Testing who belongs

The common denominator of all slang, whether it be the speech of adolescents or the jive talk of musicians, is that it tests who belongs to the group and who is an intruder. That is because slang is fully intelligible only to the initiated.

Peter Farb, Word Play

Most slang starts with the young, who normally have two contradictory impulses going on at the same time. On the one hand, they want to be accepted as adults doing adult things — driving, drinking, smoking, having sex, enjoying independence, having secrets, whatever — while at the same time they want all the benefits of youth and being with each other, distant from their parents and other adults.

Youth slang helps them with the latter. They invent terms that become significant only to themselves. The fact that their parents don't know what they are saying is part of the fun. When adults begin to understand youth slang, and worse begin to use it themselves, the young must invent new slang. Thus virtually every generation of young people comes up with new slang terms that they enjoy repeating over and over again.

Some slang terms eventually become part of the language — the word cool, for example — but when this happens they cease to be slang. As Peter Farb says, the purpose of slang is to designate who belongs to the group and who doesn't. Once it enters the dictionary, the word belongs to everyone.

As Farb suggests, older groups such as musicians can also develop slang terms, although when older people do it it usually becomes jargon, rather than true slang. Most businesses, most hobbyists, most adult groups of any kind develop jargon of some kind. Jargon makes the activity easier, whatever that activity may be. Those on the outside have no use for these terms and may not even be curious about them.

Yet as with slang, jargon also tests who belongs to the group and who doesn't.

The burden of being alone

The title of Liz Moore's magnificent 2012 novel Heft describes both a main character, 550-pound Arthur Opp, and the weighty truth Moore writes about: people need people.

Arthur was once a college professor. Now he just sits at home and eats. He sends out for whatever he needs. But he also pines for a shy former student, Charlene, the closest he has ever come to a love affair. He lost his job because of her, even though she was no longer his student by then and even though they were more friends than lovers. Over the years they have written letters to each other, letters each has treasured and saved and read over and over again.

Arthur finally hears from Charlene for the first time in years. Thinking she might come to visit, he begins to shape up — or at least to get his house in better shape. He hires Yolanda, a pregnant teenager, to clean his house. It turns out that she needs him as much as he needs her.

Meanwhile Charlene has an addiction of her own. She has become an alcoholic, and Kel, her teenage son, cares for her more than she cares for him. Kel is an outstanding high school athlete who thinks he may have a future in professional baseball. His mother's suicide makes this lonely boy even lonelier. He begins the search for his father. Is he the man he has always thought of as his father, the man who abandoned the family years before? Or could it be Arthur Opp?

Without ever bringing Arthur and Kel together, although there is the promise of their meeting when the novel closes, Moore writes poignantly about how much they need each other. Or at least, like Charlene and Yolanda, they need someone.

Same book, different experience

Rereading can be a tricky process, in which, for better or worse, you're brought face-to-face with both the present and the past. It's different than reading, more layered, more nuanced, with implications about how we've changed.

David L. Ulin, The Lost Art of Reading

I am rereading a book of science fiction short stories I first read when I was a teenager. (More on this book in a few days.) The comment above by David L. Ulin rings true for me. The nine stories in the book have remain unchanged since 1962, yet the passing decades have changed me quite a bit.

And not only am I a different person than I was in 1962, but the world has changed dramatically since then. The stories still read like science fiction — talking robots, time travel, travel to other planets, aliens from other planets living on Earth next to humans — yet they sound like 1962. Centuries may have passed in the stories, but the names, the speech patterns and the attitudes are those of America in the middle of the 20th century. In one story a character is shocked that it will cost $78.90 to fix a tractor. This is a story taking place in the distant future, yet just 65 years after the book was published $78.90 sounds downright cheap to fix almost anything.

I find the stories entertaining, yet they probably don't shock and amaze me as they once did. As I read them I try to be a teenager again in the belief that I might enjoy them more.

Anne Fadiman

In his book Ulin quotes Anne Fadiman on the distinction between reading and rereading: "The former had more velocity; the latter had more depth. The former shut out the world in order to focus on the story; the latter dragged in the world in order to assess the story. The former was more fun; the latter was more cynical."

Each of her points makes sense to me.  And then comes her final point about rereading a book,  "... I saw the book through the complicating lens of adulthood, I also saw it through the memory of the first time I'd read it."

How true.

A lifetime guilt

Guilt can last a long time, a lifetime in fact.

In The Stolen Child (2024), Ann Hood gives us a story about Nick Burns, a man dying of cancer in 1974, who wants resolution and perhaps grace before he dies. As an American soldier in a trench in France during World War I, he was handed a newborn baby boy by a female artist on whose land the trench was located. Then she disappeared.

