Words and Phrases and Widespread Aversions

I was pleased to read here that I'm not alone in taking against certain words, even though I suspect, given the date, that the whole article may simply be a joke. Certainly it is not a joke for me that, if someone uses 'moist' - I remember a young man I'd earlier thought quite attractive referred to something we'd just eaten as a 'moist meal', and this, along with the rather effete way in which he picked up his chicken bones and gnawed at them, (yes, it is possible to be effete and gnaw), made me decide he wasn't attractive after all (such is the ephemeral nature of romantic love) - I have generally concluded that they are a bit 'wet' in the non-moist sense.

We're not talking here about annoying, overused words, but words that provoke an emotional reaction, words that make you wince. In the same kind of way, I shudder slightly at most shortenings eg 'veggies'. I, along with many others, judging by this article, can't stand 'panties'. I used to hate 'slacks', which the headmistress of my boarding school used to tell us we could wear on special occasions, thus putting me off trousers for a long, long time.

What do you think? What are the words that elicit an involuntary shudder in you?

Inspiration

I've been taking a more relaxed view of typos lately, but this woman has rekindled my zeal, (if that's not a mixed metaphor, which I think it probably is):

In Pippa Kelly's honour, I've added a few more posts to my blog of unbridled pedantry. You can find them here.

Words and Phrases - a Continuing Series

There are people in my household who seem to think that a Monday evening that doesn't include watching at least a part of Q&A, (it tends to be only a part as the programme acts as a soporific on its most enthusiastic viewer - or possibly it's the wine downed to render the content of the programme semi-tolerable), is a Monday evening wasted. I don't agree, but I am usually over-ruled. As a result, I find myself each week being enraged by many things - it's that kind of a programme - but above all by the host inviting me to 'join the Twitter conversation'.

The so-called 'Twitter conversation' is actually a band running along the bottom of the screen, displaying banal tweets by viewers. The tweets shown there are not all the tweets tweeted about the programme; the tweets shown there are only a select few. Some mysterious and mystifying process of editing or censorship is passed through before the successful ones are alllowed to show themselves before the wider viewing public. They are mostly stupid and dull, some are aggressive, one or two are mad. But what is worst about them is they ARE NOT A CONVERSATION. They are just a random collection of remarks. There is no quickfire bantering, there is no referring back, there is no expanding on a theme introduced by one tweeter and enlarged on by another.

What we are being tricked into believing is an exchange of thoughts is no such thing. It is just a burble. "Join the Twitter burble." That's what that man on Q&A should say each week. And if he did, I would answer, 'No, I won't - and even if I did you probably wouldn't let me join properly. You'd probably say, "That's not burbley enough, we can't show something that doesn't burble properly." So instead of joining the Twitter burble, as you are apparently inviting me to do, I'd be left pressing my nose eagerly against the window - or screen - of the Twitter burble. I'd be on the outside, wishing I could be inside. So it's actually a false invitation that you're giving me. In fact, it's a misuse of language. We've cleared up the conversation misunderstanding; you've agreed that it's actually a burble, but now we have the problem that the invitation that you're giving me isn't actually an invitation at all."

At that point, the Q&A fan in my house would wake up and ask me why I was shouting at the telly, and I'd say, 'Never mind, it doesn't really matter. I'm just going to take a look on Twitter', and then he'd go back to sleep.

Words and Phrases - a Continuing Series

Someone called @johnemcintyre has just tweeted this excellent piece of advice:

'Every time you delete the word "iconic," a sentence becomes more succinct and marginally less annoying.'

Some people might even say that that is an iconic tweet.

Words and Phrases and Learning the Hard Way

It's taken me a while but I think I've finally decided that theatrical performances billed as 'challenging' or 'confronting', (see here for an example), are best avoided - and if 'burlesque' is mentioned anywhere on the poster, well, that's the clincher. All the 'burlesque' performers of my acquaintance have been somewhat repressed private school girls who seem to think that putting on satin corsets and fishnet stockings will help them transcend their inhibitions and transform them into wild-eyed sirens.

Here's one, getting ready for an evening performance:

By the way, have I ever mentioned how much I hate the phrase 'no-brainer'? I probably have, but there's no harm in making the point again.

Words and Phrases - a Continuing Series

I just heard a man on the radio say that the failure of the Apollo 13 mission was "a September 11 moment for America".

No, it wasn't. Leaving aside the fact that, as far as I can remember, no-one lost their life in Apollo 13, there is no such thing as "a September 11 moment", except September 11 itself. Nothing comes close to it. It is no good trying to appropriate it. The enormity of the crime that was perpetrated on that day is approached by nothing in recent times. Not even the recent act of terrorism in Boston can be classed as "a September 11 moment".

I do hope this usage doesn't spread.

The Joy of Babel III

As I've mentioned before, while I enjoy learning languages, I'm not very good at it. Which is why I identified very much with this passage from Simon Winder's introduction to his book called Germania:

"...for many years I charged at language after language in the manner of someone running up against some massively barred and studded fortress door: Italian, Latin, Spanish, French, Russian, Arabic (in a moment of lunatic lack of self-knowledge), German, Ancient Greek - a catalogue of complete pointlessness."

