Tag: language

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Oh, My Wordle

Dang it, Heather. You know my HABIT for wordplay far too well. In fact, you HONED in on it like a LASER. Now I can’t even ARISE in the morning without seeing five-letter groups everywhere.

And if that made way too much sense to you, someone’s probably hooked you on Wordle, too.

Yes, my wife got me into the latest word-puzzle craze, which is a little like giving a six-year-old a high-sugar cereal and no supervision. I’m a writer. An actor. A punster. I collect words like they’re going out of style, nerd out on their histories, and revel in the ones that have an extra-neat sound to them, regardless of their meaning. (Isn’t it fun to say “discombobulate?”)

So when Heather invited me in, I was wary. And then cautiously curious. And then hooked.

If you’re new to the latest social media fad, Wordle is a simple game with a simple object: figure out a hidden five-letter word in six guesses or less. Each time you get a letter right, its square glows, green for “yes, it goes here” or yellow for “right letter, wrong place.” Once you crack it, you can show off the pattern of your guesses to your friends, letting you compare how much of a struggle it was without giving away the answer to someone who hasn’t played yet.

It’s weirdly addictive …. “weird” mainly because there’s no way it can eat up your time. You get exactly one word per day.  So you struggle, solve and move on. That’s it. No temptations to play “just one more turn.” No real-time action to make you lose track of time. Heck, you can’t even buy anything to help you out, which I’m sure breaks the Ancient Code of Online Game Developers. (“Thou shalt make thy profit and keep it holy.”)

Sure, the fad will probably cool down eventually. They always do, whether it’s Rubik’s Cube or Angry Birds, reaching a stage where they still hold fans but not the spotlight. But while it lasts, it may just be the game our time needs, and not just because it’s a single-player game in an often-distanced age.

You see, the dirty secret is that Wordle isn’t really about words. It’s about pattern recognition. And these days, that’s a survival skill.

We’re surrounded by information. Claims about politics and society. Assertions about health and safety. Compelling thoughts that seem to fit so well with what we think and feel. Some are genuine. Some are trash. All of them make constant appeals for our time and attention.

It’s easy to just react, just like it’s easy to zone out on a game of Candy Crush or even Tetris (for the old-schoolers in the crowd). After all, time is precious and none of this could be that important, right? But inevitably, some of it will make a difference: for you, your neighbor, the world around you.

And so, at our best, we grapple. We study. We look closer and see what actually makes sense.

Mind you, it’s easy to force a pattern onto circumstances. Conspiracy theorists do it all the time. That’s a different thing entirely, like declaring a Wordle victory with four letters wrong because “I know what the answer really is!” You get so caught up in what an answer should be that you miss the clues to what it is.

So it’s good practice to have a game where you see patterns, but can’t impose them. Where the object is to be aware and find a path that makes sense. Where you can stay interested without growing obsessed.

Each of those is a skill worth building.

In fact, you might even say it’s a useful KNACK.

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In Translation

The difference between the right word and almost the right word, Mark Twain once told the world, is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug. By the look of things, Heather had just swallowed a horde of lightning bugs.

“En route??”

Heather shook her head as she looked away from her reading material, torn between hilarity and disgust. “There has got to be a better way of saying ‘on the move’ than that. I mean, it’s just … just wrong!”

A little background may be in order here. Heather, like millions of people across the internet, decided to jump feet first into Duolingo. She wanted a fresh start that would keep her brain busy, so rather than resume her long-ago college pursuit of German ( from which she mostly retains “The window is dirty”), she instead went after French.

Funny thing. When you’re home a lot due to chronic illness, you wind up with a lot of time to spend on language lessons. A few months ago, she felt confident enough in her reading comprehension to try children’s books. So she found some old favorites in translation, the ones that she knew as well as her childhood phone number.

That’s a great way to navigate an unfamiliar road. But it also means that the potholes can be really jarring. And one such dip in the road came when The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe portentously declared that Aslan was “en route.”

“Really? REALLY?”

In the original English, the phrase is “Aslan is on the move.” Heather loves the feel of that phrase – the sense of something coming, of life waking up, of expectation and possibility and change. You could even see it as the opening of a chess game, the unfolding of a strategy that is just now beginning to show itself.

By contrast, to hear that Aslan is “en route” sounds like a package is coming from Federal Express. Definite. Predictable. Decidedly non-mystical. “Yo, I’m on my way, see you in about 15!”

