When I was 13, depression ruled my life. I did not want to survive, but I persisted. Why? The answer can be found in the reason I was depressed in the first place. I was overwhelmed by all the cruelty in the world. I did not want to live in such a world. However, both the legal system and most religions considered suicide a crime. But did I care?

I did believe in a greater presence than any human, so the condemnation of self-inflicted death caused me to pause.

If my life was in God’s control, then God could take it away. Nightly I prayed to die in my sleep. Waking disappointed, I prayed God would choose sometime during the day. And so, the days continued and I did not die.

But then I reasoned maybe it was really up to me after all. I began to plan the circumstances. In each case, I kept hitting the same wall. If I wanted to escape the world because there was too much ugliness and unhappiness, would not my death just add one more horror and burden to the record of history?

I would be guilty of creating exactly what I most hated. Could I do that? Make everything even worse? The question held me on the brink long enough for more thoughts to reach me. I knew there was a long history of others who searched for wisdom.

I began to pray for the wisdom to understand why people needed to be cruel. A wisdom which would make it possible to forgive without anger. A wisdom that would bring me peace.

Meditating on this thought, I stopped each day after school at my church which was never locked in those days. The friend who accompanied me on my walk home would wait outside. I was never long, just long enough to say my prayer asking for wisdom.

It was then I happened on my answer.

There were the philosophers. So many of them, but not one of them had found the single answer which all could agree upon. I was only 13, how I could I hope to do better than all those great minds?

I was never going to know why, not for certain, not ever. Strangely this realization freed me.

Later confronted by an estranged friend in the mood for argument, I saw a vision of our moment as a tiny dot on the world’s timeline. So tiny, so insignificant. Before my recent revelation, I would have been vulnerable facing this once-friend. But I was no longer.

In that moment I knew the darkness I had lived through in that 13^th year was ending. I had endured and would survive. My calmness completely confused my once-friend as I turned and walked away unperturbed by her attack. The worst was over.

Peace settled into my mind, my whole body, my view of the world thoroughly changed.

Janus words, like the Roman God Janus and the month of January, provide two views. For January one face looks at the year just passed while the other faces forward to the future. Janus words also look in two directions—opposite directions. They are an example of the flexibility I admire about English. But they contribute to the idea that the language is difficult to learn. Here are some that can really be annoying to the new user of English.

Dust. The word we all know from housekeeping is the action of removing the persistent coating of microscopic and not so tiny bits that just drift down on everything from nowhere and everywhere making the house dirty. Bakers also know this word. They dust their creations before and/or after by sprinkling them with flour, sugar or powdered chocolate, but not to make these items dirty!

Rock. We are all familiar with rocks. They are solid, hard and often heavy. We speak of being steady as a rock, un-moving and unmovable. Yet, rock also means to sway from side to side or back and forth—very movable. Good grief, which is it? It is, of course, both. It is a Janus word.

Here’s a fun one—Left, the past tense of the verb leave. If we remove you from a room, and we say “you left.” You no longer exist in the room, but have vanished, gone, leaving an emptiness or nothingness once filled by you. But in the mathematics of subtraction, the answer to the problem is the amount left. It remains. The amount taken away, the amount which actually ‘left’ is not called the left amount. So, on the one hand, the language gives you “removed” and on the other hand the answer which “remains.” The word has you coming and going. It is a Janus word.

Bound. Tie something down and it is bound, kept from moving. But hurdlers bound over obstacles in their way. Oh, good. Tied up but leaping about, like that makes sense. Are you feeling pulled in two directions? It is a Janus word. And it has a cousin, fast, meaning held stationary and also to move rapidly. It’s enough to make a person cry with frustration.

A Janus word which comes courtesy of the art of photography is screen. Before photography it always meant to conceal or provide a barrier. After the advent of photography, it means to show, broadcast. So, Janus-like, you are either hiding or blatantly showing off. Oh, dear, I just used another problem word.

Off. The one meaning we all learn early is the opposite of activated or “not on.”  But the other Janus meaning is just that—activated, as in the alarm went off. Of course, off has a bunch of other flavors that add to the confusion—the taste of something is “off” or not fresh; I am feeling off or not well or inadequate and so forth.

What is a person new to English to do?

While I enjoy the adaptability of English to make a word, new or old, suit the changing world, I must admit the choices made can be more confusing than helpful. As a native speaker, I apologize to all those new to this language and offer my profound sympathy.

