Language

Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium were written in anticipation of his delivery of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1985-1986.

In his memo on exactitude he wrote:

"It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty—that is, the use of words."

Twenty six years later my own use of English is strained in conversation—I take a slow pace, meticulous and careful, thoughtful about what I say, and the exact language I use to say it. I am not surrounded by listeners. Certainly not in my public existence: at the market, post office, or among neighbors. Yet I expect more. I've been told these expectations are my downfall.

"It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meanings to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the spark that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances."

I am not looking for a common language. I am looking for the deep translation required by life. This translation requires a search for meaning, most relevantly, the meaning of particular words for particular moments. A diminished vocabulary results in a diminished existence.

On my first day in High School I walked into Western Civilizations for my final period. Sr. Damien handed out an assignment sheet with the course textbook listed along with Funk & Wagnalls' A Standard Dictionary of the English Language (1st ed. 1894). Our assignment: read ten pages, look up every word we did not know, and write down the definition. We should be prepared to discuss the readings. I was twelve. I already knew all there was to know and reading comprehension was my strength. I had the test scores to prove it. So I read away and didn't crack the spine on my Funk & Wagnalls. I only purchased the book because you had to show it to her the next day before you were allowed to take a seat in the classroom. On Friday we sat down and were told to take out a piece of paper and write the definitions of the words listed on the chalkboard. They were all in the reading. If we had done the assignment, we should know every word. If we didn't at first, we should have looked them up. I failed.

"It seems to me that language is always used in a random, approximate, careless manner, and this distresses me unbearably."

Sr. Damien's philosophy: if we didn't understand the word we could never understand the reading. The words were assigned, someone had chosen them for us. She would guide us, however twisted the path, through them, page by page. Life does not assign everyone a Sr. Damien. I couldn't wait to get rid of her myself. But there is power in demanding exactness in thought. Everyone deserves to be asked to understand clearly and to express themselves clearly. Access to language is not a privilege. Language is a responsibility we share.

"At this point, I don't wish to dwell on the possible sources of the epidemic, whether they are to be sought in politics, ideology, bureaucratic uniformity, the monotony of the mass media, or the way the schools dispense the culture of the mediocre. What interests me are the possibilities of health. Literature, and perhaps literature alone, can create the antibodies to fight this plague in language."

Whose responsibility is it to reverse the language shift?

In Narratives of Navajo-ness, Deborah House writes about the language shift among speakers of Navajo. She illuminates the solution very astutely, writing: "Reversing Navajo Language shift is the responsibility of those persons who need the language in their lives, and their children's lives and reversing Navajo Language shift can only be done when those individuals who can speak the Navajo language do speak the Navajo language at every opportunity; when those who can't speak the Navajo language, start taking advantage of every opportunity to learn to speak it; when those who can model benefits of speaking the Navajo Language get out there and do model it. It doesn't have to cost a dime."

How it works: speak. (The Oral Tradition)
How it works: read. (The Written Tradition)

House continues: "It's the easiest thing in the world to tell people how to reverse Navajo Language shift, but actually doing it is going to be hard; it's going to be an everyday, day after day, year after year, commitment—at home, in the community, in the Chapter House, at the Trading Post, at school, at work, at prayer, at the polls and wherever else a person happens to be. And just talking about it won't make it happen."

Every day, year after year, a commitment to language, memory, exactness of expression is what carries the people and their knowledge forward. Every day, year after year, we can manifest this commitment in our own speech, in the stories we tell, and those we read. Calvino's belief that literature, maybe even literature alone, can protect us from this plague holds within it the knowledge of a certain attention to language made by writers and readers. We can share this in our speech and in our reading—if we tenaciously endeavor to.