stay in bed for a year reading French novels and not
feel like you are missing out on the world outside. You want to experience
the feel of a soft breeze on your cheeks? Say it in French: ​‘Le vent me
caresse les joux avec ses ailes de soie’.​ (The wind strokes my cheeks with
its silken wings).

American English has the incredible vitality of a language that uses

action words in many of its expressions. ​Listening to the news​ is like going
to the gym; we ​jump​ to conclusions, we ​beat​ all odds, we ​kick​ the can
down the road and we ​cook​ the books. Even talking about something as
dry as the stock market becomes exciting: ​‘the stock market crashed today
and investors ran for cover.’​ A French person might say: ​‘the stock market
lost shares today and investors withdrew their money.’​ Where’s the fun in
that?

In America you don’t study, you ​‘hit the books’​. You don’t make small
talk; you ​‘shoot the breeze’​. You don’t get suspicious: you ​‘smell a rat’.
The action-oriented Americans have elevated many nouns to the status of
verbs: ​‘to interface, to impact’. ​This is to make sure that your listener gets
the importance of your statements, since verbs demand more attention
than mere nouns.

Reading the news in Dutch, on the other hand, is like walking through
molasses: slow and cumbersome. And even though French is a beautiful,
poetic language, it is archaic and convoluted in a practical sense. The
plasticity of the English language is missing.

The French feel threatened by English to the point of forbidding certain

words in the French language. You cannot say ​‘computer’​ in French, you
have to say ​‘ordinateur’​ or else they’ll get you. This is just as absurd as
our attempt to boycott the words ​‘french fries’​ during the 2003 invasion of
Iraq. Did you ever order ​‘freedom fries’​ at McDonalds?

What is interesting about the use of words in different languages is not

the language itself, of course. A language cannot really ​be​ poetic, dynamic
or imaginative. A language is a reflection of the people who speak it. And
Americans are different from the French. As are the Chinese, the Japanese,
the Russians and The Mexicans. I only wish I would have enough time to
learn all those other languages.

As I was passing a construction site during my latest visit to Paris, a

young construction worker looked at me and said: ​‘Mademoiselle, vous
avez perdu quelque-chose’​. (Miss, you dropped something). I looked
down and said: ​‘what?’​. With a beaming expression he said​: ‘votre
sourire’​. (your smile!). That is how a Frenchman makes a pass at a female
passerby. Vive la France!!

~*~*~*~

THE DUTCH OBSESSION WITH DIMINUTIVES

Everyone agrees that French is the ​language of love​, but what about
Dutch? Some harsh critics call it the ​language of phlegm​, because of its
voiceless uvular fricative​ ‘g’ that pops up in every second word they utter,
as if they were constantly gargling. Dutch doesn’t sound romantic.

Their tendency to string words together to create one long

unpronounceable word, as in’ ​Meervoudigepersoonlijkheids-stoornis’,
which means multiple personality disorder, is only matched by their love
of diminutives.

The Dutch are statistically the tallest people on earth. Not only are they
tall, but every time I travel to Holland, they seem to have grown taller.
Whatever feeling of confidence and superiority my above-average height
might give me in the US, it evaporates the moment I arrive at Schiphol
airport and start to navigate my way through a sea of giants. It’s hard to
get used to feeling ‘short’, even if it’s just for a week or so.

You would expect this propensity for height to spill over in the way the
Dutch speak, with bombastic, aggrandizing words and phrases. But it’s
just the opposite. The Dutch are extremely fond of diminutives. They add
the suffix ​‘-je’​ or ​‘-tje’​ to practically any part of speech. When I visit my
friend Edith in Baarn, we often go for a ​‘fiets tochtje’​, a little bike ride
(even though it might take up to three hours). We’ll stop on the way for a
‘kopje koffie met een gebakje’​, a little cup of coffee with a little dessert.
On our way back, we’ll go into town and buy a ​‘jurkje’,​ a little dress or
hunt for a ​‘koopje’​, a little bargain. It’s all little this and little that in
Holland.

But adding the –​je ​or ​–tje ​to a word doesn’t just make it small; it also
makes it innocent and harmless. Holland is the only country where
smoking a ​‘sigaretje’ ​is less harmful to the lungs than smoking a ​‘sigaret’​.
When my mother’s nurse has to give her an injection, she calls it ​‘een
prikje’ ​(a little injection). She helps her put on her ​‘sokjes’ ​(little socks),
serves her a ​‘hapje’ ​(a little bite) before she takes a ​‘dutje’ ​(a little nap).

The Dutch diminutive also has the effect of trivializing an event by

making it seem less important, less threatening. If our house were on fire,
my Dutch husband would insist that it’s only a ​‘vuurtje’​, a little fire, and
that there is no need to panic. The most horrible acts can be trivialized by
adding this suffix. There is nothing grammatically wrong with the
sentence: ​‘Ik ga even een moordje plegen’ ​(I’ll just go out and commit a
little murder).
 You would think that using double or even triple diminutives puts a
strain on any language’s respectability, but it is quite common in Dutch to
say ​‘een heel klein huisje’ ​(a very little housie). Some Dutch words don’t
even have a normal sized version. A ​‘meisje’ ​is a girl, but ​‘meis’ ​doesn’t
exist and calling someone the root word ​‘meid’​, which means broad,
would not be appreciated.

Is it a coincidence that a nation of tall, stoic, serious minded Nordics

has found a way to minimize the harsher side of our existence?

Is it to show who is the boss in this valley of tears? Or do the Dutch use
diminutives to such an extent because they can, because their language
allows them to do it so easily? English has diminutive suffixes, like ​-let​,
-kin ​and ​-y​, (as in piglet, pumpkin and daddy), all of which, by the way,
are borrowed from other Germanic languages. But you cannot just paste
them onto words. There are rules. You cannot have a dadkin or a pumplet.
Besides, English is too business minded, too action oriented to be bothered
with all that fancy schmancy stuff. You want to say that something is
small, then just add the word ​‘little’​ and be done with it.

But when it comes to expressing the essence of the world of small

creatures, the Dutch use of the diminutive is completely justified. The
word for robin is ​‘roodborstje’​, which literally means ​‘little red breast’​. It
conjures up the image of a small, delicate creature. Replace it with the
word ​‘roodborst’ ​and it makes you think of an aggressive knight in armor.
All the charm is gone. The Dutch use the diminutives ​‘mannetje’ ​en
‘vrouwtje’ ​for male and female birds. Isn’t that what they are? Small?

So why don’t the tallest people in the world use augmentatives instead
of diminutives to match their size? They could say things like: ​‘I bought a
megamansion for a supersum of money and now I am uberhappy.’​ But
they would rather ​‘buy a cute housie for a little money and be content’​.

Another word that the Dutch use in abundance, is ​‘lekker’​, which in its
literal sense means ​‘tasty’ ​but can be applied to anything under the sun.
You can ​‘lekker wandelen’ ​(take a nice walk), ​‘lekker kletsen’ ​(chitchat
nicely), ​‘lekker naar de bioscoop’ ​(go to the movies nicely) or ​‘lekker
eten’​, which means that the act of eating is nice, not the food itself.

And then, there is the all-time favorite, completely non-translatable

word ​‘gezellig’​. You can only appreciate the importance of this word if
you have lived in Holland. It means friendly, fun, pleasant, cozy. A room
can be gezellig, people can be gezellig, and even going to visit the Queen
can be gezellig.

So you see, the Dutch have it pretty much covered. Whatever the
complicated reasons are for the Dutch tendency to minimize and defang
the world, it gives their language and their culture a unique character. Just
switching from English to Dutch during my brief visits gives me a fuzzy
feeling. It won’t match the nasty Dutch weather but, as they say in
Holland, ​‘Ieder kaasje heeft zijn gaatje’​. (Every little cheese has its little
holes). Nothing is perfect.

~*~*~*~

OH LA LA! WHAT TO DO WITH THE VOUS?

While the Dutch are having the time of their life defanging the world
around them, the very status-conscious French spend their day figuring out
how to address someone by using the ‘vous’ or the ‘tu’ form of ‘you’. Had
you been alive in Shakespeare’s time, you would have had the same
problem the French still struggle with. You had to choose between ‘you’
(vous) or ‘thou’ (tu) when addressing someone. The ‘you’ won the battle
and the ‘thou’ thankfully disappeared from the English language.
Shakespeare had to reprimand his children by saying ​‘thou hast been
naughty.’

One of the parents at my dance studio asked me: ​‘Tu donnes des leçons
le lundi prochain?’ ​(Do you hold classes next Monday?) I was a little
offended. I am her child’s teacher and did not expect to be addressed with
the familiar ‘tu’ form for the word ‘you’. But I forgave her because I knew
she was from Canada. Had she been French, I would not have let her off
so easily.

One of the advantages of living in an English speaking country is that

there is only one word for ‘you’. But many languages have two distinct
words. In French the terms are to ‘tutoyer’ and ‘vouvoyer’ someone.
 ‘Tutoie-moi’ means ‘don’t be so formal’. It’s quite a tricky affair
though, if French isn’t your native language. Only bungling foreigners are
forgiven when they mix up the terms ‘tu’ and ‘vous’.

Originally the term ‘vous’ was only used in the plural (as in you guys).
It became the ‘polite’ form of the singular ‘you’ because plurality is
equivalent to power and prestige. ‘If there is more than one of me’ thought
the king, ‘it will make me even more important’. So he ordered his
subjects to address him with ‘vous’.

Once the King acknowledged his plurality, he had to refer to himself as

‘We’. Louis XIV dismissed visitors to whom he granted an audience by
saying: “Nous vous permettons de vous retirer.” (We permit you to leave).
Pompous professors still refer to themselves in the plural: “As we
indicated to the reader in the preceding chapter….” This BS is called
pluralis majestatis.

In present-day French politics the ‘vous’ and the ‘tu’ are used as
powerful tools to manipulate, convince, insult and denigrate. The ‘tu’
politicians are liberal leftists who see each other as equals. The ‘vous’
politicians are conservative. These two camps spend an inordinate amount
of time deciding whether they should ‘tutoyer’ each other or not.

When Nicolas Sarkozy ​[4]​ asked Jacques Chirac ​[5]​ whether they
should ‘tutoyer’ each other, Chirac answered ‘Si vous voulez’. It took
these two very eminent politicians several minutes of precious airtime to
argue over this, the issues at hand being completely forgotten.

You would think that having two forms for ‘you’ would give people
more opportunity to be polite. But the opposite is true. To use a ‘tu’ when
a ‘vous’ is expected can be very insulting. American politicians are
incredibly well mannered and restrained compared to French politicians
who like to insult each other in public. But I have a feeling that being
snobbish, aggressive and arrogant are qualities that the French public
doesn’t find particularly negative.

Not too long ago long-time married couples still addressed each other
with ‘vous’. In ‘La Chamade,’ a 1968 movie, after a long night of
passionate love making Michel Piccoli asks his wife (played by Catherine
Deneuve): ‘Vous voulez une cigarette?’ Weird.
 To graduate from a ‘vous’ to a ‘tu’ in a relationship, things have to be
negotiated on an individual basis and there are really no hard and fast
rules. It’s like two countries that have to trust each other enough to
establish diplomatic relationships.

But if you are not sure, just stick to ‘vous’. Don’t take it too far, though.
You don’t want to be asking your two-year old: ​‘Vous voulez un cookie?’
(Would your grace like a cookie?). But it is always a bigger blunder to
‘tutoyer’ someone inappropriately than to ‘vouvoyer’ them.

THE BAD BOYS OF LANGUAGE

Using ‘vous’ and ‘tu’ correctly might make you feel all cocky, but the
real litmus test of fluency in any language is knowing how to swear in it.
When a decent part of your vocabulary is made up of words that you are
not supposed to use, that’s when you know you have mastered that
language.

Young Filipino kids know this instinctively. They try to sound cool by
using swear words even when they don’t know a word of English: ​‘Okkay,
you buhsheet. Okkay yankee buhsheet.’

As Steven Pinker explains in ​‘The Stuff of Thought’​ ​[6]​, the historical

roots of swearing are in religion. Swearing was a means to bind you to an
agreement, which we now do by signing legal contracts. In earlier times
God and Hell were very real to people, not just abstractions. By swearing
that you would keep your word, you voluntarily submitted to punishment
(the wrath of God) if you didn’t meet your obligation.