Maybe that sounds a little finicky. But words matter. Even when they technically mean the same thing, they carry a different weight. As the writer Terry Pratchett knew, there is a hilarious difference between calling your epic tale “Gone With The Wind” and “Blown Away.”

The dictionary wouldn’t care. But we know better. What we say isn’t necessarily what someone else hears.

That matters to all of us. Not just the translators.

It means peeling back assumptions and old habits, and fitting yourself into someone else’s experience.

It means hearing stories that might not be comfortable, going places you haven’t been, learning how life and the world works for someone who isn’t you.

It means examining your mental picture like an engineer scrutinizing a design, trying to see what’s been left out – or maybe, should never have been put in.

It’s not easy. And we’re not going to get it right all the time.

But making the effort means a wider, more caring, more interesting world. It means living with chords rather than monotones, a library instead of a worn-out book, a rich and varied playlist instead of a track perpetually caught on a single earworm.

It means we actually hear each other. And help each other. That we become harder to fool with fears and hatreds because we’ve caught a glimpse of the wonder that may wait behind.

That’s worth it. Every time.

Listen well. New worlds await, and not just Narnia or Hogwarts. Maybe they’re still far off, but have no fear.

They’ll soon be en route.

Right, honey?

 

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Fantastic Tales

Beware the dragons. Watch out for the trolls. And always remember that heroes may be hazardous to your health.

Not your usual prescription, I grant you. But it’s apparently second nature to Graeme Whiting, an English headmaster who made international headlines when he declared that fantasy fiction would rot your child’s mind.

No, I’m not overstating it. Kind of hard to, really.

“Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, and Terry Pratchett, to mention only a few of the modern world’s ‘must-haves’, contain deeply insensitive and addictive material which I am certain encourages difficult behaviour in children,” Whiting wrote as part of a lengthy blog post on his school’s website, “yet they can be bought without a special licence, and can damage the sensitive subconscious brains of young children, many of whom may be added to the current statistics of mentally ill young children.”

You might be surprised to learn that he and I agree on exactly one thing: Parents should pay attention to what their children read. Books do indeed open doors onto many places, and every parent should know where their child is spending their time, whether it’s in the park or in the Shire.

But fantasy can open some wonderful doors indeed.

I’m not writing to disparage the more classic works that Mr. Whiting himself loves and encourages for a growing mind, such as Shakespeare or Dickens, which were also part of my reading. Enough so that I’m a bit amused. After all, Dickens was long considered popular trash by lovers of “proper literature” and as for Master Shakespeare – well, whose life couldn’t use a dose of teen marriage and suicide (Romeo and Juliet), eye-gouging (King Lear), witchcraft (Macbeth), and rape and mutilation (Titus Andronicus), with just a sprinkling of cross-dressing and humiliation of authority (Twelfth Night)?

Sure, they’re wonderful – dare I say magical? – stories. But safe? C.S. Lewis once warned visitors to Narnia that the great Aslan was “not a tame lion” and if a story has any power to it at all, it can never be considered a “safe story.” When books meet brains, anything can happen. Anything at all.

Stories have a power that the great authors of fantasy knew quite well.

“Not the Gandalf who was responsible for so many quiet lads and lasses going off into the Blue for mad adventures?” the hobbit Bilbo Baggins declares in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Tolkien has been my own Gandalf since about third grade, leading my imagination into places both terrifying and wonderful – as have many of the fantasy authors who followed in his wake. My family and I have cheered on Harry Potter, wandered with Taran and Eilonwy, leaped through wrinkles in time, and stumbled through wardrobes into unexpected worlds.

You acquire many things on a quest like that. Beautiful language. Heartbreak and hope. A decidedly quirky strain of humor. And most of all, the realization that evils can not only be survived, they can be overcome.

“Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey,” G.K. Chesterton famously wrote in 1909. “What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.”

No, stories aren’t safe. Few things worth having are. But they can be priceless.

So yes, have a hand in your child’s reading. Be careful. Be aware. But be open to wonder as well. And don’t fear the dragons.

After all, that is where the treasure is to be found.

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O-Pun My Word

Saturday morning had come, and with it, Missy’s favorite routine: get in the car and go downtown for a visit to the bookstore and a bite to eat. Neither of us could wait.

