(no subject)
English. English... English! I enjoy this language so much that it occurs to me occasionally that there's is no other country in which I would like to live other than the one, where I am now temporarily staying. The United Kingdom, the noble country, England, where this adorable language is spoken in its most posh, authoritative and most correct, standard way, the received accent.
English. The Russian word does not have the right flavor, the charisma for the ears, the fling. English. En-glish.
Its precision, it's jawbreaking, explosive, deconstructive precision of a tool that has been evolving through the work of millions of masters, practitioners, us for centuries and centuries! What tiny and at times embarrassing details it is able to unveil, disclose, bring to light if only the user wishes and knows how to command it, how to man thousands of tiny little adjusting mechanisms with the purpose to put in concrete of a pronounceable and writable word the user's thought.
Knowledge is required to master such complex tool. Such a shame I still can't use it in the way I want to. I shoot blindfolded, I step in the dark of my operating memory, I rarely come up with sentences that are consistent from the point of view of standard English. I feel that my language body is impaired, as if my limbs are not under my control and only do approximations of what my language brain commands them to do. It's like having your arms and legs sleeping all the time. In such condition, picking up small objects is not an easy task and rarely could be done in a singly try. So sentences are constantly reworded, restructured, changed in my head but only AFTER they are pronounced. It is as if I was typing in my head all the time but with one distinction -- I can not erase or retype what has already been typed. Control and precision of language is not my strong suit.
And it often makes me sad. The way I talk can not communicate, get the message across to people about how much I enjoy this language, how much I respect those who respects it and uses it APPROPRIATELY. More over, due to the fact that I don't possess the knowledge, I cannot fully appreciate the monuments of this language, the classic or contemporary literature, in texts of which I very often encounter such lexics that I can not comprehend, but still enjoy. I KNOW that author wanted to describe something very very specific, something that can only materialise in the mind of a reader if it is coded in that exact combination of words. I see myself as a blind person touching letters encrypted on a cold thick stone wall, I can feel the letters there, I know that they are trying to bring the vision to me every time I helplessly try to read them but they constantly fail, the magic does not appear in the air.
Every time I am back home or abroad and an expression comes to my mind that is better worded in English and that I can not use I imagine myself being a fish washed up on the sea shore lying on the sand, gaping for water, waiting for another wave to carry it back to the native habitat.