But the religious authorities didn’t like this trend of using God’s name
for such mundane purposes as promising your neighbor to give him your
daughter in marriage in return for his cows. They said: ​‘Don’t take the
name of the Lord in vain’.​ And that’s how swearing became taboo.

The other reason, according to Pinker, is that swearing is aggressive

and conjures up negative thoughts. It is the human equivalent of the yelps
and grunts of animals.

Other words that are taboo in most languages are words for bodily
excretions. The reason for this is that blood and feces carry diseases.
Therefore touching, smelling, ingesting and even talking about those
substances is bad for your health. Hence they became taboo. You won’t
hear guests at a fancy dinner say: ​‘Holy crap! Look at this shitload of
food!’

Sexuality is also taboo, of course. Pinker explains that the reason for
this is not necessarily prudishness, but the fact that having sex is pretty
serious business. It’s not exactly like playing tennis. Beyond the
participants, there are the parents, the community and the potential future
children who are affected by someone ​‘doing it’.

Having sex is also more of a big deal for women than men. Women get
pregnant and they have to breastfeed. They do not benefit from casual sex,
whereas men do – emotionally and otherwise – since they don’t have to
pay such a high price for it. This difference is the reason that men use
sexual words more in swearing than women. It is less of a taboo for them.

Swearing is aggressive and using swear words shows that you can
withstand pain. In the army, navy and other all-male circles, swearing
shows how tough you are.

The ‘s’ word is America’s all-time favorite, but because using it will
cause this book to be banned for all eternity, I have replaced it with a less
offensive word in the examples below:

No tomatoes Sherlock

He has tomatoes for brains.

They are like two pigs in tomatoes.

We were just shooting the tomatoes.

You are full of tomatoes.

I am in deep tomatoes.

I am tomatoeing bricks.

I am up tomatoes creek.

He beat the tomatoes out of him.

 I don’t give a tomatoe.

He has tomatoes for brains.

Swearing has become less of a taboo in our day and age and there are
many expressions that use swear words but are very innocent. They are
ways to give more color to our diction. The person who taught me how to
do that is my very own daughter. Thank you, Aniko!
 AMERICAN ENGLISH:

THE MOST POLITE LANGUAGE ON EARTH

In the ‘old country’ American English still has the image of being a
pragmatic, somewhat ‘rough around the edges’ kind of language. Nothing
like its more sophisticated cousin British English. But American English is
trying to make up for its frontier-type image by introducing a myriad of
ways to say ‘you are welcome’.

In America, the way you respond to a ‘thank you’ depends on how

generous you are as a ‘giver’ of a favor. It seems to run on a scale from
taking pleasure in doing something for someone (my pleasure), all the way
up to making them know in no uncertain terms that they are in your debt
(you bet).

So here are a few ways of saying ‘you are welcome’ on the

indebtedness spectrum:

If you are a true giver of favors by nature you would say: ‘you are
welcome’, ‘no problem’, ‘don’t mention it’, ‘it’s no trouble’, ‘it’s
nothing’, ‘not at all’, ‘no biggy’, ‘my pleasure’ or ‘any time’.

Then, if you feel that having done a favor for someone has been
somewhat of an effort on your part, you could say: ‘sure’, ‘all right’,
‘certainly’, ‘ok’, ‘forget it’, ‘fair enough’ or ‘that’s ok’.

Sometimes, the person who has received the favor can feel so indebted
that they say: ‘Much obliged’, which means you are obliged to do
something in return in the future.

‘You bet’ really sounds innocent (when the waiter has brought you your
meal and you say ‘thanks’, and he says ‘you bet’.) But doesn’t it really
mean: ‘you bet your sweet bottom that I did you a favor by bringing you
your meal?’

And what about ‘you got it’? What did you get, exactly? As if someone
could take the favor back, so they make sure you ‘got it’?

At the more neutral range of the scale there is the: ‘Uh huh’ or ‘yep’. In
that case I am not sure if it means that the person who did you a favor
thinks it wasn’t a big deal or whether they confirm your indebtedness to
them by not even acknowledging your ‘thank you’.

In French the only ways I know of to say ‘you are welcome’ is: ‘de
rien’ (it’s nothing), ‘pas de quoi’ (short for ‘il n’y a pas de quoi’, i.e., it’s
not enough to be worthy of a thank you) and ‘je vous en prie’ (I beg of
you?!).

Only three measly synonyms in a language that is supposed to be

culturally far superior to American English? Ha!
Madeleine on Beach, Zandvoort, 1957. © Ata Kando
 I SPEAK, THEREFORE I AM

It is generally assumed that, other than ​‘onomatopoeia’​ ​[7]​,​ ​the sounds

of words are arbitrary: a train might as well be called a ​‘tsorp’,​ it would
not make any difference in its meaning.

But in his book ​‘The Stuff of Thought’​ ​[8]​, Steven Pinker, the all-time
expert on language, points out that some phonemes carry meaning in and
of themselves. Take the sound ​‘sn’​ for instance. Many words with that
sound in it have to do with the nose. Snout, snooze, snot, sneeze… you get
the idea?

So, if I throw out another sound, let’s say ​‘gl’​? What does that conjure
up in your mind? Glance? Gloat? Glean? Glare? Glitter? Obviously the
‘gl’​ sound has to do with vision. What about the sound ‘​cl’​? Clan, clot,
club, cluster? This sound probably has to do with people banding
together…

Boy, language is funny. It makes you think about thinking, doesn’t it? It
can keep you busy for days, speculating on the endless intricacies of this
incredible tool we have developed to communicate with each other.

Pinker is a proponent of the ​‘language as instinct’ ​theory, which means

that humans are born with an ability for language, as instinctive as
walking or breathing. Others say that people are born a blank slate and that
everything has to be learnt, including language. I’ll leave it up to the
experts to fight it out. For me, it’s enough of a miracle that we are able to
enjoy language, enjoy it almost as much as a sunset on a beautiful
Hawaiian beach.

Words are being created all the time. But who are these Einsteins of
language, I’d like to know. I suspect that language is so dynamic that
people like you and me are inventing it. No one special. New words come
into a language mostly by necessity (texting, emailing, browsing, etc).
Other words enter our language because of major historical events, like
‘Ground zero’ ​or ​‘WMDs’​.

Some words can be made up very easily. I just read the word:
‘pre-heritance’,​ (that is when parents give money to their children during
their lifetime). So why can’t we talk about going ​‘pre-shopping’​ for a
wedding gown? (I guess that would mean going window-shopping), or say
‘I went on a pre-vacation to Hawaii? I didn’t like it so I went to Bali
instead.’​ It might generate an entire new industry of virtual experiences.

Language in itself is so mysterious. We take it totally for granted

because we can all speak, but if you really think about it, it is one of the
most incredible feats of the human mind. I would like to go on record by
correcting what Descartes said so long ago​, ‘I think, therefore I am’​ and
change it to: ​‘I SPEAK, THEREFORE I AM’.

~*~*~*~

WORDS ON STEROIDS

I teach French and sometimes Spanish, but only when I can get away
with it, since French is my native language and Spanish is just a language
I have a degree in. I teach very little people. They are so young in fact that
they barely understand the concept of another language. But that’s ok. We
all like the way French sounds, my students and I, and that is a good start.

I try to teach my young brood that French has two genders. ​‘Yes’​ I tell
them. ​‘In French every word is either a boy word or a girl word. The
moon is a girl word and the sun is a boy word’.​ So we play a game with
animal beanbags. I put down two boxes. One for the boy beanbags and
one for the girl beanbags. I tell them that an elephant (un éléphant) is a
boy word and a turtle (une tortue) is a girl word. Five-year-old Marty asks:
‘what if the turtle is a boy?’​ ​‘Aha!’​ I say. ​‘Very good question! Well, the
poor boy turtle still would be called ‘la tortue’. ​He would still have a girl
name.’ Marty’s face shows great confusion but eventually he accepts this
as a fact of life. Kids are good at that. They accept things.

Then I realize that maybe explaining this to a five year old is

counterproductive. After all, French children don’t know about gender, yet
they never make a mistake by saying ​‘le tortue’​ instead of ​‘la tortue’​. To
them the animal’s name is ​‘latortue’​, period. Eventually they will learn
that the ​‘la’​ part is the article and the ​‘tortue’​ part is the noun. The trick is
then to avoid saying something like: ​‘Maman, il y a une latortue dans
l’eau!’​ (Mom, there is a ‘theturtle’ in the water).

In my older classes I tell my students that words put together the wrong
way can create havoc if you are not totally familiar with a language. Like
a sign in Norway that reads: ​“Ladies are requested not to have children in
the bar”.​ And I warn them never to ask ​‘Ou est la salle de bain’​ (Where is
the bathroom) in a Paris café or they might be mistaken for a vagrant in
dire need of a bath. (In France ‘les ​toilettes’​ still means ​‘toilet’.​)

These young students of mine should be aware that words are so

powerful that they can shape the course of history. In his 2003 State of the
Union address, George W. Bush said: ​‘The British government has learnt
that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium
from Africa.’​ (Which meant that Saddam was developing a nuclear
weapon.)

What if he had said: ​‘The British government believes that Saddam

Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.’
Would the word ​‘believes’​ have qualified as a reason to go to war, I ask
them? (It turns out that the British government indeed only ​‘believed’
Saddam had bought yellow cake, since we never did find WMDs, but with
hindsight that’s just a small detail).

Even your name is important, I tell them. It depends a lot on when you
were​ ​born. How many parents named their baby boy ‘Adolf’ after the
Second World War? Even though ‘Adolf’ means ‘Noble Wolf’, there was
nothing noble about Adolf Hitler.

Words have many degrees of strength, from neutral to inflammatory to

offensive and can stir up strong emotions. To illustrate, we play a game by
conjugating ​verbs that increase in negative intensity: ‘I am uninformed –
you are ignorant – he is stupid’​.​ Or: ‘I am slim – you are skinny – he is
emaciated’. Or, ‘I am laid-back – you are inactive - he is lazy’. And so on.

Computer related terms can be quite a mouthful in French. Instead of

‘spam’ the French have to say: ​‘J’ai recu du courrier indésirable
d’origine inconnue’​. (I received undesirable email of unknown origin).
There is a bug in my program is ​‘le programme souffre d’un défault du
logiciel’​ (The program suffers from a logical mistake). My advice is to
substitute the English word and put a ‘le’ in front (le spam, le web). Just
remember that it is officially verboten!

The French, purists as they are, seem to be under the illusion that they
can censure their language. But it’s a lost battle, like prohibition. You
cannot tell a language what to do. It is one of the most organic processes
of human life. That is the power of language!
German Soldiers on the Eiffel tower, 1939. © Ata Kando
 CHAPTER THREE:

THE EVIL USE OF LANGUAGE

LANGUAGE AND ANIMAL LIBERATION

Language can kill, it can elevate, it can insult. It can do pretty much
everything you want it to do, including manipulate, deceive and distort
reality to the point of making it unrecognizable.

If you ever doubted the power of language, I recommend you read

‘Animal Equality: Language and Liberation’​ ​[9]​ by Joan Dunayer. With
lucidity, courage and brute honesty, the author shows us that the way we
speak about animals is inseparable from the way we treat them.

Evil, in any form, has the nasty habit of gathering euphemisms around
itself, until it grows to unmanageable proportions. ​‘The final solution’,
‘ethnic cleansing’​ and other expressions are a prime example. But the way
we use our language as it relates to nonhuman animals deserves a special
medal for self-deception and evil.

In her book, Dunayer opens our eyes on the world of hunting and
fishing, zoo keeping and aquariums, vivisection and animal agriculture.
Each branch has its own ‘language’, which is designed to justify the
immense cruelty, suffering and pain that are inflicted on nonhuman
animals. Through what Dunayer calls​ ‘speciesism’​ (similar to sexism or
racism), we lie to ourselves.

One of the most effective tools to justify our inhumane treatment of

animals is to deny that they are individuals. Just as racists have spoken of
‘the Negro’ and ‘the Jew’, people speak of ‘cattle’, ‘game’ and ‘how much
deer’ there is on a shooting ranch. They are a ‘substance’, like sugar, or
sand. They are all one single animal. Killing one doesn’t matter, since they
are all the same.