Standing on the driveway, I unlocked the Honda, opened the door, and then told Missy the words that I’d said a hundred times.

“Ok, Missy, jump on in.”

She looked at me. Smiled her big 100-watt grin. And then very deliberately jumped in place.

I burst out laughing, in surprise as much as humor. She grinned along with me. With one carefully chosen move, Missy had joined the ranks of the Rochat family punsters.

At first glance, that might not sound like much of a shocker. Those of you who know me well know that I am an incorrigible punster – as in “Please don’t incorrige him.” I lived and breathed wordplay around the dinner table as a kid, then inflicted it on my fellow human being over years of headline writing for newspapers. My personal favorite was summing up a demolition derby as “Wreck Creation,” although a street fair that I described as “Planes, Trains, And Audible Squeals” wasn’t far behind.

So to live with me is to live with puns. Simple. Natural. Perhaps a bit painful, like living with an amateur orthodontist who likes to practice at home. (Brace yourself.) But certainly not surprising, right?

Well … not until it comes to Missy.

For those who haven’t met her in this column yet, Missy is my wife Heather’s physically and mentally disabled aunt. We act as her guardians, alternately caring for her and being amazed by the world she reveals. It can be a quiet world at times, since Missy says maybe a few hundred words per week – and at that, she’s gotten more talkative than she used to be.

We’ve suspected – heck, we’ve known – that Missy understands more than she can say. Give her directions like “Could you go to the bathroom, put some water in the yellow cup, and bring it back here?” and she does fine, when she’s not feeling sassy or contrary. Read her a book at night and she’ll sometimes comment on the plot, either verbally or physically. (If an injury is described, for instance, she’s been known to touch the afflicted body part and go “Ow!”)

Like a computer with a dim monitor and no printer, her output is a lot more limited than her input. Enough so that Heather and I often keep track of new words and sentences used, as proof that she’s adding to her capacity.

But punning, even visual punning, is a whole new leap.

Puns are often called “the lowest form of humor.” Like many paronomasiacs (pun addicts), I’ve taken that to mean that the pun is the foundation of all humor. It requires someone to hold two meanings in the brain at once and instantly understand both, to take the normal clarity of language and tie it in knots for entertainment.

It’s small wonder that the sign of approval for a pun is a wince. After all, it knocks out the keystone of language itself, that you can hear the same thing I say without misunderstanding. It’s language as taffy, soft and pliable.

Now Missy had added a bend of her own. And with that simple bend, our window into her mind not only opened up a little wider, it revealed a room we hadn’t even suspected was there.

That is encouraging beyond belief.

So thank you, Missy. Welcome to my hobby and a wider world. I knew you were capable of a lot, but this one went beyond anywhere my thoughts had flown to.

That’s right. The pun was mightier than the soared.

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Getting “Over” It

When the news broke, reporters and editors went up in flames. Within minutes, the stunned outcries and passionate debates were filling the social network.

Russia’s invasion of the Crimea? Nope.

The passing of Topeka’s most infamous preacher? Uh-uh.

The early exit of Duke and Kansas from March Madness? Maybe a little, but … no.

No, this was an issue designed to strike at the very soul of journalists everywhere. Are you ready? Brace yourselves.

The Associated Press declared that “over” could mean the same thing as “more than.”

I’ll stand back while you recover from the faint. Feeling better? Good.

OK, it sounds like a silly thing. Frankly, it is a silly thing. But from the commentary I saw from most friends and colleagues in the industry, you’d think it was December 2012 and the Mayan gods had come to demand sacrifice.

“NOOOOOOO! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!”

“That AP concession is making my brain ache.”

“More than my dead body!”

For those who don’t know — or, most likely, care — about fine points of journalism style, the AP’s stance for decades has been that “over” is a position and “more than” is a quantity. So it’s incorrect to say that I’ve had over a dozen arguments on this subject since the change was made.

Or at least, it was incorrect.

Excuse me while I grin.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m as much of a style and grammar geek as any reporter. I’m insistent that “cement” is not the same as “concrete,” that “literal” does not mean figurative and that “enormity” is a horror, not a size. From the AP’s complex use of numerals (“Write out one through nine, except for all the times you don’t”) to the non-existent period in “Dr Pepper,” I fight the good fight and do so pretty well.

But — brace yourself — I don’t see the big deal here.

