‘Snitzels’ and silly semantic snobbery

To be fair, we all have our little grammatical peccadilloes (euch, one of mine is the use of the word ‘Peccadillo’) or pet peeves about the way people use, or rather misuse, language to express themselves.

I found more than 55 different Facebook groups and pages alone for people who simply will not abide the various word misuses or misspellings of words in the English language. The first most commonly held prejudice appears to be against people who utilise the wrong form of ‘there’, ‘their’ or ‘they’re’. Following closely behind in second place seems to be the misuse of ‘it’s’ versus ‘its’, or in more general terms, a general intolerance for people who simply have no ability to correctly employ an apostrophe.

Interestingly, the most heavily populated Facebook language or grammar related group is without a doubt “I judge you when you use poor English”, a title which itself contains no fewer than four semantic insufficiencies, and ironically a group whose name belies the often poor language of its many members.

Although I can understand and even speak, to varying extents, several other languages, I am not sufficiently competent in any to truly know if this is an equally common phenomenon in other languages. I also wonder if this is a uniquely western problem, or at least more common in the west than east.

What seems simplest is to immediately lay blame at America as the precipitator of the English language’s steep demise. (Please note I am not referring to uses of slang or vulgar forms of English in general.. but we’ll get to that) While American English can certainly be grumbled at for removing letters such as the ‘U’ from words such as ‘colour’, ‘labour’, ‘flavour’, or the letter ‘I’ from ‘aluminium’, or exchanging the ‘S’ for a ‘Z’ in words such as ‘organise’ and ‘analyse’, this is a matter of style, and no grammatical change has been made by American English which threatens the actual structure of the language.

In fact if we remove ourselves from the usual American-bashing position, and look around, other more startling and dramatic changes have been made, mostly unconsciously, by a little island-nation comprised of convict-descendants and immigrants in the middle of the pacific ocean. (Wave guys!)

The word ‘orientate’, is my big one. And while I am still friends with people who use the word, it irks me no end that those who profess enormous disapproval of language abuse continue to insist on using the word themselves, despite it being grammatically nonsensical. (Yes, not a crime against humanity by any stretch, but certainly an annoyance.)

The verb ‘to orient’ comes from the Latin root ‘oriri’ meaning ‘rising’, which explains why ‘Orient’ also came to be used a name for Asia, ‘The east’, -which is where the sun rises. (Incidentally, ‘Occident’ means ‘setting’, as in ‘where the sun sets’, and is the name ‘The west’, in the same way as ‘Orient’ is for the east.) Initially ‘to orient oneself’ meant to adjust one’s bearings relative to the east.

‘To orientate oneself’ exists only as a backformation of the word ‘orientation’ a grammatically valid noun form of ‘orient’. Some have argued that since the word ‘orientate’ has been used since its back forming in1849 it is now essentially canonised and an acceptable part of the English language.

When it was formed seems immaterial. The question is whether it is acceptable as proper English. Its suffix of ‘-ate’ certainly seems to serve no additional grammatical function, and appears to be as silly, and then potentially and sadly valid  as back-forming the word ‘frustration’ into ‘frustratate’, or ‘conversation’ into ‘conversate’ (yikes, my spell-check is hating this article!), and certainly as unnecessary as the word ‘inflammable’ on top of the already existing ‘flammable’, whose silliness is further compounded by the fact that its appearance as being complete opposites rightfully confuses thousands of children and immigrants every day.

Again, it leaves me wondering whether or not other languages are as ridiculous as English, a language with words like ‘dismayed’ but not ‘mayed’, ‘disgruntled’, but not ‘gruntled’ (which by the way sounds substantially more unhappy than ‘disgruntled’), and of course ‘definite’ whose structure seems to suggest the opposite to what it means.