For additional examples, you might check out www.mentalfloss.com. To see Janus words existing in other languages, try Wikipedia’s article on the Auto-antonym.

#TRIVIADAY

#January4

Taking a slightly different direction than my other essays on the English language with this post. Back when I was a teenager, I learned that Japanese, like English, is stress dependent. This lesson came from a Japanese speaking actor performing the play Kataki at the community theater where I attended Drama lessons.

Everyone at the theater was pronouncing the play title as “ka-TAH-i” or “ka-TACK-i.” The Japanese actor informed us the proper pronunciation was “KAH-tah-ki.” But just yesterday, I learned Japanese is also pitch dependent like Chinese. In other words, the same written word (characters/script) when pronounced with not only stress, but pitch change, will have more than one definition.

I should have realized this before as I have long known that Chinese has this characteristic, and the two languages share a linguistic string. But what I found most interesting is that the author of the post explained there is a possible way to write a word to indicate the pitch variant, and therefore the true meaning intended. However, it is also possible that the word’s connotation will vary depending on how the word is used—something common to most languages.

Ignoring connotation for a moment, I have to say never have I been happier to know that English meanings change primarily due to where the stress is place on the word. Example from an earlier post*, CON-test is a competition, but con-TEST is the action of vying to win that CON-test.

However, English speakers manage to even make the simplicity of this complicated. Americans pronounced the word dedicated as DED-i-ca-ted, while our English cousins will say ded-i-CA-ted (long A). If the speaker is from India, the word might or might not mimic the English pronunciation. And so it goes, around the globe. Just imagine what would happen if English, like Japanese or Chinese, were also pitch dependent. Horrors!

*For the full text of the February 27, 2023 post, see:

#EnglishLanguage

I climbed the sounds until I found a word. Then I played upon the shape of it as though it were a jungle gym or the playground monkey bars (sliding up and down and wiggling in and out the angles and curves) until it became as familiar as home: so that I would know it in the dark, recognize it in a fog.

Then growing more adventurous, I flew like the trapeze artist from word to word–sometimes to fall, tumbling into confusion only to land back where I had started. Yet the thrill of the flight would draw me back up onto the high platform to try again and again. I learned to balance upon the high wire, that taut string of words reaching from meaning to understanding. There I performed a delicate ballet: each step, each forward movement carefully executed following the narrow path.

Next I took to the suspended swinging rope: words in a flexible line that arched and wove around me. I swung outward till I stretched free of the rope into the bit of air circumferenced by the words. There I flew and danced while barely tethered to the line like a kite held to the earth by a string. Yet I was freer to explore the sky than any kite.

So, this is how I have come to know what language is. And the thrill of discovery still remains. With each day a new trick may be learned, while the danger now is more acute for no longer do I wear a safety harness, no more perform above a safety net.

#EnglishLanguage

I have an inherited friend, a dear friend of my mother’s. They met in writing class, and it is writing that connects me to this friend. Every day I call to share a poem with her, for it is poetry that truly speaks to her as she ages toward one hundred. Like my mother, she is happy to read poem after poem in books of poetry.

Though I appreciate poetry and write it, I cannot bear to read poem after poem in a book of poems. I find the experience too overwhelming. Still, I do read others’ poems, but lately I have been finding it difficult for another reason altogether—the English is wrong. Errors stop me, choke the flow of the words.

Today as I searched the web for a poem to read to my friend, I found myself editing the poet’s choice of words so that my friend’s ears would not also be startled, dragged from sense into questioning what was heard. Some of these errors are due to a simple lack of spell checking the “help” that the autocorrect feature supplies as we type online. These I can forgive. I don’t always catch them myself.

Some errors can be explained as the typical errors made by non-native speakers of English. These, too, are easily forgiven. More so, even, than failure to proofread a final draft.

But this morning I found a poem which seemed so promising, only to find myself thinking errors in parallel structure. A term I haven’t used for years, a relic from my years of teaching English to teenagers. I just couldn’t continue as there were too many corrections to make as I read. I did not share that poem with my friend. Even so, if the poem had not also survived copy editing and been published, I would not be writing this now.

It seems to me too many poems today are full of errors and yet are published. Yes, I know that it is the writer’s prerogative to purposely break rules to create a desired impact. I try to allow for this as I read the poems with errors, but the mistakes seldom add anything to the message, style or feeling of the poem. They are just wrong, and my curse is to find them.