Memoirs, Ink

On Love and Language

by Leonore Tjia

I am beginning to grow dissatisfied with my own language.

Oh, don’t mistake me, I have long been in love with English and its idiosyncrasies. This magpie tongue has enough words to satisfy the most loquacious, and it lends itself well to sarcasm—something even the dourest speaker should appreciate. It’s also flexible, capable of portmanteaus like ‘blog’, new verbs—she Facebooked him; I’ll Blackberry you—and so forth.

Let’s not forget tenses! (That was the imperative.) If we were to worship at the temple of the subjunctive mood, we would kneel before phrases capable of expressing lifetimes of uncertainty; let us pause before doors and give thanks.

My fanaticism runs the other way, too. Misplaced punctuation marks actually give me a headache. I get a perverse delight out of correcting the grammar of street signs. When people replace my delicate, beloved ‘were’—as in if I were—with the uncouth if I was, it simply adds insult to injury.

I have been called a grammar Nazi, but I prefer something more delicate; communication is, after all, an everyday art—not a marauding army. I try to find beauty in the mundane.

But let us return to the question of vocabulary and my own dissatisfaction. Someone once told me that in Icelandic, there is a word for the experience of dreaming something which later comes true. In English we call our protests demonstrations, but in French they are manifestations—a word with a more spiritualist background, implying a calling forth, a collective realization of ideas and hopes. In English: chance, in French: something which entails more risk, hasard. How to express these subtleties? Am I asking too much in wanting words to match, no, downright embody the fullness of their meanings?

And I wonder about all the things for which we have no words. Why is there no term for the space between lightning and thunder? There is no word for the flight of hawks on the empty sky in high summer, though if there were it would have to express both those wings and the ensuing jolt of pleasure in my heart. No word for the kindness of strangers, or the irritation of navy, brown, and black together. And I know the word “rose,” and the word “garden,” and the word “smell”—but as for the perfume of those blossoms, which spreads through my house at night and into the room where I sleep—well, that is just one more thing without a name.

I’m beginning to wonder, too, about “love”—a word thrown around a bit carelessly, used for parents, siblings, friends, cats, good Samaritans, Hitchcock films, peonies. I love all those things, and I know it is wrong to list you among them, because you are more than one more detail.

So instead, I’ll say: there is no word for the smell of your hair or the familiarity of your skin. There is no word for the shape of you in a crowd, and also no word for how I can always find you there. I think I could forgive English all its failures if it were not for the shape of your hands, and the feel of them enclosing mine.

Our language having failed us, I’ve learned to live with you wordlessly. I am filled with a new awareness. I know English is not enough, and yet somehow I've achieved fluency in another tongue, a new language with no words and no name. It passes from my silence to yours, containing silence. And it is enough.

 

Leonore Tjia (pronounced CHEE-uh) studies International Relations and German at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. “On Love and Language” is her first published work.