Kinky Idol Mirrors

[thamiris]

Mirror, MirrorReturning to Montreal, I looked into a mirror: I have churches for eyes, a cobbled tongue, St. Laurent hair. It was the first time I ever realized in a thousand-flashing-lightbulb way the extent that the city's inscribed on my bones...Or, truer yet, that my skeleton's made of Montreal

Comments

[gnomi]

My trippy, awkward, overthought relationship with language? From growing up in a city with language police, from the Anglo habit of saying everything twice, once in English, once in French, of ploughing ahead in the second if the first gets a blank stare or a nationalist glare then committing crimes against the rolling-R flow of la langue officielle

Do you find yourself smacking up against your native language(s) often, missing the word in one that you need but having it in the other? This happens all the time to me.

(It doesn't help at all that my second language is also the first language of my new parent company, so I'm hearing it more and more on a regular basis, thus making me code switch with much more frequency. It makes my (American) coworkers' eyes bug out when I accidentally switch.)

[thamiris]

That Fringlish confusion happened to me more frequently when I lived in Montreal and was surrounded by French, but yeppers: it happened then and it still happens now. And some French words are just better, so I use 'em anyway.

You sound like you're in a linguistically-crazy place, hon! Can I ask what your other language is? (

[gnomi]

My second language is Hebrew, and the bizarre thing is that neither of my parents are nearly as fluent (and they didn't speak it in the house when I was growing up, since they're not fluent). But my mother was taking a class in Hebrew when I was two that was audio-tape based, so she played the tapes all the time, and so I learned all the vocabulary. And then they sent me to Jewish schools where I learned in Hebrew from native speakers.

It doesn't help my day-to-day vocabulary that there are concepts I just don't have in English for which I tend to substitute Hebrew/Yiddish terms (this is not uncommon; a conversation with many non-Jewish New Yorkers can have as much Yiddish as a conversation with my mother). And then my company was bought by an Israeli company, and so a whole slew of folks keep coming for meetings who speak Hebrew in the hallways.

Sometimes I feel like I should come with my own glossary. :-)

[thamiris]

I thought it was Hebrew because I know you speak it, but then I'm always a half-step (at least) away from reality so I decided to ask. *g*

And there's nothing like a second language to remind us of all the inadequacies of English, is there?

[gnomi]

Heh. I find the oddest inadequacies sometimes. Yiddish (for example) has a single word to describe, say, the relationship between my mother and my mother-in-law. English has no such thing.

It seems from things I've read that languages from cultures that have a large emphasis on family structure are more likely to have a word for such a relationship than languages that come from cultures that have less of an emphasis on family structure.