I am certainly far from a perfect user of English, or in fact, any language, and often create and make up words, conjugations, suffixes and prefixes to suit my own purposes, but I in no way suggest that these made up words are any form of proper English, especially since they are mostly created out of a need to amuse myself with grammatical silliness. Even if I wanted to, no amount of insistence would make it so any more than insisting that the deplorable Australian word ‘Snitzel’ is as acceptable as ‘Schnitzel’, just because it has been incorrectly said for a very long time by a lot of people. Or does it? Perhaps one day two hundred years from now a dictionary will exist which lists the word ‘Snitzel’ as an English word, spelt thusly (aaargggh!!!) derived from the German word ‘Schnitzel’.

But perhaps this is the organic nature not just of language, but especially of Australian English – a language forming observably over an inordinately short period due enormous numbers and diverse ethnicities of its immigrants.

I suppose that is how many words in many languages were formed, we spoke a language, took it with us to a new land and eventually aspects of the language and its contents were incorporated into the new language. We can call that bastardisation, or we can call that natural language evolution. We can see it as a tragic loss to the greatest feat of human civilization, or view it as the beauty of the fluidity of the ever winding, flowing and changing stream of language.

If we are to accept that all language is a living, breathing organism and subject to change at any time, are we therefore necessarily obligated to abandon all the ‘terms and conditions’ of language structure and accept all and any changes in pronunciation, grammar and spelling simply because of how widespread those changes have become?

‘S’s’ idea: Conduct an experiment. Start using a word and see if it catches on. If it does, it will inevitably become part of the English language and be published in the dictionary in coming years. Or at the very least come in to popular use (as has occurred with many pop culture words such as ‘nanu nanu’. Or several Douglas Adams ‘swears’.)

The first word I would like to start with is ‘inceive’. (euch, my spell check is literally seeing red) A back formation of ‘inception’ and a word which in my opinion has an infinitive structure and bears the meaning ‘to begin’. Unlike the word ‘orientate’, I believe that ‘inceive’ serves a grammatical function not served elsewhere in the language.

The second, also a verb is the term ‘envaginate’. If it sounds horrible, that’s most likely because it is, although it offends my ear much less than ‘orientate’. To provide a clear context, some friends and I recently spoke of a small man who is married to a rather dominating force of a woman, and her treatment and manipulation of him leaves little of his masculinity intact. To say that she has ‘emasculated’ him is not just an enormous understatement, but probably not even sufficient a description of what has been perpetrated against him and the role reversal she has created within their dynamic.

He has been very much ‘envaginated’.

Could we say the same for the English language?

Mubarak, “Let my people go!”

The Mesraya (Egyptian) people are an interesting bunch. Hospitable, warm and helpful. After many conversations and interviews with several men and women, to whom I professed to be ‘Christian’, not fancying my chances of popularity as a Jew, I was rather intrigued to find out several new revelations about them.

1. When they found out I was Australian, they professed total disgust at our own Sheikh Hilaly for his remarks against Jews, women and the west. They all remarked similarly that “he is from Mesr (Egypt), but he is not a good man, not like other Mesraya people, we do not want him back”
2. They are a very relaxed bunch, and are not interested in arguing. They seem to prefer to start the discussion out being right, so as to enjoy an agreeable discussion over a nice cup of tea.
3. A lot of them prefer to spend as little time talking as possible, mostly opting to keep their mouths over the end of a Shisha (water pipe), inhaling honey flavoured tobacco with friends and strangers while they share several rounds of backgammon. Little conversation is had and attempts to generate small-talk for its own sake usually fail.
4. Within the larger cities a new kind of apparent equality exists whereby women are permitted or even encouraged to work. Sadly this is for the purpose of enabling the men to spend their day time relaxing with their friends while the women work hard to provide for their families, predominantly by doing menial cleaning work.
5. Contrary to what I, and most of the western world, had been lead to believe, MOST women in Egypt have been and still are undergoing circumcision.  Two of the young women I spoke with about this were not circumcised and said that none of their peer group or extended families had any knowledge of this, due to fear of being killed. Yes, killed. One of them asked me why no western country has tried to intervene in this matter.
6. Of all the men and women I spoke with, travelled with and interviewed, none, but one, of them had ever been outside of Egypt’s borders, but what was far more intriguing was that none of them had ANY desire to do so. What seemed unanimous amongst them, was a sense of very deep ‘love’ and familial connection to a fatally flawed gem that cannot be saved.  The one girl who had before been outside Egypt’s borders was a unique case. She had spent several years living in the United States and felt Egypt pulling her back. Although she described Egypt as filthy, chauvinistic, and lacking in a sense of its own self-respect, she felt it held a powerful enigma which the USA simply did not have.