Almost all our interactions with nonhuman animals suffer from this
‘speciesist’​ use of language. The term ‘circus animal’ implies that there is
a special animal category of hoop-jumping tigers. Without that role a
‘circus animal’ has no purpose for living. Would a housewife cooking
dinner ever be called a ‘cooking female’? As if that was the only thing she
was good for and if arthritis prevented her from cooking, we would get rid
of her? Another example is to justify inbreeding animals for human
pleasure by calling it by positive names such as ‘purebred’ or
‘thoroughbred’. This always leaves the animal with physical defects,
which they would not have naturally.

When we use words like ‘brute’, ‘bestial’, ‘inhuman’, etc., we are

creating a language that justifies the ‘brutish’, ‘bestial’ and ‘inhuman’
treatment of nonhuman animals. We do not call hunting by its true name,
which is murdering for sport. How many hunters are marksmen that kill
with one clean shot to the heart? Hunting means maiming, wounding,
prolonging a slow painful death. It should be called ‘torturing to death’. It
is ritualized murder. And they call it a ‘sport’. We do not call vivisection
‘torture’ but a necessary evil. Slavery was also called a necessary evil until
people realized that it was not necessary, but pure evil.

Were it not for this evil use of language, society would have to view
these practices from a different perspective. At least we could have an
honest conversation.

In a recent ‘Psychology Today’ article, the author argues that we are

hard-wired to eat meat. It is as natural to us as breathing and drinking
water. But isn’t one of the reasons that it is so ‘natural’ because the source
cannot protest? It is a habit that gives us pleasure. And habits and pleasure
are hard to give up. Slaves were hard to give up; treating women like
cattle was hard to give up. Does that mean it was ‘natural’? And even if it
IS natural, is it right? As Hume once said, ‘you cannot derive an ‘is’ from
an ought’. We ought not to let people starve but we do. Isn’t the reverse
also true? An ‘is’ shouldn’t necessarily justify an ‘ought.’ Just because we
can does not mean we ought to. Animals suffer physically and emotionally
just like humans do, even more, because they cannot control or understand
their plight, or foresee an end to it, which would make their suffering more
bearable.

But comparing nonhuman animals to other groups that have been

oppressed and discriminated against doesn’t work. Animals cannot fight
for equality. We have to do it for them. They cannot create a suffrage
movement, march down the street with rainbow flags, and follow leaders
who chant ‘I had a dream’. They are literally at our mercy. Language is a
powerful tool to preserve the status quo. Why are we protective of
children and other human groups that cannot fend for themselves, but not
protective of animals? We do not use gender when we talk about
nonhuman animals. We talk about an ‘it’. Nonhuman animals don’t ‘eat’,
they ‘feed’, they don’t get pregnant or nurse, they ‘gestate’ and ‘lactate’;
when they die they don’t turn into ‘corpses’, they turn into ‘carcasses’ or
‘meat’. If we were honest with ourselves we wouldn’t call removing and
killing off undesirable members of a herd ‘culling’. We would call it
‘ethnic cleansing’. We would call a ‘gamekeeper’ by his or her true name,
a ‘killer’.

I have to revise my own relationship to nonhuman animals. Like

everyone else’s, it is schizophrenic. I love my pets, but when it comes to
consuming, wearing and using animal products, I conveniently put
blinders on. Is there an unbridgeable gap between the is and the ought?
Between what I ought to do and what I do? I have always had an intense
reaction to animals’ suffering. My instinct always told me that they need
protection. They are the underdog and I am a sucker for the underdog.
Now, my reaction stems more from an instinctive knowledge that what we
do to animals is wrong because it goes against the natural balance of
things. But the problem is being shoved under the rug of rationality, the
most dangerous adversary of our moral instinct.

I hope there will come a day when eating, wearing and using nonhuman
animals, treating them like ‘things,’ will be a thing of the past. Right now,
only 5 percent of Americans do not eat nonhuman animals. They are the
visionaries, the vanguard. They have quit successfully. But quitting is not
that easy. And even if I did become vegan, which I hope is the next step in
my evolution, I would still be inhaling secondary smoke. I would still be
affected by the realization that so many animals suffer because of our
filthy habits.

~*~*~*~

EUPHEMISMS

Euphemisms can distort our understanding of what is real and thereby

mask and encourage horrendous evil, as the previous section shows. Such
euphemisms are bad, even ugly. But sometimes euphemisms can be
useful, even good.

The recent public lynching of Paula Deen ​[10]​ over her one-time use of
the N-word has motivated me to do some research on euphemisms. As a
non-native speaker, I fully appreciate how much spice and color they add
to the English language. This is ironic, since the function of euphemisms
is to avoid saying something unpleasant, offensive or taboo. So not saying
something makes a language richer?

In the case of the N-word, the original word is still around, so we at

least know what it means. But some other words have not been that lucky;
the euphemism has completely obliterated the original word, killed it
outright, knocked it off, rubbed it out, and terminated it with extreme
prejudice. The word ‘bear’, for instance is a euphemism for a taboo word
denoting a large, dangerous, hairy killer. The original word has been lost
forever.

One of the problems with new unspoiled euphemisms is that they soon
get contaminated with the same negative connotations as the original, so
we have to come up with a euphemism for a euphemism. Before purists
messed with it, the word ‘toilet’ was completely neutral. The classy
French still use it in its original meaning. Here, the word ‘bathroom’,
which spawned bathroom humor as well as absurd expressions like ‘the
dog went to the bathroom on the rug’, soon replaced it. So we had to
replace ‘bathroom’ with ‘lavatory’ and ‘restroom’, although I have never
seen anyone rest in a bathroom.

There are many tools in a language’s shed to create euphemisms. You

can tiptoe around what you really mean by using circumlocutions ​[11]​:
‘That furry thing with long ears that likes to eat carrots’​. You can
abbreviate the offensive words: ‘sob instead of son of a bitch’, you can
mispronounce it: ‘goddarnit, freakin’, or you can substitute a term of
foreign origin: ‘derriere, perspire’.

Eating, procreating and dying are the prime targets for euphemisms.
Contemporary euphemisms for death are quite colorful and someone who
has died is said ‘to have passed away, bit the big one, bought the farm,
croaked, given up the ghost, kicked the bucket, gone south, tits up,
shuffled off this mortal coil, or assumed room temperature’. Once you are
dead and buried, you are said to be ‘pushing up daisies’ or ‘taking a dirt
nap’. You are ‘worm food’.

There are a few euphemisms for killing, which are neither respectful
nor playful, but rather clinical and detached. Some examples of this type
are ‘to terminate’ or ‘to take them for a ride, to do them in, to frag,
smoke’, or ‘waste someone’.

The Military has been instrumental in perfecting the art of

‘doublespeak’ in an effort to mask the horrors of war by removing its
emotional component. Terms like ‘friendly fire, collateral damage and
extreme prejudice’ don’t sound nearly as gruesome as ‘killed by your
buddies’, ‘death of innocent civilians’ and ‘killing without mercy.’ This
obscene distortion of the use of language reminds me of the live coverage
of Operation Desert Storm in 1991. I remember being glued to my TV set,
watching the killing 24/7. I wasn’t sure if I was watching a video game or
live action.

Military doublespeak goes far beyond the pale in its manipulation of

language to justify violence and destruction. This is what George Orwell
meant when he said: ‘Political language... is designed to make lies sound
truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to
pure wind.’

Sex and its derivatives take first place in the spawning of euphemisms.
I found at least 300 words for male genitalia and 160 for making love.
Here are some of my favorites: batter dip the corn dog, bouncing the pogo
stick, butter the muffin, park the Plymouth into the garage of love, and
taking the skin boat to tuna town.

At least everyone knows what the N word stands for, but what about
other acronyms? The D word could be short for ‘Death’, but if you live in
Arizona it might be short for the dreaded ’Drought’.

What about the M word? Murder? Marijuana? Or the Z word? Zombie?

Zero Tolerance? It’s hard to keep track.

No matter how you slice it, euphemisms are here to stay. They serve as
a pressure valve but have the nasty habit of distorting the truth. The trick
is to know when someone is trying to pull the wool over your eyes, when
you are bamboozled, when someone is trying to pull a fast one on you and
take you for a ride. Then it’s time to cut through the BS, clear the air and
tell it like it is. Or you might just as well play patsy. I mean who wants to
be a doormat, a schmuck? You don’t want to be branded with the R word,
do you?
 EVIDENTIALITY:

A CURE FOR PATHOLOGICAL LIARS?

In about a quarter of the world’s languages, every statement one makes

must specify whether you personally witnessed it, heard it from someone
else, or inferred it. It is called ‘evidentiality’. It is the evidence one has for
the truth of a given statement. Unfortunately, the English language relies
on extra words to show how valid the source is of what someone
proclaims: “I heard that…” and “I saw.”

But some languages have this evidentiality baked into them, so that you
cannot just say ‘the car drove off the road’. You have to specify: ‘I saw the
car drive off the road’, or ‘I heard him say the car drove off the road’, or ‘I
heard the car drive off the road’.

In such a language, when a presidential candidate says ​‘His opponent

deleted emails’,​ it means that he actually saw her delete them. If he only
heard or read about it, it would be impossible for him to say ‘she deleted
emails’. Nobody would believe him, since everyone knows he never lived
with her and never could have looked over her shoulder while she was
deleting the emails. With evidentiality built into the language, the truth of
a statement is measured according to the clear difference between direct
experience, inference and conjecture.

In English, you cannot say anything without specifying WHEN it

happened. Contrary to the concept of truth, the concept of time is baked
into our language. You cannot just say ‘John to walk’. That is
grammatically incorrect and it doesn’t make sense to any
English-speaking person. You have to specify: ‘He walks’, ‘he walked’ or
‘he will walk’ etc. In Mandarin, however, you can say ‘John to walk’.
Whether John walked yesterday, today, or tomorrow doesn’t matter
because you get that information from the context.

In French, the concept of gender is baked into the language. Everything

is either masculine or feminine. If you said: ‘​la soleil est chaude’​ instead
of ​‘le soleil est chaud’​ (the sun is hot), people would know you are a
foreigner who has not mastered speaking proper French.

So you see, languages give priority to certain concepts over others.

English gives the truth concept a voluntary status. You can specify
whether you witnessed something or just heard about it happening, but
you don’t have to. That gives pathological liars a lot of room to
manipulate facts.

Wouldn’t it be nice if future presidential candidates. and especially the

press, were required to use ​‘evidentials’ ​to accompany every statement
they make, by telling us whether they witnessed it, heard about it or just
plain invented it?

~*~*~*~

FAKE NEWS, POST TRUTH AND LIES

From very early on in life, we are told that lying is bad and telling the
truth is good. These values are imprinted in our genes and they are one of
the pillars on which any society is founded, since without truth there can
be no trust and without trust soon we would all be at each other’s throat.

But recent elections have shown that the truth is no longer what
motivates a large segment of Americans to make political, social or
economic decisions. In politics and in business, the truth exists to be
manipulated; it is relative and not absolute to a whole new level.

Plato and Aristotle already argued about this a long time ago. Plato
pointed out that relative truth is logically unsound, since it refutes itself. If
your truth is different from mine, then I can say that my truth is true and
yours is false. Equally, you can say that my truth is false and yours is true,
which means that neither one is real. (See: Plato’s Critique of Cultural
Moral Relativism.) Sounds familiar? Does Fox News report the true news
or is it the New York Times? No wonder we no longer trust the news.

Fact-checking

Who would have thought that the ‘information age’ would morph into a
‘misinformation age’, where we have to fact-check everything we read or
view. An entire ‘truth detective’ industry has emerged comprised of fact
checking sites like FactCheck.org and PolitiFact.com, as well as online
open source investigation organizations such as Bellingcat. For instance,
Bellingcat’s investigation showed that a Buk ‘brought in from the territory
of the Russian Federation’ launched the missile that shot down Malaysian
Airlines flight MH17 in 2004 in which 298 people died. Russia tried to
cover up the facts, of course. (​See: Revelations and Confirmations from
the MH17 JIT Press Conference)​ ​[12]​.

