Patty - Living with a Dead Language

Rem tene, verba sequentur.

Grasp the topic, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

Verba tene, res sequentur.

Grasp the words, the topic will follow.

Umberto Eco

I t began with benevolence. I was in the seventh grade and my oldest brother, Terry, was home for Thanksgiving. He was in his freshman year in college at UC Berkeley, a short fifteen miles away on the map, but worlds distant from our home on Elysian Fields Drive in East Oakland. Along with such exotica as sauted mushrooms, espresso coffee, and romaine lettuce, Terry brought home books and words. I dont remember the context in which he used benevolence, but I dont think I had ever heard such a sonorous four-syllable word used in speech before. I wanted that word, and ran off to my room to write it down and look up its meaning in the dictionary. I loved how it extended the concept of kindness into a worldview.

I began collecting words. By ninth grade, I was using my new words in conversation whenever I could. This did not delight my classmates, and forced me to drop the phony stupid-girl act I had adopted in a futile quest for popularity. (In the midsixties, it was the height of uncool at my school to be smart. I still remember being mortified when a friend in eighth grade started telling everyone I got straight As on my report card.) I decided to become an intellectual, an important-sounding, polysyllabic concept.

Books and words were in short supply in our household. Neither of my parents had gone to college, though my mother was an avid worker of crossword puzzles and often bragged that she was so good at them because shed studied Latin all during her Catholic education. Shed even won the Latin medal when she graduated from high school. Latin, for her, was the expression of her intelligence. But her engagement with words was solitary, and she did not use Latin words or phrases around us, nor explain how they helped her solve the crossword clues.

The only interest my father showed in words was in trying to rid us of certain verbal tics that annoyed him: Whenever one of us (too frequently) said, Yaknow? he would say, No, I dont know. Whenever we said, Thats true, he would say, No. True lives across the street. True being the name of the doctors wife in the pink ranch opposite our house.

After benevolence, I was always on the alert for new words that came my way, and Id add them to my growing list of words and their definitions. Id test myself against the It Pays to Enrich Your Word Power pages in the monthly Readers Digest. Soon I knew all the words on offer there.

During high school I spent most of my spare time reading, writing bad poetry, and discussing books (often recommended by Terry) with my best friend, Shannon. Words had become my other best friend: I spent hours following strings of synonyms through the dictionary. I became obsessed with suffixes, especially with words ending in -id. I loved the -id words: languid, pellucid, insipid, intrepid. They have an interior, intense quality; the -id ending carries the scent of moral or esthetic indulgence, whether good or bad. It forces the tongue to execute a dental stop to finish the word, as if its entitled. Even before I knew Freuds id, and what it meant, I seemed to have intuited it in many -id words. Each seemed a quiddity (!) of a state of being, complete in itself. After several years, my collection of -id words was large enough to construct the House of Ids.