Quakerese

Today I was trying to tell a coworker I wanted to hold off on publishing something I wrote. "Maybe we should season this another week," I told her. Translation: I woke up this morning realizing this was all a horrible idea, and if we publish this I'll be so embarrassed I'll cry.

I failed to realize, though, that I was speaking Quaker and she had no idea what I meant. Apparently "season" to mean "delay, hoping we never have to deal with it again" is not common usage. E.g. The Education Standing Committee agreed to establish a task group to further season this idea.

Sometimes I think Quakers have too much jargon, but sometimes it would be useful if everyone knew it.

No forwarding address

It’s funny how many words there are for “dead.”

In a newspaper article, you may be a fatality. In another sort of newspaper article, you may be the late Mr. Walker. To your sister, you have passed away. To your pastor, you are the dearly departed. The post office prefers “deceased”.

Today at work I got a piece of returned mail with that word scrawled on it. Below was the post office’s sticker:

MOVED

LEFT NO FORWARDING ADDRESS

Get it right

I'm fascinated to read that the movie of The Importance of Being Earnest is rated PG "for mild sensuality". What exactly are the characters doing that children shouldn't see? Feeling the satin lining in their coats? Licking maple syrup off a fork at breakfast? Smelling the air as they walk outside in the morning? I'm so tired of people confusing sensuality with sexuality.

Brief rant

Who let an Eastern European compose the "international" language? Did the man stop to wonder if ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, or ŝ appeared on anybody else's keyboards or were even letters that made sense to anyone else? And why the ham sandwich would you construct a language with cases if you wanted to make it so easy to learn? The random choice of vocab from Germanic and Latin roots is driving my poor etymologist's brain up the wall, too - you can't have "god" be the word for God and "adiaŭ" be the word for goodbye!

In other words, I'm learning Esperanto. Even my mother thinks this is a new height of geekiness. It's almost certainly my most pointless language yet, but it's keeping me busy.

A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse - and Thou

I've fallen in love with a pronoun. "Thou", specifically. I've just finished reading a lovely book called Ella Minnow Pea, in which more and more letters of the alphabet keep getting outlawed, so after "u" is banned people have to call each other "thee" because "you" is impossible. It makes their dialogue so much sweeter.

I'm sad that we ever lost the word. I've always liked that older Christian texts address God not with the formal "You" as if to a superior, but "Thou" as if to a parent. The language that seems stuffy to modern ears is actually a mark of closeness, almost an endearment. Familial, intimate. "Be Thou my God" just doesn't work in modern speech. Joseph Campbell talks about the relationship between Native Americans and the bison, and how they addressed all living things as "thou". The whites came and called the bison "it" and slaughtered them. "The ego that sees a 'thou' is not the same ego that sees an 'it.' And when you go to war with people, the problem of the newspapers is to turn those people into 'its.'"

I've met a few old Quakers who still use "thee" - although they've developed their own grammar for it, which is a little distressing. The custom of using only the informal started in the 1600s when the Quakers began trying to break down class barriers, so refusing to address authority figures with the formal "you" and instead using the informal "thou" was quite a radical concept. Now it's almost never used with outsiders, so it's become a marker of intimacy and belonging - I've only ever heard it used within families or with other Quakers. Unfortunately it's now archaic because English happened to be a language that erased the informal entirely and started calling everyone formally.

The distinction still exists in other languages, of course, though in some places folks are veering (as we have in English) towards the formal and others towards the informal. The informal is almost always used in Danish now, but it still has a slightly closer feel to it because it sounds like the English. "Altid din" on the end of a letter is so much nicer when you read it literally as "thine" instead of "yours." I feel like Professor Bhaer (whom I had a crush on when I was eight) - "Say 'thou', also, and I shall say your language is almost as beautiful as mine."

Anachronisms

I'm irritated that grammar check wants to change "thee and thou" to "you and you". As if anyone would actually use the old form by mistake, and be reminded by grammar check "Oh, that's right - it's 2006! 'You' would be more current!"

What words say

It's funny what words say about a society. In Russia the word "state" shows up everywhere - Moscow State University, etc. In Denmark the word you see everywhere is folke - "people." Denmark has people's highschools and Copenhagen People's University and the Danish People's Party. But the word doesn't mean "a collection of individuals" like you could use "people" in English - you can't say there were a lot of folke at the party. It's the nation, the community. In Russia you only have individuals and the state. In Denmark the state is the people's.