Another development is the rise of Citizen Journalism or Guerilla

Journalism, described by Wikipedia as “​When the people formerly known
as the​ ​audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to
inform one another.”​ In other words, because there is so much toxic
information out there, we need these new efforts to make up for the loss of
truth.

Fact or Opinion?

By its very nature, the world of social media is blurring the line
between fact and opinion and is fertile ground for fake news. Facebook is
no more than a glorified version of the ‘telephone game’ that children
play. Any fact is doomed once it gets ‘shared’ and although a viral post is
unquestionably viewed as true, it should actually be marked as the most
suspect. But who can blame us? We are told to embellish our truth all day
long, by advertisers, politicians, parents and friends. Without
embellishment, life would be too boring. So, a little lie here and there
won’t hurt anybody, right? Until it does. As Obama said after Trump won
the election: “I don’t believe in apocalyptic – until the apocalypse comes. I
think nothing is the end of the world until the end of the world”.

Are we witnessing a litmus test, a split in the road where we will have
to choose between a world where universal values of fairness and justice
still matter or one in which everyone can choose their own version of the
truth and spin it to make it look real?

Universal versus relative truth: Plato’s three-part soul

Plato said that the soul has three parts: the rational and moral part that
loves truth, justice and good, the spirited part that loves worldly
achievement, riches and victory, and the appetitive part that craves food
and carnal gratification. The rational part of the soul should be in charge,
as it is most in tune with moral values. But Plato also admitted that
aligning all parts of the soul is not easy, and many people fall by the
wayside, giving in to baser urges and impulses. So, to all you moral
relativists out there, morals have nothing to do with culture, they have to
do with which part of one’s soul is in charge.

For the past few decades, relativism – moral, cultural and otherwise –
has often been discussed under the heading of postmodernism. There is a
lot of literature about this – always about how postmodernism no longer
believes in any absolutes, absolute values, etc. In many quarters
(especially at universities), cultural relativism reigns supreme, and is
viewed as the mark of open-mindedness and progressive thinking. Have
we inadvertently created this post-truth society in the name of the ‘new
values’? Telling ourselves that we should not be biased against any
‘truth’?

Post Truth Language

The English language is partly to blame for the spread of our post-truth
politics. In the Tuyacan language, when you say ‘John sang’, it is assumed
that you either saw or heard John sing. If you were in another village at the
time of John’s singing, everyone will know that you are lying and your
reputation will be ruined forever. In other words the truth (evidentiality) is
embedded in the grammar of the language.

Unfortunately, the truth does not make for a good story. After all, 99
percent of plots in fiction are fueled by lies, which slowly unfold to
uncover a truth. In fact, the basic premise of writing a good story is to start
out with a statement that slowly gets proven to be a lie. It is fundamental
to suspense and we trust the story to find its truthful/believable ending. So
in what way is truth related to trust or vice versa?

Truth and Trust

When we actually are faced with the truth, we don’t always like what
we see. Stanford political scientist Francis Fukuyama attributes our lack of
trust in government and corporations to an increase in transparency.
Although police shootings have declined, we trust the police less because
we are exposed to more of what’s going on behind the scenes. In other
words, the institutions that give our social and political life structure are
no longer trusted because they have become too transparent and in the
process have lost much of their authority.

Democracy
 What is most troubling about our post-truth society is how it
undermines our trust in our democratic institutions and the values they
represent. Francis Fukiyama talks about what happens once you breach the
norms that separate truth from fiction. ‘We have entered undefined
territory where anything can go. This ‘post-truth’ society is a reflection of
something deeper, which is the decline of authority of institutions.’

The trust in our police force, unions, churches, and even political
parties is diminishing and when someone like Trump comes along and
spews lies, it does not shock people. They normalize it by saying ‘well,
everybody else lies, what’s the difference?’

Lying and Ignorance

We want to believe that the millions who vote for a pathological liar are
ignorant of the facts and once they are told the truth; they will see the error
of their ways. But if facts no longer matter to them, which has been shown
again and again, there really IS no distinction between lying and
ignorance.

Conclusion

There is an absolute truth out there that makes us humans tick and once
we drift away from those core values, we are at the mercy of forces that
we can no longer control, like a boat without a rudder.

~*~*~*~

THE GESTAPO OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS

One step up from euphemisms is the current obsession with political

correctness. In his novel ‘1984’, George Orwell describes Newspeak as
the language of the new totalitarian state Oceania. It is meant to limit
freedom of thought, personal identity and free will, since those would
ideologically threaten the régime of Big Brother.
 I met the Gestapo of Political Correctness yesterday, in my writing
group. I barely had time to sit down at the table in our usual meeting
place, ready to share a short essay with the group, when, without a word of
warning, my hands were cuffed tight to my chair and the Gestapo of
Political Correctness came out and started to drill me.

I was drilled for hours. When one member of the crew got tired, another
one took over. I started to sweat and my heart was racing. I wasn’t exactly
sure what I was being accused of because my essay was about elves and
Christmas. Should I have referred to the elves in my story as ‘vertically
challenged individuals?’ or called Christmas ‘the winter solstice holiday,
practiced with respect for the religious persuasion of others?’

But the Gestapo let those two peccadilloes slide. It was a lot worse, one
of the interrogators told me, as he pushed his face into mine. With an
accusatory finger he pointed to the third paragraph, where, I confess, I did
mention Zwarte Piet (Black Peter), in the context of the Dutch celebration
of Sinterklaas.

If you are not familiar with the Sinterklaas tradition, let me explain.
Every year, on December 5th, a bishop by the name of Sinterklaas arrives
on the beautiful shores of Holland from Spain. He sits on a white horse, a
large miter on his head and a bishop’s staff in his white-gloved hand, to
give out candy to the enthusiastically waving Dutch children. This bishop
also has a helper by the name of Zwarte Piet who holds the bulging bag
full of candy. Piet is also instructed to clairvoyantly seek out those
children who have been naughty and work them over with a birch twig. If
they are really bad, he stuffs the unfortunate ones in a canvas bag that gets
shipped back to Spain.

To my surprise, the PC Gestapo didn’t find anything objectionable

about Sinterklaas having a slave and a black one at that. Their outrage was
over the description of Zwarte Piet as a member of ‘the negroid race’. It
was the word ​‘negroid’​ that had set off the alarm at Gestapo central and
made them rush to show up that night. They were out in full force, gun
holsters loosened, ready for a major razzia. One especially energetic agent,
his red hair clearly classifying him as a descendant of the Irish race (I
could have said ‘Celtic people’, but I couldn’t resist stirring up things
here) and a fervent defender of the PC faith, was particularly upset by my
use of these terribly offensive words. He spat on my essay, his saliva
landing exactly between the words ‘negroid’ and ‘race’. I asked him
whether he had aimed there on purpose or whether his spitting skills were
not fine-tuned and he had meant to spit on only one of the two words, and
if so, which one?

But he ignored my question and just said: ‘We ain’t done with you yet,
buddy. You better come clean, or else.’

A second agent, a heavy set one who looked like the leader of the unit,
pointed to another paragraph where I had alluded to the possibility that,
had Zwarte Piet lived in the States, he would not have gotten away with
stuffing very bad children in a canvas bag and sending them off to Spain
for punishment. He would have ​‘dangled from a rope before he could say:
‘een, twee, drie’​. There was a group gasp coming from all agents present
as these lines were read out loud. The energetic, red haired agent, his face
turning crimson to match his hair, was slowly un-holstering his gun, but
the leader signaled him to stop.

I tried to hide the shaking of my hands as I wiped my glasses, which

had fogged up, from my profuse perspiration. With extreme effort I tried
to appear calm, asking sensible questions that went unanswered: ​‘Would
Germany be better off if it prohibited talk of the Holocaust?​’ This seemed
to be what the PC Gestapo was telling me. ​‘Don’t refer to lynching or
you’ll be hung out to dry yourself.’

The handcuffs finally came off once the Gestapo reached the second
page of my essay where the real story starts. As an investigative writer, I
had discovered the connection between the very bad Dutch children sent
off to Spain and the numerous elves on the North Pole, slaving away for
no pay for Santa Claus. They were, in fact, one and the same. In my essay,
I encourage world governments to indict both Sinterklaas and Santa Claus
for human trafficking and for violating numerous child labor laws.

But the story had been emasculated, fallen victim to yet another raid on
common sense. I was free to go, they said. But don’t think you can hide
from us; we have eyes in the back of our heads. One false move and you
are back in the hot seat. I am heeding that advice. I no longer use words
like: yid, krout, yank, lesbian, homo, chink, hunk, bum, retarded, chick,
gringo, towel head, cracker, honky, redskin, redneck, trailer trash, mick,
grease-ball and commie. No way, not me. I learned my lesson.
Ed van der Elsken playing the flute, Valmondois, France, 1950.

© Ata Kando
 CHAPTER FOUR:

THE SOUND OF LANGUAGE

GHOST SPEAKERS

One of the more disorienting experiences of my life was when I first

heard my own recorded voice. I heard myself as someone else hears me.
And it was a total shocker. After that, I was never too thrilled to be asked
to speak in public.

There is really nothing wrong with my voice, mind you. I express

myself well, good choice of words and all that, but it’s the tone of my
voice. Like the color and pattern of a dress, it just doesn’t work
sometimes. Which brings me to the real subject of this essay…I am a radio
junkie. Mostly because I am so bored driving to work. Since I teach dance
for a living, I have enough music in my ears to last me a lifetime and that
leaves talk radio as the only other option. Believe it or not, in a country of
over 360 million people, there are not too many options out there in that
category. Yes, you guessed it: I listen to NPR. Every so often I give other
talk radio stations a half-hearted try, but somehow I always revert back to
my home station. I am a creature of habit I guess.

Like all self-respecting groupies, I could identify NPR voices in one

second flat. I have my favorites of course, Tom Ashbrook for instance, but
I won’t bore you with those details. I just want to say that, in my humble
opinion, we should introduce some kind of entrance exam to decide which
voices we allow on talk radio. I mean, us poor listeners have to fill in the
rest of the persona whose voice we are subjected to. We can be forgiving
when we see a gorgeous blond on TV speak with a squeaky little voice but
there are no visuals on radio, my friend. Only the damned voice! So it
better be a good one.

You have ghostwriters so why not have ghost speakers? I cannot tell
you how many times I had to turn off the radio in the middle of an
extremely fascinating discussion because the voice of the commentator
was so annoying. The newscaster with a chronic cold announcing that
‘Doo beoble died yesderday id a gar accidend’. That really takes away
from the severity of the announcement, don’t you think?
 Or how about the voice that cannot say more than two words without
interjecting an ‘uh’ in between. After a while no topic is important enough
to go through that ordeal. It makes you want to strangle the speaker. I
dread listening to news about judicial matters since the reporter on staff at
NPR must be eating a lot of potatoes that get stuck in her throat. I am
sitting there clutching my steering wheel; feverishly swallowing in the
hope that it will make HER swallow, if only once, to clear that damned
potato out of the way.

Other voices that should have failed the exam are the ‘I know a lot
more than you’ voices, the ‘I better shout so you can hear me’ voices, and
above all, the ‘mumblers’. Often people who call in fall in that category:
‘Yes, Tom, thanks for taking my call. I really think that.. mumble,
mumble.. And besides you don’t have to ... Mumble, mumble... Unless
you... Mumble, mumble. Thank you, and I’ll take my answer off the air.’
Trying to decipher what they say is more stressful than being stuck in
traffic.

On the other hand, there are certain radio voices that should be given an
A plus. One of my favorite voices was the announcer on WGBH’s
‘morning pro musica’ program: Robert J. Lurtsema . You could tell he
really liked classical music himself. His voice stroked his words like a
velvet glove. With HIS voice he could have announced that the end of the
world was here and it would have been a good thing.

~*~*~*~

VOICES

They are all around us, those voices. They permeate every minute of
our waking hours. Radio, TV, friends, family... voices, voices everywhere.
A voice is the medium, what you say is the message. A voice has a
personality of its own. Why do I like Obama’s voice so much? My God,
he could say: ‘Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall’ and it would sound like the
most intelligent thing I’ve heard that day. On the other hand, ever since I
heard Bush talk about ‘nukalar’, the hair on the back of my neck stands up
just at the sound of his voice.

