The Wordly Way
On inherited words, acquired names, and paths already worn.
Everywhere I arrived, the words were already there.
Bovs. Townies. Civvies.
Spoken without explanation by people for whom no explanation had ever been necessary.
I grew up in a military family, which meant moving often enough to become accustomed to arriving late: late to the place, late to its friendships, late to the conversation everyone else seemed already to be having.
Before I was eight, one of those places was Germany, where I attended kindergarten and learnt German with the careless ease of a child who does not yet know that learning a language is supposed to be difficult.
Alas, being the stubborn little shit that I was, I refused to speak it with my mother.
Without use, and without ceremony, it gradually left me.
At eight I went to boarding school, so that at least one part of my life would remain still. Whatever posting or house my parents moved to, school would be the constant: the same buildings, the same routines, the same people and, inevitably, the same peculiar vocabulary.
It was never quite a different language.
It was always English.
Just not always the English I had known before.
Some places had townies. Others had bovs. Military life had civvies. Each word carried assumptions that everyone around me seemed to understand instinctively. Nobody stopped to define them. You gathered their meaning from where they were placed, the tone in which they were spoken and the reaction they produced.
Then there was the bread roll.
A cob, where I eventually settled. Elsewhere a bap, a batch, a barm, a bun, a muffin or, with suspicious simplicity, merely a roll. Each name entirely ordinary to those who had inherited it and faintly ridiculous to those who had not.
The arguments over which was correct always struck me as rather missing the point. None had been reasoned into existence. Nobody had surveyed the available terms and selected the most linguistically sound. The word had simply been waiting for them when they arrived, just as it had been waiting for their parents and grandparents before them.
I first thought of these words as unearthed.
Not invented, but encountered.
They had existed below the surface of my own experience, spoken countless times before I happened upon them. Arrival exposed them. Staying made them familiar. Leaving revealed that they had never been universal.
Perhaps language is more like a forest than a map.
A map suggests that the routes are known and that, with sufficient attention, one might see the whole. A forest offers no such assurance. Paths disappear beneath leaves, divide without warning or continue beyond sight. Some are broad and deeply worn; others are little more than an inclination in the undergrowth, visible only because someone has passed that way before.
You rarely know where a word has come from when you first meet it. You simply find it beneath your feet and follow it for a while.
The same is true of names.
In military life, I understood early that you did not choose your own callsign. To do so was to misunderstand what a callsign was. It did not become real when you announced it, but when somebody else used it and, for reasons nobody could quite explain, everyone followed.
Nicknames obey much the same rule.
My parents chose my first name before they knew who I would become. Other people supplied more as they came to know particular versions of me.
Fridge.
Tank.
Mentalblock.
Some were bestowed. One I borrowed for myself from a character in a childhood videogame. Yet even that did not become mine merely because I chose it. It became mine because other people began to use it: first as a username, then as a familiar form of address, until the original reference mattered less than all the years that had accumulated around it.
A name may begin as an idle utterance.
Someone notices something. Someone makes a joke. A word is spoken that was never intended to survive the afternoon.
Then, somehow, it sticks.
Years later, the moment that produced it has been forgotten, while the name remains. It belongs not only to the person who bears it, but to the people who knew them by it. Each name marks a different clearing in the forest: a school, a posting, a group of friends, a version of oneself that existed in their company.
Perhaps that is why self-appointed nicknames feel so hollow. The sound may be chosen, but the meaning cannot be. Meaning is laid down by repeated use, one footfall after another.
Words acquire meaning in much the same way.
We arrive after the first speaker. We inherit phrases whose origins we do not know, jokes whose first telling has been lost, and distinctions that appear natural only because the path beneath them has been worn smooth.
For a time, we walk those paths without noticing them.
We call the bread what everyone else calls it. We learn which people are townies, when clothes become civvies, and why someone who has never resembled a refrigerator is nevertheless called Fridge. What was once unfamiliar becomes obvious, and what is obvious becomes almost invisible.
Until we move again.
Then the path ends, or branches, or disappears into the undergrowth, and somebody looks at us strangely when we use the word we had assumed everybody knew.
The wordly way was well worn before I wandered it.
A thought in return?
If this wandering led your thinking somewhere unexpected, I would enjoy hearing where.
mental@mentalblock.net