All My Little Words or a Reflective Vocabulary

"Not for all the tea in China,

Not if I can sing like a bird

Not for all North Carolina

Not for all my little words"

- Magnetic Fields

It is English, not Esperanto that is gaining ground as the next Latin. Or is this a mild understatement? Should I perhaps suggest that English is stronger than Latin, the former having gone further than the latter language with the advent of technology and world travel? 

And yet English, how similar to Latin, both having gleaned from other languages. For instance, without Greek, Latin wouldn't have had the strengths nor the extensive vocabulary. English without the French influence would be far more similar to modern day Frisian.

And travel. Without the Roman Empire, without the conquest of the various caesars and their Roman legions, so too Latin wouldn't have reached both the shores of the Atlantic and the Black and Red Seas, nor the northern climes of Great Britain and the desolate deserts of Africa.

The same too with English. Without the combined economic business muscle of the United States, Britain and the (former) Common Wealth countries, it wouldn't have the universal appeal it has garnered today. Even with China and India leading the world in terms of population and, may I dare say, innovation in some fields, schools throughout Asia are desperate for English teachers. 

I meet many people who say they love English and I have learned to love it as well. It is like your hometown, you have to travel away from it to appreciate it. You begin to see the sights that travelers see and with new eyes, recognize how special they are.

So, too, with words. After traveling to Europe in 2012, I came home to truly think about words. Before the trip, I didn't regard my mother tongue as especially beautiful. I always through French, Spanish and Italians as the romantic contenders for the loveliest of languages. But while away, I had spoken in other languages, a bit of Dutch and a great deal of German. I had also studied Russian before my trip. I began to take note of words, their musical sound, their meanings, associations and even revelations and started to collect them as a means of further appreciation, reflection and wonder.  

In English, for instance, I have always loved 'diaphanous'. I picked this one up in high school. I had a wonderful Grade 12 and OAC teacher of English and every morning she put a poem or a stanza or often a simple quote on the blackboard. Along with my mother, a fellow writer and editor, Mrs.F. too helped forge a passion for language and rhetoric. It is through her I became acquainted with the word for 'delicately hazy' and 'nearly translucent'.

Then there is 'gleaming' and 'twilight' ('gloaming', as well, another word for 'dusk'), 'azure' (the latter having roots in Middle French) and 'ineluctable' which is a poetic way of saying 'unavoidable' or 'inescapable.' The word has always struck me as sad and when I looked furthered into its Latin roots, ēluctā (rī) means to 'surmount, to force a way out or over'. I now imagine the 'in'-prefix as a chain having broken the spirit of the word, that it is no longer free. 

Then there is 'elude' and 'elusive', obviously related. As with 'diaphanous', I feel the two words have a 'surreptitious' quality, that they escape from our lips like near silent-thieves.  

From 'elude', I make the jump into French, loving the word 'étude' and 'nocturne'. The former is a gentler word than our English 'study'. It brings up pleasant memories of classical guitar lessons, works by Fernando Sor and J.S. Bach and of course, first hearing Frederich Chopin. The same, too, with 'Nocturne'. We have 'nocturnal' but normally you don't think of musical pieces and paintings (ie. Whistler's works), only owls and wolves hunting at night.  

I also like the French word 'flâneur' made popular by the 19th century poet, Charles Baudelaire. The term is often blankly associated with our English 'stroller'. Then and, as of late, it has accumulated other connotations such as 'lounger' and 'loafer' and even 'dandy' to some extent. But I like the more philosophical aspects to the word. While taking art history courses in university, our professor described his own youthful wanderings in Paris, reading the French poets of the mid and late-19th century, breathing in the cultural atmosphere of the Left Bank and Montmartre. He himself had been a 'flâneur', both a part and apart from the crowds surrounding him. The word, for me, suggests detachment. One can belong to the moment and yet regard it as passing and inconsequential. As Rilke wrote, 'be ahead all parting'. The 'flâneur' embodies such a notion. 

Other French words and borrowings include silhouette, Arabesque, chanteuse, danseur and rêve, the latter adding a tender if not restless dimension to 'dream'. The hard 'r' in 'rêver' reminds me that even when we are asleep, we are still awake in ourselves. I often think of the word 'revive' and how when we dream, we are re-introduced, or born again into our unconscious self.

In German, I like 'traurig' (sad) just as much as 'tristesse'. The 'tr' sound either followed by 'ow' and 'gk' in German or the second 't' and long 'ess' in French add more substance to an emotion that is more than just 'sad'.

I also like 'Sehnsuch' ('yearning' and yes, also 'aspiration' and 'desire') and 'versuch' (try, attempt) which both suggest immanent 'search' and 'trial'. The poems of Rilke offer up to the reader the emotional underpinnings of 'sechnsucht'. It is a word that transcends mere 'longing' and implies the spiritual. 