In our family we have what my husband has baptized the ‘Kando

voice’. My mother perfected the ‘Kando voice’ throughout her life. She
started using it whenever she needed our help. Voices are very useful, you
see. They can be seductive, threatening, authoritative, fearful.. you name it
and a voice can become a weapon of choice. My mom’s weapon of choice
is her baby voice, the ‘Kando voice’. Now that she is 96 and she is
dependent on others twenty four seven, her normal voice has all but
disappeared.

I am unfortunate enough to have a neighbor in the building where I

work who is a former opera singer. Her voice sounds worse than a blue jay
in heat. She is so in love with her own voice that I sometimes wear
earplugs at work so I won’t go totally insane.

The problem with voices is that you cannot hear your own voice the
way others hear it. My husband’s voice is loud. ‘It’s because I grew up
with three loud brothers’, he explains. ‘It was a matter of survival’. He
often dominates the conversation by the sheer volume of his voice. When
we go out to dinner with friends I subtly encourage him to sit at the far end
of the table.

A voice can make up for other things: a small, inconspicuous looking

person can have a beautiful baritone of a voice. Radio personalities are a
good example of how voices don’t always match the appearance of the
owner. I hear Tom Ashbrook on talk radio and I imagine a bit of a
heavyset intellectual with glasses and a beard, holding a pipe in his hand. I
am sure he looks nothing like that, but I don’t want to find out. I learned
my lesson in that regard when I stumbled upon a photograph of Terry
Gross. When it comes to radio personalities our imagination is better left
alone if we don’t want to be disappointed.

For some obscure reason, big, sturdy Dutch women have high-pitched
feminine voices. Happy, exaggeratedly upbeat. As if they just had a
refreshing bath and are now clean and free of depressing thoughts. I
cannot compete with that. When I speak with my Dutch friends, I am so
conscious of my own morose sounding voice, I sound chronically
depressed. That’s why I don’t like to speak Dutch. I prefer to reply in
English so I don’t have to sound so happy.
 Watching Japanese samurai movies is a lesson in how looooow a
baritone voice can possibly go. In those movies the females have to
counteract the baritones by sounding like little crickets, ready to be
crushed at the slightest provocation.

And let’s not forget the part that air plays in a person’s voice. You can
tell when you hear a heavy smoker talk: raspy, worn-out, trying to finish a
sentence with their poor destroyed lungs. But having strong lungs can
sometimes be too much of a good thing: I have this American Indian CD
where the singer doesn’t take a single breath until the whole song is
finished. Listening to him perform his three-minute warrior song makes
me hyperventilate.

Voices are so incredibly diverse. That’s what makes them so

fascinating. If I were to lose any part of me, my voice would be one of the
last things I would want to give up. It is so much part of who I am. Voices
are complex, mysterious, and unanalyzable. They are probably one of the
most unique parts of a human being. The lucky few who can harness the
power of their own voice have the world at their feet. It is up to them to
put that power to good use.

I am in the habit of wearing earplugs when I sleep. Not because I like

having these bulky things shoved into a very sensitive part of my body,
but because the Dunkin Doughnut store next door does not care about my
beauty sleep when it starts blaring out it’s ‘hello, may I help you’ intercom
announcement at four o’clock in the morning.

On the rare occasions that I spend a quiet weekend in beautiful rural

Vermont or in the pristine White Mountains of New Hampshire, I realize
that it is a fundamentally unnatural custom to wear earplugs. I much prefer
waking up to the sound of early bird song and a distant waterfall. The
muffled sound of a rooster on a far away farm, cows calling out to be
milked.

If I were to metamorphosize every sound that enters my sensitive ears

into a physical touch, let’s say a shove or a push instead of a sound wave, I
would be tossed about like a lottery ball in a lottery machine. Thank God
for those little plugs. Without them, I would be a wreck.

But now I am seriously considering wearing earplugs during my

waking hours as well. I can handle babies crying on an airplane, the
‘attention shoppers’ announcements in a supermarket, the arguments
overheard on a bus. Those are noises that serve a function. After all, a
noise is made with the purpose of conveying some information, something
that you, as the recipient, are expected to pay attention to. The baby crying
on an airplane wants to be fed or comforted. The shopper at the
supermarket is reminded of good deals. The argument on the bus is meant
to resolve a conflict.

But much of today’s noise can simply be classified as unnecessary.

Devoid of useful content. Noise that does not contribute to the betterment
of society or at the very least my own enrichment or entertainment. That’s
what I need my earplugs for, this ever increasingly unnecessary ‘social
noise’.

Take Facebook, for instance. What percentage of the noise content of

all those millions of pages truly matters? Does it solve world hunger?
Does it contribute to a better, more just world? Let’s face it; it is like the
sound of passing wind after a huge meal. The only person that benefits
from it is the person doing the deed.

What about the noise generated by people whose sole purpose is to

self-aggrandize themselves? There is no place to shield yourself from
these noisemakers, they have plugged the airwaves: TV, radio, and
newspapers. Take noisemakers like Martha Stewart, Oprah and many
other celebretards. The ratio between what they are truly worth (talent,
humor, intelligence etc.) and their ability to make noise, reminds me of a
nursery school: the toddlers that get the most attention are the ones that
cry the loudest, not because they deserve it or need it, but because they
happen to have stronger lungs.

What if we all put in our earplugs as we go about our day? The problem
with this approach is that you would also drown out the occasional bird
song, the rare sound of a majestic waterfall, the sound of crickets on a
balmy summer evening. These hard to find noises have to be cherished
like the rare gemstones thrown into a landfill. But it is becoming more and
more time consuming to sift through the garbage to find any sound worth
listening to.

They say that dogs are very sensitive to complete silence, taking this as
a warning sign of impending threat. This sensitivity to silence is found in
almost all animals. Is it possible that humans (we are animals, after all) are
unable to tolerate silence? Is this deafening barrage of unnecessary noise
an attempt to shield us from the truly horrible questions that humanity
faces and is powerless to answer?
 THE INTRUDERS

I sometimes envy my mother. She is as deaf as a doornail, but what do

you expect at her age? She is going to be 103 in a few months. At least she
has a permanent acoustic guard on duty, although barring entrance to any
sound might be too much of a good thing. It’s different for me. Short of
wearing earplugs or buying an expensive noise-cancelling headset, I am
exposed to all sorts of unwelcome acoustic intruders.

Noises are part of living, you’ll say and suggest I see a shrink instead of
waste your time writing about my predicament. You might conclude that I
am suffering from ​‘misophonia’​ ​[13]​, the hatred of sound. But I am not
averse to sounds in general; I forgive sounds that cannot help being
sounds, like the sound of traffic, or police sirens. And I couldn’t live
without music.

What drives me crazy is people with loud voices. They are the acoustic
bullies of the world, the ones that always sit a few rows behind you on a
12-hour flight. You only hear their side of a conversation, as if they were
talking to themselves. They completely lack self-awareness,
misinterpreting the dirty looks that come their way for fascination with the
infinite wisdom of their words.

How do they get to be such loudmouths? Were they raised in a large

family where they needed to vie for parental attention by screaming louder
than their siblings? Do they live with an acoustically challenged partner,
or are they just enamored with the sound of their own voice?

I am on the opposite side of the spectrum with my soft, unobtrusive

voice. Though it does have its advantages: when most people cannot hear
what you say, they tend to agree with you out of politeness.

Unwelcome sounds are not the only assault on my senses. Nobody likes
the smell of b.o. or sewage, but if you are particularly sensitive to odors,
an olfactory on/off switch would come in really handy.

I don’t really mind the smell of manure or even gas fumes. It’s not the
cow’s fault that she has to eat so much to feed us all, or the poor car’s
faulty design. They are just as much the victim as I am. It’s the olfactory
bullies that I have a problem with, the smokers who expect you to enjoy
secondary smoke. The co-worker who hasn’t taken a shower before
showing up for work. And especially the odor impaired ​‘anosmiacs’​ ​[14]​.
My husband is a bit of an ‘anosmiac’. He tells me that I am imagining
things when the litter box hasn’t been changed for a week and is surprised
when his coffee curdles, although I told him about the sour milk in the
fridge.

The fear of being touched is also familiar to me. Okay, I admit I might
have a slight touch of ​Haphephobia​ ​[15]​. When someone steps over the
threshold of my personal space I develop all the symptoms of a ‘fight or
flight’ response: heart palpitations, sweating, clenched fists.. I start leaning
back at the waist as far as my spine will allow, anything to maintain that
sacred distance.

Scopophobia​ ​[16]​ is a fear of being seen or stared at, but there is no

word for the fear of ‘seeing’ (video phobia?). Wouldn’t it be great if we
could wear blinders, like horses? I hear that ultra-Orthodox men in Israel
can buy special blinders to prevent sin-enticing images from sneaking into
their peripheral vision. I wouldn’t mind having a pair of those, to prevent
me from seeing all the clutter in my house. I hate to admit it, but cleaning
up is not one of my strong qualities.

An intrusion on my sense of taste doesn’t worry me that much.

Although the food industry has done a fantastic job at bullying our taste
buds with all their additives and advertising, when push comes to shove, it
still requires prying open someone’s jaws to make them taste something
against their will.

So the next time you see someone walk down the street in a plastic
bubble, with a set of noise cancelling headphones and anti-ogle goggles,
it’ll probably be me, promoting my new fashion line called ​‘sensory
overload protection’.
Yanomamo Indian, Mawacca, Venezuela, 1965. © Ata Kando
 CHAPTER FIVE:

THE NUTS AND BOLTS OF LANGUAGE

THE FANBOYS

I am a fan of the Fanboys. Were it not for them, life would be short,
nasty and brutish. ‘Fanboys’ is an acronym for what grammarians call
‘conjunctions’, those little things that function as super-glue between parts
of sentences, and consequently our thoughts.

Without the Fanboys, we couldn’t ‘like cats but not dogs’, ‘eat raisins
and nuts’, ‘wear skirts or pants’, ‘work hard yet enjoy ourselves’, and
‘wear glasses so we could see’.

You guessed it, each letter in ‘Fanboys’ stands for one of those
conjunctions: For, And, Neither, But, Or, Yet and So.

Can you imagine if we didn’t have the Fanboys to shield ourselves

from these uppity independent clauses? So full of themselves, thinking
they are always right and everybody else is wrong? The Fanboys are there
to put them in their place, cut them down to size and make some room for
compromise. ‘My twin sister is very pretty’ sounds okay, but ‘My sister is
very pretty but I am prettier’, sounds a lot better.

The Fanboys are the grease that makes the squeaky world go round. I
cannot imagine what I would do if my favorite conjunctions weren’t
around. You expect a lot more forgiveness when you say: ‘I was going to
do the dishes, but there was no hot water’ instead of ‘I didn’t do the
dishes’. Or how about: ‘there was no hot water, so I couldn’t do the dishes
nor could I do the laundry. Oh, and neither could I cook dinner’. Instead
of: ‘there was no hot water. I didn’t do the dishes. I didn’t do the laundry.
I didn’t cook dinner’. (Take it or leave it, I don’t care).

See what I am getting at? Without conjunctions, civilization would

grind to a halt, people would be at each other’s throat, there would be no
give or take, and life would be hell.

What if we could only express an affirmative or a negative? That’s

actually what children do. They say ‘I like apples, I like bananas, I don’t
like medicine’. Soon they learn that by using ‘conjunctions’, they can save
a lot of energy, not to mention acquire a very useful manipulative tool to
get what they want. ‘I was going to do my homework, but the cat ate it’.

Without the FANBOYS, you couldn’t say ​‘Yes, I am happy, but I would
be a lot happier if you didn’t leave your dirty socks all over the bedroom
floor.’ ​They let you explain why you strangled your neighbor (because he
plays his radio full blast all day long), that you don’t wish to be on
Facebook nor on Twitter, ... that you are allergic to cats, yet you have
three of them, etc.

Although conjunctions may sound like insignificant little pieces of

language, without them we would have to repeat things a lot. If we didn’t
have the words ‘and, but or nor’ as in ‘I like apples and pears, but I don’t
like bananas or oranges’, we would have to say: ‘I like apples. I like pears.
I don’t like bananas. I don’t like oranges’.