The other night I was at Ricky's house during bathtime for the youngest son, who was squeezing his bar of soap to make it shoot up in the air. I began counting backwards in Danish as if for a rocket launch, but when I got to what should have been "blastoff", I realized I had no idea how to say that in Danish. I asked Ricky, who didn't know, and we asked his mother. "What do you say at a rocket launch after 'three, two, one'?" Dorte looked puzzled: "Zero?" Only then did I realize that of course they wouldn't know - Denmark has no space program. There is no word for "blastoff" in Danish.

A bodkin is some kind of pointy object, apparently

I had never really considered how great English is as a first language. This week in the high school class I volunteer in, the kids were translating Shakespeare from Danish into English. There's nothing like trying to explain the bit about making his quietus with a bare bodkin to a couple of highly suspicious Danish teenagers to make you realize that you have no idea what a quietus or a bodkin is. The Danish translation just rewrote the meaning of any bits that were too hard to understand, which made me appreciate being able to read so much of the world's best literature in the original language just by virtue of speaking English. It also makes me wonder what kind of garbling all the translated texts I read have gone through.

I'm starting to plan next summer. The international internship emails from Bryn Mawr were looking tasty, but I'm thinking no because if I'm going to go to a foreign country for two months, I'll barely have gotten trained and figured out what to do before I'll have to go home.

Option number two is the leadership program at Pendle Hill. I'd be living there (it's a Quaker center near Swarthmore) doing cooking, gardening, manual labor, etc plus 20 hours a week interning in some kind of social service agency in Philadelphia. It sounds just about perfect, and hopefully they won't mind that I'm agnostic. Co-founding a very short-lived Quaker student group last year should count for something, right?

In which I am a nerd

The problem with studying Nordic mythology is that the assumption is that anyone who's studying it at all has devoted their life's work to it and therefore speaks Icelandic, ancient Norse, etc. Half the sources I'm finding for my paper don't even bother translating the things they quote, though I can read a few words. It's just cruel to note that speaking the words ragr, strodinn, and sordinn were punishable by death in Iceland and then not telling you what they mean. Actually, they do translate sordinn, but unfortunately it's not a word I can bring myself to include in a paper, even in quotation.

On the plus side, one Dr. Carol Clover just made my day with her paper on masculinity in ancient Norse society by stating that "When not only one's sword and one's penis go limp but also one's tongue, life is pretty much over." I have never written a fan letter to a professor before, but I think this woman needs to get one as soon as I'm done with this paper.

Also, at my host sister's dinner party Saturday night I tried to explain the Protestant work ethic when one of the other girls asked me why our welfare system was so bad compared to Denmark's. Remind me never to try to explain Weber at a dinner party ever again, especially not with a language barrier and Britney Spears going loudly in the background.

Vor Frue Kirke

Today I went to my first-ever Lutheran service at Vor Frue Kirke, Copenhagen's cathedral. Understanding Danish hymns is a lot like understanding salsa music: you can get the gist of all the songs if you know the basic vocab. In salsa it's "heart", "bandit", "blood", "heat", "love," and "pain." The hymns also have lots of "love" and some "blood", but also lots of "heaven", "earth", "Lord", "law", and "word." Both got lucky with some rhymes: in Danish "blood" and "bread" rhyme, which is handy for communion hymns, and in Spanish "beer" and "headache" rhyme, which is just handy.

On Sunday nights there's a night church, where the place is all lit with candles and you can wander in and sit down for as long as you want in silence. I sort of like it better than the actual service because listening to a sermon in Danish is dead boring (in Denmark they say ass-boring), although I do like the singing. Church and football matches are about the only opportunities for group singing here.

In which Denmark confuses me

Whoah, Danish political parties have logos. Logos are so much cooler than donkies and elephants. I guess you need them more when you have more than two parties.

If you ever want people to look at you like you've got to be joking, become a professor of Danish Politics and Society and draw a scale of the seven main political parties on the board, explaining that the parties called "the Left" and "the Conservatives" are both rightwing, while "the Radical Left" is centrist. Or, if you prefer, you could become a professor of the Danish language and explain to equally incredulous students that Danish has two genders, neither of which is masculine or feminine. Your choice.