⩩ 46
A year ago my friend Tim read my essay on the secondhand and said that the idea that “the truly new can only be made oneself” had sparked something in him. This, in turn, — Tim’s way of putting it — sparked something in me. It was new. It’s as if what we’re saying must be reflected back to us before we can hear it. He lifted a point out of the stream, out of the storm, out of the maelstrom, and allowed me to see it.
In the essay I had contrasted the first- and second-hand. One thing our culture associates with the secondhand is clothes, where secondhand clothes are ones you inherit, and, by implication, firsthand clothes ones you buy at the store. In this, I said, we get it backwards. Clothes you buy are designed by someone else, manufactured somewhere else and delivered to you fully formed. Speaking unconventionally but accurately, any clothes that are bought are necessarily gotten secondhand. The truly new is what you have a hand in making. That’s the firsthand.
The firsthand is a major idea in the first chapter of this series. It implies something about activity and immediacy. In a world that encourages us to be passive observers, we must insist on being active participants. We must treat the world not like a movie but a video game, responsive to our engagement, receptive to our power. In a world that surrounds us with institutional, commercial, and technological mediation, we must insist on the immediate, on the here-and-now, on small groups of people working at human scale.
The satisfying fruit is the one that we pick ourselves, fresh, directly from the bush. Thoreau says that a huckleberry has never yet made it to market. What he means is that we find fulfilling what we have a hand in creating. Our nourishment comes in our own work. The borrowed thing, by contrast, — some of the qualities of which the current essay tries to spell out — is always cheaper, lighter, emptier. Borrowing takes the life out of a thing. Hollows it out.
This is as true for language as it is for everything else, and a linguistic example might serve us as a model for them all. Take the story of “Pendle Hill,” the name of a hill in Lancashire, in norther England. In the language of the Celts in the area before the Angles arrived, “pen” generically meant “hill.” When the Angles appeared in the 6th century and the two people mixed, the Angles, taking it that pen was the name for this specific hill, started calling it “Pen Hill.” To someone who knows the word in both languages, that is, “Hill Hill.”
This is a common linguistic phenomenon, evident in many contexts. In a meditation video I listened to this week, I noticed the guide instructing his listeners to feel their lungs “expand out” as they exhale. “Out” reiterates “ex-,” a fact we English speakers today appreciate, with our intuitive understanding of Latin prepositions and prefixes, though only partly. Since “ex-” is, after all, borrowed from another language, its meaning is progressively hidden from us. As a result, the word gets hollowed out, tending to become a mere sound. As this happens, it becomes more and more likely that we supplement it with a word we intuitively understand, which underlines our point.
Again, the pattern is common. A word from the native language, indeed often unknowingly a cognate from the native language, introduces or accompanies the borrowed, foreign word, in order to underline its meaning or capture its force more immediately. Unknown to the users, there is a linguistic doubling or twinning.
But we are borrowers not only of foreign languages but our own. Where the words come from is in a way beside the point, because use alone tends to hollow words out, especially combined with the fact that the used words are continually handed down to a new generation, which has no memory of their fuller meaning and which, where there has been blending and slurring, has hampered access to the original shape. Think of “sheepherder” slurring into “shepherd.” The more a word is used, simply and instinctively used, — the less it is thought about, played with, wondered at, looked at in its own right — the less it is filled with meaning. The hollowing tendency is inevitable.
Here we return to “Pendle Hill,” because this too is a chapter in its history. Over time, through the years, “Pen Hill” ran together, slurring into something new: “Pendle.” A description — “Pen Hill” — became a name: “Pendle.” At this point, inevitably, the descriptive word “Hill” got tacked onto the end again, so that we had, as we are left with today, “Pendle Hill.” From a linguistically omniscient, and therefore, static, point of view, this is “Hill Hill Hill.”
Now isn’t this a fitting image for a fundamental tendency in language across time? To speakers of a language as such, what had once been alive and meaningful comes to them as mere sounds, an undifferentiated label. So it adds its own, and words get added onto words in layers.
Our words are superfluous. Empty. When we are leaving each other’s company, we say “goodbye” or just “bye.” We have probably never considered the shape of the word. We simply use it. But what is the story of “goodbye”? “Good” seems clear enough. But where does “bye” come from?
Well, we might guess, “bye” means leaving or leave-taking, so we are wishing them a good departure. We are telling them to “fare well.” But this is wrong. Instead, it turns out, it helps to see “goodbye” in the context of analogues in other languages, like “adieu” and “adios.” “Goodbye” too invokes God. Way back when there was “God be with you!” This was shortened to “God be!” and eventually to “Goodbye!”
Now doesn’t this give our departing exclamations a funny look? As if we were much more devout than we usually suppose. But of course it is not a prayer, not an invocation, but a fossil, an empty form, a thoughtless and meaningless reflex. To us it is only a word, a greeting. Now how much of our language is like this greeting?
It is like how a city is built on top of itself. Over the years, both after destruction and in the normal course of things, it adds layer upon layer, so that some late-coming, borrowing inhabitant, digging into the ground for some personal reason, is astonished to find in it the dusty, buried houses and bed and bones of his ancestors, sleeping beneath his feet all along, without his knowledge.
So it is with the organic life of the whole earth, which in turn by generation falls to the ground and sinks into it, to settle into its place in the sediment of time. We live atop the ruins of ages. And as our race, which lives on the surface and is naturally ignorant of these underground generations, has haphazardly discovered them, and as the mind by their discovery sees that they are no more dead than we, annuls time and resurrects them; so on our journey we, who first live on the surface of words, having haphazardly discovering their archaeological depths, revive them and make them live again.
You are reading Footnotes, by Garrett Allen, a series of philosophical-ish short essays. You just read ⩩ 46, the seventh installment in a chapter on language.