Without the ‘or’, we would have to say: ‘would you like to go to the
movies, maybe? Would you like to go to opera, maybe? All that sounds so
awkward, don’t you think?

The Fanboys are just one type of conjunction; they make a bridge
between two sentences of equal importance. They are the ‘coordinators’.
But some conjunctions make one sentence subordinate to another and by
doing so, give more information than the main sentence provides, although
it gives up its own autonomy in the process. As in ‘After I brushed my
teeth, I kissed my husband’. Kissing my husband can stand on its own, but
‘after I brush my teeth’ cannot.

There are so many conjunctions that it is a mystery how we ever

manage to learn all of them, not to mention use them correctly. We never
mix up ‘even if and even though’ or ‘unless and until’. I tell you, it’s a
miracle. Our brains must have little cubbyholes, each one with a slightly
different shape, where only one of these myriad conjunctions fit correctly.
How do children, by the age of four or five, already know how to use
conjunctions properly? Why don’t they say: ‘I tried to hit the nail so I hit
my thumb instead’? Or ‘I have two goldfish but a cat?’

Conjunctions must fulfill the brain’s basic need to try to answer the
‘why, what, how, where, when and who’ of life. Answers that we need to
make sense of the world around us. Why did you have a glass of beer? I
had a glass of beer because I was thirsty. When did you have a glass of
beer? After I ate a pizza, etc.

We could make do without conjunctions, it’s not absolutely crucial to

communication, but it would make speaking and writing clunky and ugly.
I, for one, am glad they exist. If they didn’t, someone would have to invent
them pronto.

~*~*~*~

CAUTION, ARTICLES CROSSING!

The word ‘the’ is the most commonly used word in the English
language. We don’t give it a second thought; it’s there, like the air we
breathe or the water we drink. Actually, it’s not really a word like ‘butter’
or ‘table’, since it cannot even stand on its own two feet. If a ‘the’ walked
through the door, you wouldn’t know what you were dealing with. At least
with a ‘table’ or a ‘chair’, you know where you stand, but a ‘the’? You’d
be waiting for the rest of the retinue to appear before you could make
sense of the visitor.

The ‘the’, together with the ‘a’ and the ‘an’ make up the articles of the
English language. Even though they are useless on their own, these little
function words pretty much determine what people are talking about. If
my husband came in and said ‘A guy just hit a car’, it might elicit a slight
shoulder shrug, but if he said: ‘A guy just hit the car’, I would drop the
plate I was holding and run outside to assess the damage.

Learning how to use articles properly is a nightmare for foreigners,

especially if your native language doesn’t use articles. Chinese ESL
learners often play it safe and omit the article completely rather than risk
using them the wrong way. ‘Apple is good’. ‘I want book’, they’d say.
That is why we start speaking sloooowly and cleaaaarly to them, since not
being able to use articles properly is equated with mental retardation or
childhood.
 French has a lot more articles than English because words are either
masculine or feminine. If you were French you would understand the
impossibility of calling the sun a feminine thing, or the moon a masculine
object, so it wouldn’t be proper for the ‘the’ to attach itself willy-nilly to
any word that came along. You would have to learn how to pair up the
numerous articles ‘le, la, les, l’, un, une, des, du, de la, de l’ ‘ with their
corresponding gender and prey that you will get it right at least some of
the time.

Luckily we all learn how to use these determiners early on in life.

Children quickly go from calling a four-legged animal ‘horsie’ to knowing
the difference between ‘a horse in the field’ and ‘the horse that came
running’. In school they will learn that there are definite and indefinite
articles, which they immediately put to good use for avoiding blame: ‘The
cat ate my homework’. ‘A cat ate my homework’ will elicit a lot more
suspicion, since the burden of proof would be well nigh impossible,
whereas you could theoretically cut open ‘the cat’ and see if you are
telling the truth.

Even though ‘the man (that was following me) attacked me’ is a lot
more definite than ‘a man attacked me’, there are times when the ‘the’ has
the opposite effect: ‘The cheetah is the fastest animal on earth’. Here we
are talking about all the cheetahs in the world, not exactly specific, is it?

And why did Forest Gump, when asked where he was hit, say: ‘In the
buttocks, Sir.’ Why not in my buttocks? Wouldn’t that have been a lot
more definite?

When we go out to dinner, we don’t order a steak or a baked potato. We

say: “I’ll have the chicken”, as if just one giant chicken was prancing
about in the kitchen and it would end up on your plate, no one else’s.

So you see, it’s one big mess, unless you know the rules. But the rules
are so specific that it would take a grammarian to explain it. It’s a good
thing we don’t have to think about it. You don’t have to figure out how the
engine in your car is put together every time you drive to work, do you?

In other words, we just ‘feel’ our way to using articles correctly. We

say: ‘I have to go to the bathroom’, not ‘I have to go to a bathroom’. You
might never return from going to a bathroom. It might turn into an endless
search for a bathroom that just exists in your mind.
 The Zero Article

Several kinds of nouns never use articles. We use the Zero article when
the ‘the’ and the ‘a’ don’t make sense. Obviously, you cannot use an
indefinite article for plurals, and there are times when the ‘the’ doesn’t
make sense either. ‘The children are loud’ means something else than
‘Children are loud’. You can see the rules for the zero article here.

It is on the border between two languages that it gets really weird. We

call Holland ‘The Netherlands’, but the Dutch name is ‘De Lage Landen’.
And why is ‘de Rekere’, the assisted living where my 102-year-old mother
lived, translated as ‘the Rekere’? Shouldn’t it be the ‘the Rekere?’

There is a current trend among marketers of high-tech gadgets to omit

the article in front of their products’ name. ‘iPod is now available in
stores’, instead of ‘the iPod’. As if the iPod was equated with beef. ‘Beef
is now available in stores’. You cannot really buy one and half pound of
iPod, can you? So, grammatically it doesn’t really make sense to use the
zero article when we are talking about an object. But the reasoning goes
that if the consumer thinks of the iPod as a an entity worthy of the zero
article, they would imbue it with a higher moral value, usually reserved for
entities like ‘Mankind’ or ‘God’.

Languages that do not have articles are usually so-called ​high-context

languages, which means that they leave the precise meaning of what is
said up to the context. They cannot be bothered with specifics. That’s why
Russians have the hardest time distinguishing between ‘Let’s watch a
movie tonight’, ‘let’s go to the movies tonight’ or ‘I like movies’. They
will say: ‘We will go to movies, yes?’

High context languages leave it all up to the listener to figure out

what’s meant by the speaker. Chinese, for example, has no need for
articles since historically they have strived to make their language as
simple as possible, never mind if the listener gets confused. Confucius
would have said: ‘Man who not read between lines, not very smart’.

English on the other hand, is a ​low context​ language. It doesn’t allow

singular nouns to stand around all by themselves, they’re required to be
accompanied at all times by an article, like a grammatical bodyguard, just
so they don’t confuse the person you talk to. Everything is politely spelled
out. Were it not for those three little words, we couldn’t distinguish
between ‘Are you going to talk’ and ‘are you going to the talk’, or
between ‘book an event’ and ‘the book for the event’. It would all be a big
mess.

When push comes to shove, language is just a tool. It exists to facilitate

communication. There there are are no no languages languages in in which
which you you repeat repeat every every word word. Such a language
does not exist because it would simply be a bad language.

The fact that articles have been part of the English language since time
immemorial probably means that English can be labeled a ‘good’
language. Omitting them, as newspaper headlines often do, leads to
ambiguity: ‘Eye Drops off Shelf’, ‘Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim’ and
‘Police Found Drunk in Street.’

My Chinese neighbor has a cat and in her bathroom, a sign reads: ‘I like
to drink the toilet water. Please keep lid down, it gives me the diarrhea.’ I
thank the God I learnt the English at young age. Otherwise, use of article
must be very confusing.

It is on the border between two languages that the use of articles gets
really weird. My mother lives in a place called ‘De Rekere’, an assisted
living complex in Holland. Should I say ‘she lives in ‘the Rekere’ or ‘the
De Rekere’? And, since the Dutch call their country ‘De Lage Landen’
(The Low Countries), shouldn’t we call Holland the ‘the Low Countries’?

Omitting the use of articles in newspaper headlines for the purpose of

saving space and focusing attention on the actual news event is a common
practice. This can sometimes create hilarious statements such as: ‘Eye
Drops off Shelf’ and ‘Dealers Will Hear Car Talk at Noon’.

There is also a current trend among marketers of high-tech gadgets to

omit the article in front of their products’ name. ‘Kindle is now available
in stores’. Is this an attempt at ‘personalizing’ their product? ‘Mom, I saw
Kindle today’, a child would say, instead of ‘Mom, I saw Santa today’.

Emails and text messages are slowly leading the way to the elimination
of ‘the’ and ‘a’ from the English language. Until they disappear
completely, let’s enjoy them while we can and appreciate them, because
there will come a day when a sentence like this will be the norm: ‘Man
and woman were walking in Oxford Street. Woman saw dress that she
liked in shop. She asked man if he could buy dress for her. He said: “Do
you think shop will accept check? I don’t have credit card.”

I think that will be sign that I will want to stop the writing. But I will be
a dead by then, thank the God.
 AN ODE TO THE LETTER A

It has come to my attention of late that we, as writers, don’t give

enough credit to one of the most undervalued letters in the English
alphabet, the letter A.

Let’s face it, we misuse, abuse and overuse many letters, but the A is
like the Angus of letters. For one thing, it has various pronunciations,
sometimes it sounds like ‘ey’, sometimes like ‘uh’, sometimes like ‘aw’. It
is like a chameleon. It changes from ‘mat’ to a ‘mate’, from ‘glass’ to a
‘glaze’, from ‘hat’ to ‘hate’, depending on which vowels it keeps company
with. It even has to do the work of other letters when people become lazy
in their pronunciation, like in ‘whateva’ or ‘seeya’.

It is as selfless as Mother Theresa, coming to the rescue when a person

is not sure what to say: ‘aaah… let me see’, has an epiphany: ‘aaha’, an
orgasm ‘aaaah’, feels sorry for someone: ‘aaw’, or just pretends to
understand something complicated: ‘ah (yes)’.

Singers use it to practice their voice, without even considering paying

the A a decent living wage. Doctors diagnose throat conditions, again at
no extra cost to them, knowing that the A has no collective bargaining
power. Can you imagine if the A went on strike? The consequences are
too horrible to contemplate. I couldn’t finish this essey without
committing orthogrephic mistekes. The Spanish language would
particularly be in trouble, with their feminine endings and the poor
Hawaiians wouldn’t be able to talk at all, since their language consists
mostly of a’s and e’s. Everybody would get lost on the islands, since all
the streets have names like Kal’ia’iou’amaa’aaa’eiou.

You would think the A would be less generous, more of a snob, since
it’s numero uno in the alphabet. Not only is it first, it also looks sturdy,
with its two supports, not like the wobbly P or the flimsy F. You can
topple those letters with the flick of a finger, but the A is stubborn. It will
withstand a tornado and smart architects know that the shape of an A is the
strongest way to build bridges, overpasses and tunnels.

You cannot get too worked up about anything if it is preceded by the

letter A. Who cares if ‘a’ wallet was stolen, or ‘a’ dog was run over? Only
if it is MY wallet or YOUR dog we are talking about, do we lose our cool.
 Who invented the A anyway? A genius probably. It seems to have
originated in a far away land called Phoenicia, where it went by the name
aleph, which means ‘ox’ and, as you might have guessed, represented the
ideas of strength and power. Hiding behind a veil of modesty, this
remarkable letter is not only generous and sturdy, it also knows when it is
not wanted. It wouldn’t presume to show up in front of words like ‘water’
or ‘air’. It knows its place and limitations, which is a sign of infinite
wisdom.

To top it all, the A is also used to give something extra importance and
merit like an A in school, a grade A restaurant.

I could go on praising the numerous qualities of the A, but I believe it

merits a far more permanent show of gratitude. Isn’t the A much more
important than the Minuteman or George Washington? Those two only
lasted a few decades, but the A? It will still be here after most of us have
turned to dust.

