⩩ 44
Here’s an old man with advanced occasional dementia. While generally on the ball and cognitively sound, every once in a while he will be blindsided by an onslaught of forgetfulness, tossing him off the cliff into a frictionless freefall. While running some everyday errand, without warning and without remainder, he forgets where he is going and how to get there. All the sudden he is utterly bewildered, disoriented, lost in the wilderness of his whereabouts.
But not only that. In the middle of performing an everyday operation, he’ll forget what he’s doing and how he’s supposed to get it done. When he’s getting into his car, with his keys in his hand, he’ll suddenly forget what a key is and how it works, and start starring at it and looking at it like he’s never seen one before. Forgetting about the car completely, he’ll wander through the parking lot, turning the key over in his hand, holding it up to the light.
Or, on the verge of opening a can, he’ll suddenly be so distracted and confused by the can opener itself that he’ll set the can down and wander off with just the opener.
Now you will understand the appeal of words to a guy like this. Words, you see, come with instructions. As if written on a tiny rolled-up scroll that is always stashed away inside of them, silently hiding, waiting to be carefully removed and unrolled and rehearsed, they have instructions for use built into them. They contain directions. Except not scrolled up inside of them, but engraved on them, written on the very surface. They have hints and pointers about how to use and where to put them.
Take, for instance, screwdriver. How and where is it to be used? Obviously, it goes on things that drive screws. Or take underline. Plainly, to underline is to put a line under something. And? And what has a line under it stands out to the onlooker. To underline something is to make it stand out.
Now what’s the takeaway? Words come with instructions included. When you look at words as words, you see through the built-up grim of habitual use to the clues written on their surface. The hints, the reminders of their origin.
Generally, we treat language like the writing on a package of rice: we cook and eat the rice, and don’t study the package. But it doesn’t have to be that way, and there’s reason it shouldn’t.
When you look at words as words, you see through them to their past, and gain a fuller appreciation of their meaning. Words are seethrough. At least, some are.
(Some are simple and not apparently related to others; some, for other reasons, are simply not transparent.)
And so among all the tools they have an outsized importance for such a wondering and forgetful old man. And young wondering forgetters too.
You are reading Footnotes, by Garrett Allen, a series of philosophical-ish short essays. You just read ⩩ 44, the fifth installment in a chapter on language.