Then there is the German word 'Nebel' (fog) which is reminiscent of 'nebulous' in English. I also prefer 'sleep' in Deutsche, 'schlafen', with its cheerful 'schl' beginning and 'fen' ending that is both amiable and like the sound a sleeper makes deep in R.E.M.

'Love' is a 'lovely' word in English and I also enjoy its many translations: Liebe (German), liefde (Dutch), amour (French), amore (Italian) and Láska (Czech). I especially appreciate the way you say 'I love you' in Dutch, Ik hou van jou (Ik how van yow) and in Russian, Я люблю тебя (Ya l-yoo-bloo teb-ya). 

I should mention my Opa as well. Though I didn't necessarily learn Dutch from him nor my father, only picking out the odd words (and curses), I did garner an appreciation for the language. There is in Dutch the untranslatable 'gezellig' (kghe-zell-ik) which brings together concepts of 'coziness', 'familial comfort' and 'joyful conversation'. While touring The Netherlands, I learned this very gentle and tenderly complex term. 

The Dutch also have 'slappe lach' which describes the kind of laughter you have where you just can't stop laughing. A laughter where you almost stop breathing, it hurts in your gut and you literally 'slap' your knee. Google translates it rather blandly into 'giggle' (as if describing the Big Bang as a 'sneeze') but it is more than just chuckling to yourself. 

Then there is the word 'aardig' which is rendered into the innocuous English 'nice'. I myself have always had a problem with 'nice' and when you look at the word's history it has meant everything from 'stupid, foolish' to 'extravagant' to 'elegant' to 'slothful', 'luxurious', 'unmanly' and 'thin'. Jane Austen once wrote in a letter to a friend, "You scold me so much in a nice long letter... which I have received from you." It's truly hard to say if she was being kind or sarcastic or perhaps guarded in her meaning of the word. But as for the Dutch, it is associated with 'aarde' (earth) and 'aard' (nature). So if you describe someone as 'aardig' in Dutch, you are saying they are earthy, or 'salt of the earth'. (I also think of aardbei - 'strawberry' in Dutch).

Then there are the Slavic words. My mother's side is Eastern European, a mixture of Ukrainian and yes, Russian. Some of these words, like 'gezellig' are nearly impossible to translate without using a paragraph to pin down a meaning. For instance, there is 'тоска' (toská). I will hereby provide Vladimir Nabokov's explanation as he is the master in describing the word:

"No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.” (Source: introduction to Happy Moscow, Platanov)

If one Googles 'toska' multiple pages and even Tumblr sites will be made available all dedicated to describing or illustrating the word's complexity. Perhaps there is such a public devotion to the word is because it best explains if not adamantly describes the moods and emotions of some of the greatest Russian novels, stories, plays and poems. If you read Ivan Turgenev, let alone the lesser known Andrei Platanov or Ivan Bunin, the verses of Anna Akhmatova you will experience 'toska'.

Not as a popular but intriguing is Стиоб (stee-ob) which means 'an approach to life that takes no person or words serious' (source: Russians: The People Behind the Power - Gregory Feifer). Like the 'flâneur', the word suggests a mindset of detachment and even stoicism. Our English equivalent would be 'water off a duck's back'.  

Growing up, I heard also a lot of Polish from the neighborhood kids. Like Russian and Ukrainian, I continually find it to be a beautiful language. Though, when reflecting on my early teen years, I cannot recall any single Polish word as I was too often bewildered and bewitched by the beauty of a few of its speakers, namely Marzena, her sister Anna or their friend, Dominika. Their words were a means to look into their eyes, that when they spoke to each other in their native tongue, I could listen and watch them. And yes, be lost.

Yet a Polish word I came across recently fits my life perfectly and my mindset: 'pokój' (pah-kwee). It means both 'room' and 'peace'. As a reader and a quiet soul, I have often associated these two things in English. If there is a religion I uphold it is the one of a placid interior, a place to think, write and read and research. My room has always been my chapel or cathedral, sacred, sacrosanct. I believe like the philosopher and mathematician Pascal, that 'all human evil comes from a single cause: man's inability to sit alone in his room' (source, Pensées). 

One must ineluctably still leave one's room. One has to go out into the world, find friends, have a good slaape lach and be in the realm of the gezellig and aardig. We are drawn out by our sehnsucht and yet we experience toska at times. Yet the 'room' is a place where one is settled, it is the place of return, of sleep (schlafen), dreaming (rêve). 

Along with Pascal's maxim, I too adhere to the Russian saying that 'visiting friends is good, but home is better.'

Pokój is better still.