I therefore propose that we, as a nation, dedicate a monument to the

letter A. On behalf of the millions of unsung heroes, who have been
toiling day and night, on billboards, in essays and in people’s voices, let us
pay tribute to the A’s unending efforts and give credit where credit is due.
My children writing a letter, 1984. © Ata Kando
 CHAPTER SIX:

WRITING LANGUAGE

THE LOST ART OF LETTER WRITING

While I was cleaning out my basement I found some old, musty boxes
stuffed with hundreds of letters. Most of them were written on thin blue
Air Mail paper with one edge pre-glued, so that you didn’t have to stuff it
in an envelope.

I started reading these old letters. They were from my sister, my

mother, my lovers... Many of them written by people I don’t even
remember: Ilse, Gerry, Lisa... Who were they? Was I a good friend to
them? Did they also find letters in their basement and tried to remember
who this ‘Madeleine’ was?

I realized, as I was reading these long narratives, that letter writing as a

form of communication has disappeared forever.

Writing letters was important. It was a window onto a far-away friend’s

life. You could call them, of course, but the flavor of the carefully chosen
words on paper conjured up a unique image of the writer that no other
medium could create.

My sister’s letters were charming, without pretense, full of warmth and

humor. Letter writing was like an intimate conversation between two
individuals that is completely lacking in communication tools today. I
found letters that reprimanded me for not writing more, there were funny
letters, sad letters, and unreadable letters.

They were written to one person, maybe two or three, at the most. They
were fairly long and detailed. As I write this, I realize that I belong to the
last generation of letter writers. My daughters still wrote letters when they
were children but theirs is the first ‘non-letter writing generation’.

Emails can be detailed but they usually aren’t. In fact, email feels more
like talking than writing. A friend that I have known for most of my life
and with whom I recently reconnected on Facebook tried to reassure me
that his emails would be short and to the point, so that taking up contact
with him would not be a burden.

Facebook is even less communication-friendly. The more friends you

have, the less significant the information becomes that you are trying to
share. Texting, of course, has nothing to do with letter writing. It is the
electronic version of the telegram.

We have entered the ‘junk food’ phase in our ability to communicate.

We have become addicted to the quick fix, the easily digestible sound bite.
At first, I liked the instant, uncomplicated way of communicating with
Skype and Facebook. But now I am aware of its vast limitations. It forces
me to abort any meaningful thought that comes into my head. After all,
how important can anything be if it can be obliterated with a push of the
delete button?

I do miss the age of letter writing. Letters let you travel back in time
and have the magic power of immortalizing moments of long ago. Even
after all this time, these musty old letters had lost none of their power to
conjure up a vivid image of the person who had sat down and taken the
time to handwrite them in full cinemascopic detail and colors. Talking of
colors, where and how are colors best expressed and in which languages?

~*~*~*~

LANGUAGE AND COLORS

Not too long ago, people believed that the ability to see colors was a
trait that was inherited over genera-tions. Even as recently as 1858, the
British statesman William Gladstone theorized that Homer must have been
color-blind because his texts don’t mention the colors blue or green. He
concluded that full-color vision had not yet developed in humans at that
time.

People in the 1800’s still thought that physical changes during one’s
lifetime could be passed on to the next generation. In Rudyard Kipling’s
‘Just So Stories’, the elephant gets his long trunk because an alligator pulls
and pulls on it, until it is permanently stretched. Every child understands
that this is just a fairy tale and that we cannot pass on acquired
characteristics to our offspring. Even if you spend your entire life dieting,
trying to make yourself thin as a rail, your children will not be born like
anorexic models. The only reason why elephants have long trunks is due
to natural selection.

Many primitive tribes don’t have words for blue or purple. So the
experts assumed that these people couldn’t see certain colors (nature)
because their language (culture) didn’t have words for it.

English (as far as I know) doesn’t have a word for that part of the face
that is between the nose and the mouth: does that mean that we don’t see
it? That is what Gladstone said about Homer. He didn’t use the word
‘blue’, therefore he couldn’t see blue.

I read somewhere that Eskimos have many more words for ‘white’ than
we do. Does that mean that they actually see more gradations of white?
Does speaking ‘Eskimo’ change the way you see reality?

I know from personal experience that I feel like a different person

depending on which language I speak. French forces me to be eloquent
and poetic. When I speak Dutch something urges me to be practical and
non-emotional. When I speak English I somehow relax, become a
pragmatic and no BS-type of person.

So, which is it? Does language determine how you see yourself and the
world, or does the world around you determine how you use a certain
language? Chomsky said that there is something universal about language
and that is as basic as walking or breathing. Others talk about ‘linguistic
relativity’, which means that the language you speak influences how you
see things. I believe that it is both. What do you think?

~*~*~*~

SISTERS AND THEIR FAMOUS BROTHERS

 I read somewhere that only three percent of the most illustrious figures
in history are women. Ben Franklin, Einstein, William the Conqueror and
Freud do not have female counterparts. It is as if the genius gene only gets
passed on to sons, carefully skipping over daughters.

Famous men of history often had more sisters than brothers; Benjamin
Franklin had seven sisters, Freud had five and Darwin had four. What
happened to them? They all lived their lives side by side with their famous
brothers, only to vanish without a trace, almost as if they never existed.
Were they less talented? Or did they have a different role to play, a
different destiny?

Looking at the size of the families that these famous men grew up in,
one wonders how anyone of the female sex could find the time to do
anything but pop out babies. Women were baby factories, not much else.
Josiah Franklin, Benjamin Franklin’s father, had seventeen children. His
first wife died giving birth to their 7th child, so he didn’t waste time and
married Abigail Folger that same year, who bore him ten more children.
She started at age 23 and had her last child at age 45. Josiah Franklin,
‘made sure that each of his sons learned a trade’, a noble endeavor, to be
sure, but there is no mention of his many daughters being included in these
paternal ambitions.

This incredible silence throughout history of the female voice is an

accepted fact. If you look at the ratio of sons to daughters, it is about the
same in most famous men’s families, but usually the sons were given
special treatment, especially by their mothers. Freud had his own room,
while his many sisters had to share one and both Hitler and Picasso were
their mother’s ‘favorite’.

The many sisters were there to be married off and pop out babies of
their own. They barely had time to catch their breath between deliveries,
let alone learn how to read and write, study or create opportunities to
become people in their own right.

Napoleon’s mother, Letizia Ramolino, had her first child at fourteen.

The baby promptly died and so did the second one. Only eight of her
thirteen children survived. She is described as ‘a hard, austere woman,
toughened by war, who punished her children to teach them sacrifice and
discipline.’ She actually died at the ripe old age of 86, having had her 13
children before the age of 35. Many women these days haven’t even
started a family at that age!

The few sisters that survived oblivion did so at the expense of their
offspring. Pauline Bonaparte, Napoleon’s favorite younger sister, had only
one child who died at the age of eight. Pauline was considered the most
beautiful woman in Europe at the time. This, combined with her frivolous
character, her enormous sexual appetite and her fondness for intrigue,
guaranteed her a well deserved, albeit notorious place in history. She
would be a perfect candidate for a write-up in the National Enquirer. Some
historians even suspect that she had an incestuous relationship with
Napoleon himself.

Some sisters survived oblivion simply by being born famous. Octavia

Minor, or just Octavia, was Augustus’ sister. She was one of the most
prominent women in Roman history, respected and admired for her
loyalty, nobility and humanity. She married Mark Antony, who cheated on
her with Cleopatra, and she had the misfortune of being Caligula’s mother.

Some sisters deserve to be forgotten just by being unsavory characters,

unworthy of being remembered. Paula Hitler, Adolf Hitler’s younger
sister, had a clean slate, until it was discovered that she was engaged to
Erwin Jekelius, who was responsible for gassing 4000 people during the
war.

Of all the sisters that I did my limited research on, none speaks to me
more than Jane Franklin Mecom, Benjamin Franklin’s younger sister. As
historian Jill Lepore observes in the New York Times, ‘by looking at the
divergent paths of these two siblings, we can learn a lot about history,
about gender disparity, and about luck. The two had a similarly modest
background, but he, alone, transcended it.’

Benjamin Franklin wrote more letters to Jane than to anyone else. His
literary legacy is legendary, brilliant, entertaining, hers is full of spelling
errors, awkwardly written, and she constantly apologies for her writing
style.

While Benjamin wrote his famous biography, Jane wrote what she calls
her “Book of Ages”, a 14-page description of the deaths of her children.
She had twelve; eleven of them died. She was trapped in poverty, trying to
take care of a mentally ill husband, having babies who died one after the
other, keenly aware of the ‘what-might-have-beens’ had she not been a
sister but a brother. She was thirsting for knowledge, for the education she
never had.

Have we made any progress? Are sisters still in danger of living out
their lives in obscurity, motherhood forcing them to give up on greatness?
The social pressure on women to have children is still strong.

London School of Psychology’s Satoshi Kanazawa found that maternal

urges drop 25 percent with every increased 15 IQ point. He finds smart
women’s reproductive choice ‘dumb’, because ‘If there is one thing that
humans are decisively not designed for, it is voluntary childlessness.
Reproductive success is the ultimate end of all biological existence.’

Well, Mr. Kanazawa, if women choose to remain childless, it is a

reflection of society’s failure to provide the support they need to raise
children. Forcing women, especially smart ones, to choose between
greatness and obscurity, between career and kids, and then lecturing them
on their ‘duty’ towards our species, is hypocritical. We need those
women’s voices to fill the historical void. Then, maybe, perhaps,
eventually they can have children, too. If you ask them nicely.
Bois de Saint-Cloud, Sèvres, 1949. © Ata Kando
 CHAPTER SEVEN:

LANGUAGE STORIES FOR CHILDREN

MILLY THE WUG

Milly the wug was very ordinary looking. She wasn’t one of those
fancy wugs, with curlicues in their hair and stiff collars to hold up their
necks. No, Milly was unpretentious. True, she had a tendency to be snappy
sometimes. Especially when her father came into her room without
knocking. Her parents often couldn’t tell where her wugging started and
theirs ended. But on the whole, she was a well-adjusted, soft-spoken,
cuddly little wug that most other wugs her age liked.

On Tuesday she received a letter from her aunt Mildred (she was
named after her as you might have guessed). This is what the letter said:
‘Dear Milly. This is your aunt Mildred. I want to come over to visit you on
Friday to give you a present. Please respond a.s.a.p. as I am waitressing all
week at the ‘Wugger’s delight’ and need to ask my boss if I can take the
evening off. Yours sincerely, Aunt Mildred’.

Milly liked presents so she replied in an email. ‘Dear aunt Mildred.

Yes, please come over. I will be waiting in my room. The secret knock on
the door is the following: ‘two short taps followed by one long one’.

Milly could hardly wait for Friday to come. She had received presents
before. They all had had cards on them: ‘to Milly-the-wug’. Just so they
wouldn’t be given to whom exactly? ‘Milly-the-bee’? ‘Milly-the-bear?’
No one else was named Milly in her neighborhood, so it was somewhat
superfluous in her opinion. But as I said before, Milly was ordinary and
unpretentious, so she kept her criticism to herself.

On Wednesday, on her way to school, she met up with Barnaby.

Barnaby secretly liked Milly. That’s why he some-times pushed her and
punched her on the shoulder. So Milly crossed the street so she wouldn’t
have to talk to him. In school they learnt about the famous twelfth century
‘Battle of the Wugs’ when Wug the Magnificent had defeated his enemies.

On Thursday, after she had done her chores and her home-work, she
took Poodles for a walk. She saw a crawn stuck in the tree where Poodles
was doing his business. She carefully untangled his right leg and placed
him on the ground. Crawns are unpredictable you see, so Milly quickly
stepped back before the crawn would have a chance to take a bite out of
her helping hand.

Finally it was Friday. Milly had put out chips and lemonade, crackers
and napkins. And now she was waiting for the secret knock. And sure
enough: she heard the two short taps followed by one long one. ‘Please
come in’ said Milly.

The door opened slowly and Milly, who hadn’t seen her aunt Mildred
for quite some time, was surprised to see a beautiful, tall and slender wug
stand in the doorway. ‘Hello Milly’ said Mildred with a beautiful,
melodious voice, unlike any other wug voice Milly had ever heard. ‘I have
come to give you a present. Would you like to open it?’