What is a man at war supposed to do with a baby? And so he abandoned the newborn, hoping somebody else would find him and take care of him. Now near death, he desperately wants to discover what happened to that baby.

He hires Jenny, a college dropout with her own demons, to accompany him to Europe to try to find the man the baby may have become. 

The more serious guilt in this story would seem to belong to the mother who, because of her desire for artistic success, abandoned her baby in a battlefield trench, yet Hood mostly ignores her to focus on Nick. Even Nick doesn't blame the mother. He blames only himself. Everyone is responsible only for his own actions.

Hood's title, taken from a Yeats poem, is misleading, for the child is never actually stolen — abandoned certainly and passed around a bit, but not stolen. What happens to the child, to Nick and especially to Jenny, who eventually becomes the book's central character, makes a fascinating story.

Life and love

Life is not simple, nor love inevitable.

Niall Williams, As It Is in Heaven

Niall Williams demonstrates the above line, found early in As It Is in Heaven (1999), in the novel itself. He also demonstrates its flip side: Love is not simple, nor life inevitable.

Both life and love are precious treasures, not to be taken casually, Williams tells us through his novel, as lyrical a love story as one is likely to find.

Philip Griffin loses both his wife and daughter in a tragic accident early in the story. Now, dying of cancer, he worries about his lonely son, Stephen, a 28-year-old teacher whose life seems to have already hit a dead end. The two men say little to each other as they play lengthy games of chess, yet Philip notices signs that his introverted son may actually be in love.

Stephen has become infatuated with a beautiful Italian violinist, stranded in Ireland by a lover. He goes to her recitals, even when it means ignoring his teaching duties. Gabriella finally notices him, and a relationship develops, though having been burned, she is reluctant to commit herself to a man. And let's face it, Stephen is not the man of most women's dreams. She returns to Italy, pregnant with Stephen's baby.

Life not being simple, nor love inevitable, the reader doesn't know how this will turn out. This is not your typical romance novel, after all. Midway in the book, Williams tells us, "Gabriella Castoldi shared with Stephen Griffin the expectation of failure and the familiarity of despair." Readers of literary novels share these expectations. One must wait for the very end to discover whether both life and love are possible for Stephen and Gabriella.

Novelist as scientist

Jane Smiley

When Jane Smiley argues, as she does in 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, that a novelist is like a scientist, who is more likely to be offended. the novelist or the scientist?

On the surface, a novelist and a scientist are very different people. If you ever got a college degree, it was probably either a bachelor of arts or a bachelor of science degree. A novelist does art. A scientist does, well, science. There have most likely been novelists who did science and scientists who have written novels, but for the most part they think differently. They do different kinds of things.

Still, Smiley may have a point.

A scientist works with a hypothesis. "A novel is a hypothesis," she writes.

Both a novelist and a scientist are observers. They both ask "what if" questions. A chemist may wonder what happens if a little of this chemical is added to a certain chemical compound. A novelist may wonder what happens if a major character dies in the second chapter.

And so there are similarities, as Smiley observes. Even so, scientific results are supposed to be reproducible. What one scientist discovers upon doing an experiment, another scientist is supposed to be able to find when doing the same experiment. Novelists, however, are expected to discover something entirely different each time. Or else we wouldn't pay any attention to them.

Garbage words

Remember that what you're likely noticing and reacting to is the word's frequency, not its grammaticality.

Anne Curzan, Says Who?

When people talk, unlike when they write, their sentences often contain useless words and sounds. The most common are "like" and "you know." Others say "right" or "um" or favorite vulgar words. When we are talking and trying to think of what we want to say next, we insert these things to hold our place or to fill in the blanks.

And there are those who are overly fond of certain cliches. "At the end of the day" seems popular these days.

It is these pointless words and expressions that Anne Curzan is talking about in the line quoted above from her book Says Who? Usually, as she observes, it is the frequency of their use that bothers listeners, not the words themselves or how they are used in the sentence. She's right.

If someone said "you know" once every 10 sentences we might not even notice. But there are some people who can put two or three "you knows"  in a single sentence. Not only do we notice, but many of us get downright annoyed. Sometimes when I hear someone talking, I ignore what they are saying and just count the "you knows." Yet speakers probably don’t even notice how often they are using the phrase.

It's natural that our speech should be different from our writing. When you are writing something, even a simple text, you have extra time to think, and you also don't want to take the extra time to write "like" and "you know" every few words. Speech, however, gives us little time to think, and if we pause too long, our speech may get interrupted by someone else, as so often happens in conversation.  And so we put in those garbage words and sounds to hold our place. We may not even notice, but if we do it often enough it is certain that other people will.