When I farewelled my new Egyptian friend in the Sinai, like an embarrassingly typical tourist I asked her, “So, do you think you’ll ever come visit Australia?” Her answer was simple. “No, I am sure your country is beautiful, but there is nowhere better than Egypt and I don’t really want to go anywhere”.

At that moment I felt the epiphany wash over me. I realised I had been staring into an abyss of national despair.

Here were a people living in the shadow of one of the richest cultures in human history and their cultural mojo had all but evaporated, leaving them in a sort of patriotic limbo.

Egypt is not a country plagued with terribly much internal racism or general discontent. What they do have, after years of living with their hands politically tied, unable to effect change, instead seems to be a rather unfortunate apathy. As a people they are almost saying “Meh, what can ya do.”’

My initial thought since leaving Egypt has been of likening Egyptians to victims of abuse, where they sit in quiet acceptance of their hopelessness. Then, as I am often want to do, my mind wanders to the biblical account of the Israelites in ‘slavery’ in Egypt.

This ‘slavery’ was supposed to have had a duration of several hundred years (roughly 200-300, depending on whom you ask). It would be prudent to point out that this ‘slavery’ would not have manifested in the Cecil B DeMille / Charlton Heston style, involving a total persecution and forced hard labour of ONLY Israelites, replete with whips and crying out all the while to the Lord for salvation.

Middle kingdom literature attests to whipping and hitting, unfortunately or fortunately, being part of Egyptian daily life. Even young Egyptian boys from noble households, training to be scribes, would be whipped and beaten while learning how to write hieroglyphics, as a simple method of ensuring they retained what they had learned.

The lower classes or individuals not of noble birth were given what we might view as the most difficult or menial, undesirable and degrading jobs in Egyptian society. This included, but was not limited to, working in fields, building temples and tombs and irrigating the Iretu (Nile). They were quite literally the working class. But the working class was comprised of a mix of nomadic tribes (including Israelites), Nubians, Cushites, Hittites and many others who had come from far and wide and become assimilated into multicultural Egyptian society and its various stratum over the course of several centuries. To believe that a working class would have called out to anyone for a redeemer would have required them to have possessed a significant amount of post-modern social self-awareness.  Additionally, we have no historical or biblical reason to believe that just as there were Israelites at the bottom of the social pyramid (pardon the pun) schlepping and building, that they weren’t also at the top, issuing edicts to build, gather, fight and worship. On the contrary Joseph’s being Royal Vizier of Egypt demonstrates the plausibility and even reality of this notion.

More accurately and more definitively, the ‘slavery’ seems to be that of an enslaved mind. In a similar way to those of the subsistence lifestyle of Russian peasantry in Czarist Russia of 1896. Before Marx’s ideas were widely disseminated by individuals such as Lenin, most would have viewed themselves and their lives as “just is”, without the benefit of objectivity and thus unable to see the terrible state of ‘slavery’ they were living in until they were informed of it. Again, crying out to be freed would have been difficult when they were viewing themselves subjectively from within.

Like in ancient Egypt the working class lifestyle and even its worsening would have happened extremely slowly over such a lengthy period of time that its noticeability would have been highly improbable. Apathy and acceptance of the status quo would have been more likely.  Even those educated few who were aware of their sub-standard social structure were not keen to revolt and felt that sleeping Czarist dogs were best left to lie. Russia’s former glory was but a foggy whisper in the falling snow outside the Kremlin. But then someone spoke up. Then another someone and then another. Until the revolutionary Bolshevik party came into being and coups d’états  were staged.  Even though the Russian workers and farmers were not literally being whipped into submission while dragging multi-tonne limestone blocks around, the political, economic and social injustice and impossibilities of their place in a damaged society meant that they, like the Israelites in Egypt, had been very much enslaved.

