A Million

“Do you have enough space back there? I have like a million leg room”.

You know how sometimes you just develop your own language, and your friends know the language, so it just becomes so normal that you forget it’s not real language? I went on a road trip with some new work friends on the weekend (which is why this blog is late). I said the above sentence and the three people in the car laughed like it was a joke.

“A million leg room haha.”

“A million undetermined units of legroom, hahahaha.”

It wasn’t a joke. That’s just how I speak sometimes.

I’m a bit of a show off, and an orator. I love to tell a story, love to have people listen to me, to laugh at my jokes (to read my blog). But sometimes, new people laugh at things I wasn’t intending to be funny. It’s not a bad thing; it’s just a strange realisation to have in the passenger seat at 100Km per hour on a country road.

It’s one of the things I miss most about my Brisbane friends. Having and developing a language of our own is one of the best ways I’ve ever felt close with people. I love words, I feel in many ways they are almost holy, but I also love to mess with them. Years of living and working and studying with friends have produced a special lingo over which we all subconsciously bond. Meanwhile, Boyfriend and I shorten everything. We’re not seeing a movie, we’re “going to the moves”, we don’t eat dinner we have “the dins”. These aren’t even particularly sickening, coupley things, we’re just quite lazy (or “laze”).

And it’s not as if my new friends don’t do it too. The phrase “legit strat” was used over the weekend, and we all laughed and discussed how it would be silly to say “legitimate strategy” (especially when I think we were discussing sand castles). But of course the speaker was just using a turn of phrase, not trying to make a joke. I wonder if he felt like it was a bit weird we all laughed and dissected his words. Maybe he says “legit strat” every day. We just don’t all speak the same language yet.

I’m reading Paper Towns by John Green at the moment (shh I haven’t finished yet, no spoilers). One of the major themes is about how we see others. Do we see them through a window, something of their creation that allows us to see certain aspects of their personality? Or do we see them through a mirror, as variations of ourselves? The main character hasn’t quite decided yet, but I think it’s a combination of both. Language is one of the most subtle ways we can portray ourselves, yet is the most present, we use language almost every moment of every day. It is also one of the more obvious tools we use to create our conceptions of others. Do they speak like me? Do they use words I understand? Are they gentle, abrupt, silly, loud, intelligent, crass or rude?

So maybe it’s not about windows vs. mirrors, maybe it’s about megaphones vs. sounding boards. 

Words

Are these words working, do they work for you?

Damn I love words. Words are the cleverest thing humans have ever thought up. Like, science and maths and all that are pretty clever, but how in the heck do you explain your complicated new theory about fire to the other Homo sapiens if you don’t have some way to codify ideas into vocally expressed thoughts? With stick drawings in the dirt? I don’t think so.

Ta da!

I get unreasonably excited about words. Today, while watching The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, Jane said “loquacious”. I love “loquacious”. I had to stop the video to clap my hands like a kid. Number 1 best ever use of “loquacious” was by Hermione J. Granger in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (movie). It was the best ever because the joke in itself is funny: that Victor Krum is a bit handsy, but it’s even funnier because it’s Hermione, and she didn’t say “handsy” she said, “Victor is not particularly loquacious”.

Words make us laugh, but they also wound. You can stab someone, shoot them, throw a rock at their head, and hurt them, kill them, instantly. But words take time. They can twist and fester and pull right at the gut of a person. Even a cutting, scathing remark that hurts upon hearing will worsen with time, biting deeper and deeper. Words start wars, words end lives; words change us.

Even though words, at their worst, are brutal things, I still love them. I love them for their flexibility, for their changeability and for their ambiguity. I love that you can make people groan with a pun and snort into their tea with a particularly crude phrase. I love that you can put a lot of them together in a certain way and tell a story; that you can conjure them up out of thin air to make fiction.

Mostly I love that words belong to people. Words change, language changes, and there’s nothing you can really do about it. With words, in my firm opinion, majority rules. If enough people start pluralising the word “you” to form “yous” or perhaps, “youse”, then it’ll be a word. Lots of other languages have a plural, but in English; particularly Australian English “youse” is associated with lower class or uneducated speech. Well listen up, non-bogans, if the bogans get that word to spread enough, someone will put it in the dictionary, and we’ll be stuck with it. There’s a beautiful irony when people say “you can’t just make up words!” because that’s all words ever are, made up sounds that some motherfucker (probably Shakespeare) has decided mean something.

Don’t get me wrong. I like correct spelling and grammar. I’m not saying you can just write whatever you like and hope for the best. But the main reason I like it is not because it’s good and proper, but because English is so convoluted; there’s so many glorious ways you can say something, that you’re bound to be misunderstood if you don’t get it right. So you’ve got to get it right. Commas and apostrophes, they mean stuff. Without them, you start to turn words into letters again. Just boring old letters. You need all the other little dottie bits to keep those letters together, keep them as fantastic, beautiful, clever words.

I wonder why I’m talking coz I’m talking all the time. We won’t forget the message and just leave it all behind. The conversation’s trivial but trivial is fine when held up to the light. - Words, Kate Miller-Heidke.