Fun with Words

Today Cosmo used the word “patronizing” to describe Obi-Wan’s attitude towards the villainess Ventress, whom Obi calls “Sweetheart” just before she’s about to whoop his ass. (Actually a draw, since she ran away to fight another day.) It reminded me of some less sophisticated words Cosmo used to say. For a long time, well after he could read, he said things like “Are we having panacakes for breakbast?” and “I lost my bounce” when he was referring to balance. It was so sweet that we didn’t bother to correct him. (A longish essay follows—which you are invited to read or skip—documenting his linguistic evolution and running commentary on our trip to Venice in 1999. Ten years! Wow.)

Speaking of Venice, this year the American representative at the Biennale* is Bruce Nauman, considered to be one of the most important artists of the latter 20th century. One piece, called "Days/Giorni," consists of two rows of 14 audio speakers. You can walk between them and listen to various recorded voices that randomly recite the days of the week, in English and Italian. Here's the disconnect: These words, so deeply ingrained in our subconscious, have a specific meaning, but when you hear them looping through (in fact, you can, at http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/06/10/arts/design/20090610_BIENNALE_FEATURE.html ), they become more arbitrary, more like sounds or a chant, than a reference to a particular notion of time. The repetition challenges assumptions about what those words mean by turning them into a kind of "polyphony,” as some reviewers have called it. The words repeat, different but the same. Days of the week repeat, too—but this Monday is surely different from the last. The music of our lives.

And speaking of sound, the New York Times had an article (June 22) about how our ears can be a more reliable witness than our eyes when the two senses receive conflicting information. Author Natalie Angier says, “Scientists now suspect that the origin of human language owes as much to improvements in the early hominid ear as to more familiar spurs like a changing vocal tract or even a generally expanding brain.”

So there you have it: language, sound, music, time, and art, all connected. (I’ll let you draw the lines between dots.)

Here’s hoping you keep your bounce.

* We got to go to the Biennale on that trip, with Cosmo mostly sleeping in the backpack. It was very cool.)