In Russia and ancient Egypt…things burned, people died, kings, Czars, Pharoahs and (now) Presidents sat firmly in their seats for months and years, refusing to budge for the sake of their people or in fact any reason.

And eventually the cry of ”Dayenu” (“Enough”) could be heard throughout the land, not as they called out to their dieties with apparently selective hearing for the umpteenth time, but as they called out from within themselves for the very first time as they took matters into their own hands and actively created the change they had been waiting for, without even realising, for hundreds of years.

As Red, in ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ comments about Andy’s miraculous escape from prison after 20 long years, “That’s all it takes, really. Pressure and Time”

Eventually someone decides that it’s time to leave the Big Brother house.

In this case the Egyptian movement for Change, known as Kefaya (which means ‘enough’) have stormed their Bastille, initiated their own plagues, are waking their fellow Egyptians from their apathetic hibernation and are demanding of their Pharoah Mubarak  “Let my people go!”

 

2011: A year to dance

My friend ‘J’, who has a delightfully childish and playful sense of adventure about her, used to remind me of the adage “Dance like no-one’s watching”, a maxim she proudly displayed on her bathroom wall. While once showering at her place, I marvelled at the almost dangerous irony of encouraging dancing in a place where visibility was limited by the constant spray of the shower and sure-footedness threatened by slippery flooring.

There’s a certain reassuring power that comes from the belief that not a soul will read my rantings. Perhaps not dissimilar to the literary freedom and honesty found in the pages of a childhood diary.

In other words, theories not necessarily accurate or planet-altering, but certainly imbued with a great sense of natural, organic truth, with an innocent purity, having not yet been soiled or disproven in the often disheartening and cold laboratory of reality.

I thought for a long time about keeping a blog, like many other Gen – X over-thinker who keeps one. I wondered if keeping one would mean that I am self-absorbed and egocentric or if, on the other hand, not keeping one would mean that I was giving free reign to my own insecurities and self-doubt.

Either way, it gave me another whole thought ‘solar system’ to dwell endlessly upon to compound the already impossible task of getting to sleep at night.

As a child, I was encouraged to keep a diary by my school counsellor, who felt that doing so would help organise my thoughts and create a sense of structure in my mind. It would, she asserted, purge my mind of trapped thoughts and would eventually mean I could switch off that forever-analysing blob of grey matter and get some rest.

But I learnt early on that diaries were meant to be found, their locks broken and pages read and shared by those meant to protect you.

A lesson I only needed to learn once.

I vowed to myself, that the next time I commit my thoughts to writing, I would be the master of their dissemination.

It’s been more than two and half decades without proper sleep, so with nothing left to lose I figure, perhaps that time has come.  Perhaps not, but I am happy to find out.

Three friends suggested that I write under a pseudonym, rightly asserting that I am not emotionally tough enough, and that if (or rather, when) less pleasant elements in our community use my blog to have a jab at my character I might fall into a teary heap.  I think both are mathematical certainties, but maybe that is the test.

2010 was a year of tears cried for some of the toughest decisions and realisations ever made and had, of necessarily farewelling the toxic, and mourning the loss of people I loved. I would like to think that 2011 is and will be a year of freedom, in which I can step forward, out of the shadow of self-doubt and assert that no matter what my brain thinks, I do matter and that I do not need the reassurance of anyone to make it so.

Of course the only way to test this, is to challenge myself, open myself up to the harsh criticism, do not shy away from cruel words but rather learn to deflect them.