Part of my “meh” is because the AP has been swimming against the tide for a long time. “Over” as a figure of speech has at least a 700-year history, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It’s a frequent guest on lists of “language rules that aren’t,” right up there with the myth that you are not to in any way split an infinitive, lest you be sentenced to a career on Star Trek.

But the larger reason is that the change does nothing to obscure understanding. No one who reads that “Babe Ruth was the first baseball player to hit over 700 home runs in a career” is likely to think that the Babe stacked up all those home runs like cord wood and then hit a ball over them, any more than someone would expect sunny side up eggs to come with a weather report.

It’s a harmless change. The end of a rule that existed only to have a rule. And really, don’t we have enough of those already.

And to those who fear that English is about to lose all meaning — well, the language has taken that step. Many times.

You could ask William Shakespeare. But he’d probably have to listen carefully to hear past your outlandish grammar and curious word choice.

You could ask Geoffrey Chaucer. But he’d likely understand one word in 20 at best, and that badly accented.

You could ask the anonymous Beowulf poet. Assuming you could even get past “Hello.” Or should it be “Hwaet!”?

Actually, you can’t ask any of them because they’re centuries dead. Minor detail. But you get the point. Language changes. Especially English. Over time, those changes add up. At some point, old and new become strangers to each other.

Our job is to keep clarity for the readers and speakers of now. While recognizing that “now” is a moving target.

By all means, fight to save useful words. Those are the paints that allow fine shades of meaning.

Absolutely, encourage prose that gives more clarity instead of less. Without mutual comprehension, there is no language.

But recognize the moment when a rule has become nothing more than a habit. In language, or anything else.

Those don’t help anything except stylebook sales.

And now, I think I’ve said more than enough on this topic. It’s time to sign off.

Over and out.

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Famous First Words

“Er-DEE!”

Our nearly two-year-old niece pointed a stubby finger at the nearby finch, then trotted over to the next bird cage. A fresh smile grew on her face as she again pointed excitedly, this time at a pair of parakeets.

“Er-DEE!”

Yes, Riley has discovered words. Sporadically, anyway. During her weekly visits to our house, it’s not uncommon anymore to see her pursuing the dog with an outstretched arm and calling “Oggie!”At red lights, she’ll sometimes tell her dad “Go, go, go!” She’s even learned a sort of chorus to “Old McDonald,” chiming in at the right moments with “Ya, ya-yo!”

Clearest of all is the cry of achievement. We heard this one when she saw a cartoon boy working in his garden – something Riley had just helped her mom with the other day.

“I did it!” she declared, pointing ahead.

You sure did, hon.

It’s especially fun for me because I’ve lived with and worked with words for so long. I love their sound, their texture, their taste. Heather and I used to spend many date nights comparing words with cool sounds – yes, we’re geeks – or bemoaning the fact that the best words always seemed to belong to horrible medical situations. (Heather’s own condition of ankylosing spondylitis has a certain musical ring to it.)

Now, with two nieces and a nephew in the toddler stage, I get to watch someone new dip their toe in the pool. It’s like being an artist seeing someone discover finger paints, or a musician hearing the first strikes on a toy piano.

Or maybe a marksman carefully watching the first lesson on a firing range.

Because words have power. Oh, so much power.

We start out claiming otherwise. “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words …” Well, you know the rest. And before we get out of elementary school, we’ve had plenty of opportunities to learn that words can hurt. A lot.

Nerd.

Geek.

Loser.

And yeah, worse ones that I’m not going to print here.

By the time we’re grown, we’ve had an opportunity to see the best and the worst that language can do. And it doesn’t have to be a Shakespearean sonnet or a stream-of-consciousness flood of profanity to get a reaction.

In many ways, the most potent ones are the reverse of my old date-night exercise: ordinary words freighted with extraordinary meaning.

“Are you OK?”

“Never mind.” (Sigh) “It’s not important.”

“What were you thinking?”

“Hey. It’s all right. Come here.”

None of those require a college degree. All of them can leave fingerprints on the soul.

A word well-wielded can be an awesome thing. Or a terrible one.

And someday, Riley will learn that power.

Learn to speak well, little one. Learn when not to speak. And especially learn how to listen, not just to the words of others, but to your own, so that you may always realize what you’re saying and how.

May your words always be a joy and your joy be beyond words.

Now, let’s go check out those erdees.