Milly was very curious but also very polite, so she first offered Mildred
some lemonade and crackers. As the tension built inside her, she inched
her way closer to the box and finally couldn’t resist. ‘May I?’ she said.
The box was easily opened. A flat, square looking object was wrapped in
tissue paper. She had never seen anything like it before. Inside a dark
brown looking frame was a shiny silver colored glass surface with the
letters ‘U’ and ‘G’ on it. As Milly slowly turned it towards her she saw
buttons with letters, like a telephone pad on the side of the frame. She
pressed the letter ‘W’. Whoosh! An odd looking creature was looking
back at her. It had eyes, ears, a nose.. ‘What is that?’ asked Milly. It looks
like a picture of someone familiar. I sort of like it. Who is it?’

Mildred leaned towards her and as she caressed her cheeks with an ever
so tender touch, she said: ‘that is YOU, my darling. A wug. Why don’t
you press the letter ‘B’?’ Instantly she was transformed into a B-U-G
inside the frame. As she started to press the different letters, her reflection
metamorphosed into a M-U-G, then a R-U-G and also a SL-U-G. ‘What a
wonderful present’, said Milly. I can be anything I want!’

‘So from that day on, when she didn’t feel like doing her homework she
changed herself into a bug. And when her father got upset she could
become a ‘hug’ and make him feel better. And when her feet were cold
she could become a ‘rug’.
 I bet you can think of many other things Milly could change herself
into. Wouldn’t it be great to be a wug?

PEQUEÑO

Once upon a time, a long long time ago, there were three little children
whose names were: Jane, Eva and Peter. They all lived together in a big
house with their mother and father. They were very busy getting bigger,
because that’s what they wanted most of all: to get BIG.

One day, Jane fell out of bed and broke her tooth. Poor Jane. She
wasn’t too upset though, she could still chew her food quite well with all
her other teeth. But just to make sure, her dad called the tooth fairy and
said: ‘Tooth fairy, could you come over tonight and grant Jane a wish, so
Jane won’t be sad about her lost tooth?’ So, the tooth fairy asked what
Jane wished for the most and she told her: she wished she were BIG.

The next day, when the children woke up, they were a little surprised.
Everything was so BIG! The chairs were big, their beds were really big
and even their slippers were so big that they looked like boats instead of
slippers.

Peter (who was smaller but very smart) said to his sisters: ‘don’t worry.
This means that we are still asleep, and we are just dreaming. Let’s wait
until we really wake up.’ So they all laid down, closed their eyes again and
waited until they REALLY would wake up. Eva, who became a bit
impatient, peeked through her half closed eyes. But nothing had changed.
So she said: ‘I don’t think we are dreaming, guys. We better find out
what’s happened.’

Eva managed to climb out of her enormous bed. And right there, on the
enormous floor was an enormous piece of paper with enormous letters on
it: ‘Yoor weesh as bin granted. And it was signed: ‘Sinceramente, la hada’
(which means ‘fairy’ in Spanish).
 Oh, no! The tooth fairy, who had just arrived on a boat, only spoke
Spanish! She had feverishly looked up all the words in the Webster
English/Spanish dictionary, and had misunderstood.

Instead of making Jane, Eva and Peter BIG, she had made everything
else big! Jane said: ‘We will write on the note, ask her to make things
‘smaller’ (they knew the word from their Spanish class in school).

Luckily there was a bucket of fresh paint on the enormous floor. Peter,
Jane and Eva dipped their little feet in the enormous paint bucket and
started to walk the letters like this:

They managed to climb back into their huge beds by grabbing onto the
sheets and closed their little eyes and waited. Sure enough, they heard a
swooshing sound and when they opened their eyes everything was normal
sized again.

Jane, who was actually the smartest of the three, told her dad that they
wanted to send the tooth fairy a gift certificate, which would entitle her to
take some English as a Second Language classes. That is how the tooth
fairy learnt English and never made mistakes like that ever again.

~*~*~*~

AZUL

You might remember Peter from the previous story. He was the
smallest of the awesome threesome and he really really liked the color
blue. He even knew how to say blue in Spanish and whenever someone
asked him what his favorite color was he said: ‘azul!’ enthusiastically.

He liked azul so much that his favorite pants were blue, his toy truck
was blue and his eyes were blue too. He often dreamt that he was
swimming in the azul ocean in his azul swimsuit. That day he ate
blueberry yoghurt for dessert. That was his favorite because it was azul, of
course.
 He woke up the next day with a funny feeling in his tummy. When he
looked in the mirror he almost fainted. His whole face was azul! His nose,
his lips and even his formerly cute little pink ears were azul.

He ran to Eva’s room. ‘Eva, Eva’ he said: ‘I turned azul. What am I

going to do?’ ‘I know’, said Eva, ‘let’s call ‘la hada’ (remember her?).
Maybe she knows the magic words to change you back.’ So they dialed
her cell phone number (in Spanish of course). ‘Uno, dos, tres, cuatro,
cinco, seis, siete…’

‘Ello? Thees ees la hada’ (She had taken a course in ESL to learn how
to speak English so she could become an American citizen). They
explained what had happened. ‘Eef yoo say color en Español, will make
evereething good again’.

Eva’s favorite color was red and she even knew how to say red in
Spanish! Before she knew what she was doing, she called out ‘rojo!’ at the
top of her voice. Poor Peter. That instant his whole face turned red, which
wasn’t much of an improvement.

Together they ran to Jane’s room to ask for her advice because, as you
know, Jane was the smartest. ‘Jane’ said Eva. ‘The hada says we have to
say the colors in Spanish so we can turn Peter back, but now he turned
rojo instead’.

‘Ojala’ said Jane. (that’s Spanish for ‘sheesh’). Jane’s favorite color
was white, so before she knew what she was doing she called out ‘blanco!’
They looked at Peter with great anticipation, but Peter now looked very
blanco, as if he had turned into a ghost.

It was time for extreme measures. They all ran to their mother and
father’s bedroom. ‘Look at Peter, Daddy. He first turned azul, then he
turned rojo, and now he is blanco. We forgot how to say pink in Español.’

Tom got up, rubbed his eyes, and said: ‘give me a minute. I’ll be right
back.’ He put on his running shoes, and ran around the house three times,
because he was better at thinking when he ran.

‘Ok. I got it. Jane and Eva, you need to call out ‘rojo’ and ‘blanco’
together and you will see that Peter will be back the way he was before.
Ready? I will count to three: uno… dos… tres!
 Jane and Eva both called out their color at the same time. They looked
at Peter and.. oh! Peter was all back to normal, a beautiful shade of pink!

Can you guess why?

 BOY OR GIRL?

The awesome threesome, Jane, Eva and Peter, liked playing with each
other a lot because being a threesome is really awesome.

When Ava got bored playing with Jane, she could play with Peter and
when Jane got bored playing with Peter, Ava was always there as a
backup.

In fact, it’s always best to be three. Three is a magic number, you

know. I mean, if there was no green, you could never mix yellow and blue.
What if there was only morning and evening? You could never go out and
play outside in the afternoon. What if Jane and Eva didn’t have Peter to
play with? They would get soooo bored with each other, wouldn’t they?

And most importantly, what if there would only be moms and dads?
Moms are good, and dads are good, but when you mix them together you
get children! And that’s even better.

So you see, three IS a magic number. After all, everything in the world
is arranged in this awesome three​-​some way. Things are either ‘boy
things’, ‘girl things’ or ‘it things’. Moms are girls, dads are boys, but
tables are ‘it’ things. They are neither boy nor girl, unless you put lipstick
on it, of course.

Unfortunately, in Español, you only have boy things and girl things.
There are no ‘it’ things.

So, every little bitty thing has to choose between being a boy or a girl
thing. A table has to choose whether it wants to be a girl or a boy, and it
decided a long time ago that it wanted to be a girl thing. So ‘the table’ in
Español is called ‘LA mesa’. But the sky decided it wanted to be a boy
thing, so it is called ‘EL cielo’. Weird, huh.

Let’s play a game called ‘What am I?’ I will ask you to tell me whether
the following ‘it’ things in Español decided to be boy things or girl things,
ok? If you see the letters ‘LA’ in front of the word, it means it is a girl
thing. If you see the letters ‘EL’, it means it is a boy thing.
 What if the turtle is a boy turtle, you might wonder? Would it still be a
girl thing? Well, it’s sad, but yes, even the boy turtle is going to be called
‘la tortuga’.

So you see, Español is not so smart because it doesn’t have the

awesome three​-​some that English has. Maybe you could write to the King
of Spain and ask him to issue a decree (that’s a fancy word for a ‘rule’) so
that Español could have ‘it things’ as well. All the ‘it’ words, like tables
and chairs and doors, would be really grateful because that way they
wouldn’t have to choose between being a boy word or a girl word. They
would just be ‘it’ words, just like in the awesome three​-​some English
language.
 CONCLUSION

Language is a funny thing. It has so many aspects to it, that you are
never done talking or writing about it. It’s like a corkscrew, which is
designed to open wine bottles but, depending on how creative you are, you
can use it in an endless variety of ways. You can untie knots with it, screw
it into a wall and hang your coat on the SAK, pick gravel out of a tire,
undo zip ties without breaking them, pick your teeth, clean your nails and
write with it in the sand. And that’s just talking about a corkscrew’s uses.
You can also describe its shape, the material it is made of, its color and the
sound it makes scraping down a blackboard.

You can talk about how a language is used, but it is more than a tool, it
is an organically evolving phenomenon. It has an evolution and a history.
And there still enough of them to have fun comparing them, especially
when trying to translate them literally. Did you know that there are no
porcupines in Holland, there are ‘needlepigs’ and even though it gets
really cold, people don’t wear gloves, they were ‘handshoes’.

Parents who read Amazing Language Stories are encouraged to read

some of the Children’s Language Stories to their kids at bedtime to
introduce them to the idea of a wider, more interesting world from a young
age.

So you see, having more than one language in the toolshed is an endless
source of wonder. It is both fun and instructive. It enriches the soul, feeds
the mind and, most importantly, it breeds tolerance. ​Vive la différence!

MADELEINE KANDO – 2018

 NOTES

[1] ​A language that is adopted as a common language between

speakers whose native languages are different.

[2] ​Robert Phillipson: Linguistic Imperialism, Oxford University Press,

1992

[3] ​David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the
Meaning of Everything, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011

[4] ​Nicolas Sarkoz​y​ is a French politician who served as the President

of France and ex officio Co-Prince of Andorra from 16 May 2007 until 15
May 2012.

[5] ​Jacques René Chirac is a French politician who served as the

President of France from 1995 to 2007.

[6] ​The Stuff of Thought: Language As a Window Into Human Nature is

a 2007 book by experimental psychologist Steven Pinker. In the book
Pinker "analyzes how our words relate to thoughts and to the world
around us and reveals what this tells us about ourselves".

[7] ​The formation of a word from a sound associated with what is

named (e.g.,​ ​cuckoo, sizzle).

[8] ​Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into

Human Nature,​ ​published by The Penguin Group,​ ​2007

[9] ​Joan Dunayer: Animal Equality: Language and Liberation. Lantern

Books, 2001

[10] ​Paula Deen is an American celebrity chef and cooking show

television host.

[11] ​Circumlocution (also called circumduction, circumvolution,

periphrasis, or ambage) is locution that circles around a specific idea with
multiple words rather than directly evoking it with fewer and apter words.

[12] ​Revelations and Confirmations from the MH17 JIT Press

Conference, September 30, 2016 By​ ​Bellingcat Investigation Team​:
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2016/09/30/revelations-c
onfirmations-mh17-jit-press-conference/

[13] ​Misophonia, literally "hatred of sound", was proposed in 2000 as

a condition in which negative emotions, thoughts, and physical reactions
are triggered by specific sounds. It is also called "select sound sensitivity
syndrome" and "sound-rage".

[14] ​Those who suffer from the loss of the sense of smell, either total or
partial. It may be caused by head injury, infection, or blockage of the
nose.

[15] ​Haphephobia​ ​involves the fear of touching or of being touched​.

[16] ​Scopophobia is a ​morbid fear​ ​of being seen or​ ​stared​ ​at by others.