‘B’ has heard me use the analogy of ‘Learning to walk in the rain’ as a way of describing become strong enough to face often confronting realities. That staying indoors throughout the duration of the rain means we cannot go about our daily lives, out of fear of being saturated. My analogy suggests that instead we must find our emotionally protective gumboots, raincoat and umbrella, and learn to head down the high street, ‘Paddington bear’ style and do our utmost to embrace the existential limitations of our meteorological realities, because it may rain for a long time, and sidelining ourselves waiting for the storm to pass may mean that life may altogether pass us by. Life is short, and too often taken from us before we’ve had a chance to truly live it.

So enough allowing the dampness of emotional rain showers to hinder my living.

It’s time to toughen the hell up, put on a raincoat and learn to walk in the rain and eventually dance in it… like no-one is watching.

… Because contrary to what people say… it doesn’t matter if they are watching. Heck, they may even learn to dance in the rain too.

To dream, to reveal, to understand and perchance to sleep…

The ‘good book’ indicates that once Joseph had interpreted his Pharoah’s troubling dreams about the impending Nile failure, he was renamed ‘Zaphnat Paneah’ which Rabbinical scholars translate as ‘A revealer of hidden mysteries’.

With the benefit of historical hindsight, what is clear is that it was certainly no hidden mystery that the Nile was well overdue to fail and a famine impending. Whether Joseph was brilliantly prophetic or simply a somewhat gifted analyst is an almost irrelevant debate which typifies a more modern need to scientifically and retrospectively justify complex and seemingly fantastical incidents of bygone eras. Either way what IS clear is that Pharoah just wanted to sleep… and his dreams were far too troubling to allow it.

As I remark in my first post, I too would like to sleep. But first there is much to unravel, to explain and hopefully, ultimately to accept with grace and gratitude.

Here are some of the places in which I seek ultimate truths .. and no they are not simply limited to the far off mountains of  Tibet, of buddhist monasteries or learning centres of Tzefat, or the corridors of Universities or scientific research.

The truth I seek is a far greater, far more latent, and ever complicated ‘stream’ of complex realities which change and evolve, then devolve and re-evolve into an always elusive series of truths about what was, what is and what shall be. None of which can be known with any degree of certainty. To think otherwise is an epistemological absurdity, but to not even attempt its pursuit seems foolish and existentially wasteful.

The List:

Pages of the Talmud

The early stages of infant development

Philology and Language analysis

Ironies of the Modern World

Ethnic Flavours and Customs

Egyptology

The Autism Spectrum

Comparative Theology

Past and Present Empires (Egypt, Greece, Rome, Austro-Hungarian, British and American)

Nomadic peoples and wandering

Comparing ancient texts & versions of history

Sexual Identity

Social Labels

Dissociative Disorders

Psychological Trauma and resulting Neuroses

Stuff white people like…

Things children say

Things Douglas Adams says

Humour as therapy

Racism, Prejudice and Social injustice

The Human Body

Duality in ALL things

Consciousness & Memory

Films about consciousness and Memory:  Black Swan, Fight Club, Mulholland Drive, Inception

Films which define ‘The Jew”:  Fiddler on the Roof, An American Tail, The Prince of Egypt

Food and Cooking

Comedy

Music: Swing, Soul, Blues, Big Band, Country, Broadway, Musicals

General dorkness

People who pretend to be people they are not…

Religious Zealotry

The great outdoors and the natural world

Word games, trivia, board games and similar social nerdy fun

Singing and Song

Birth and Death

Dreams Vs Memories Vs Hopes

Religious Concepts

Books & Literature

Written Thought

Filmmaking

Current activities for 2012

Languages I know or am learning: English, Hebrew, Hungarian, French, German, Latin, Egyptian Hieroglyphics, Sanskrit, Arabic, Akkadian.

I am currently reading: ‘A State beyond the Pale’ by Robin Shepherd

Planned journeys: Iran, Turkey and Russia.

Living Projects: Charity Fundraisers, support and empowerment for children,  Community Networking, new initiaves and Media, Documentary editing, loving my family, practical solutions to community crises. Pro Canaanite Language, blogging.

Email me: zaphnatpaneah@gmail.com