Winder goes on to explain that he did manage to master Arabic script but then:

"... there was an awful awakening - Arabic beyond the script was even worse than French ... There was an unhappy sequel to this. I still vividly remember wandering around the abbey of St-Denis, north of Paris, where all the French kings were buried, and vowing to improve my knowledge of medieval monarchs. I had the sequence down from 1550 or so (everyone's called Louis, in order, with a handful of easily remembered, vivid exceptions) - but the huge accumulation of earlier people called Louis or Charles was a tangle.

This was when I realised the limits of the human brain. I had always assumed I could indefinitely add stuff - battles, capital cities, dynasties. As I loaded up those Merovingian and Capetian kings I felt my brain, like some desperately rubbish, home-assembled bathroom shelf, lurch suddenly to one side, and all the Arabic alphabet fall off the other end. Shortly after that the whole thing came off the wall, taking the pointless Merovingians with it too."

I know that feeling. Oh dear yes, I know that feeling very, very well.

The Joy of Babel II

Yesterday, when we were watching the news about the Italian election, Mr Monti appeared on the screen. "What's the Italian for 'boring'?", my husband asked. "'Noioso,'" I said, 'or possibly 'fastidioso', although I think that means more irritating and tedious than dull exactly."

"What's the Italian word for 'fastidious' then, if 'fastidioso' means annoying?" my husband asked. We looked it up in my ancient and rather useless dictionary (so useless that when you look up 'boring' in the English section, all you get is an engineering term) and also in the electronic dictionary that came with my e-reader.

What we found illustrates one of the things I love about learning languages - the way in which underlying differences in the outlook of the speakers of another language are revealed in the language itself. In this case, almost all the words listed to translate the English concept 'fastidious' into Italian - 'difficile', 'esigente', 'schifiltoso' (which presumably comes from 'schifo') and 'incontentabile' - were negative.

The Italian language clearly assumes that its speakers will see someone who is fastidious in their approach to life and work - (the kind of person that I, as an editor, would regard as the apex of humankind) - as difficult and hard to please. The thing that interests me is whether this detail suggests that Italians actually regard the fastidious as a bit of a pain or whether it is just their language that prevents them from viewing such people in a more positive light. Do we shape language or does language shape us?

Limited Value

Usually, when learning a language, I am a dutiful plodder, accepting unquestioningly the rules of grammar and completing the dull exercises I'm set without a second thought. However, yesterday, as I was ploughing my way through a chapter on the Hungarian imperative in one of my Teach-Yourself-Hungarian-type books, I did find myself wondering about the verbs that had been chosen to illustrate the different classes of conjugation.

I mean, how likely is that I'm ever going to order anyone to do some milking, or indeed exclaim cheerfully, 'Let us milk'? And I trust I'm right in assuming that I'm never going to need to use the word 'kill' in any context, least of all the imperative - or is it a rule that, once in possession of knowledge, one will inevitably put that knowledge to use?

How Now Thou Lovely Plough

I love learning foreign languages, but I've gone on in detail about that before. At the time I also mentioned my curiosity about the loss of the 'thou' form in English. Why did we lose it, when did we lose it and does it mean we're all ice-cold swine?

Anyway, I should also have mentioned, while on that particular subject, that one of the things I find adorable about the fiendishly hard Hungarian language is the fact that, as well as having the 'you' and 'thou' forms familiar to anyone who's had a go at any of the Germanic, Slavic or Romance languages, it also has a third utterly unfathomable - to me at least - mode of address that is either more or less haughty than the other two (I've never been able to make out where it really fits in in the complex world of linguistic efforts to express the subtleties of human relationships).

Furthermore, Hungarians, already in possession of an extra nuance in their interchanges, (and two different verb declensions, depending upon whether the object of their sentence is vague - 'a', 'some', 'several' - or definite - 'the'), also have a verb form reserved specifically for activities that go on between a first person singular - 'I' - subject and a second person singular (or plural [ideal for orgies])  - 'thou' - object. Thus, there is 'I see him' and 'I see you' and 'he sees thou', but, as well, in the phrase 'I see thou', a special iteration of the verb is used to convey the exclusively intimate relationship that exists between an 'I' and a 'thou'.

Such nuance in a language's grammar strikes me as both sophisticated and sensitive. My mother tongue seems a rather primitive tool by comparison. Remembering how as a small child in primary school I baffled my teacher - (no, no, not lovely Miss Monck Mason, she would have understood immediately - it was that horrid Miss Pickard) - by writing a story - (at the school that I went to virtually all we ever did was write stories) - about a character called 'pudding hat' who led an uprising of the common nouns, demanding the same rights as proper nouns to have initial capital letters - (of course, 'pudding' should have moved to Germany I realised when I started learning that language decades later) - I wonder now whether it is in fact English verbs, rather than nouns, that should be revolting. Rise up, 'doing words', demand equality with your more subtle Hungarian chums.

Words and Phrases, a Continuing Series

I'm not sure the thing I'm objecting to today is actually a phrase so much as a franchise. It's certainly not a

Arse

Before I start ranting and raving, let me make it clear

Encounters with Futility

Despite making an effort to put aside at least ten to fifteen minutes of every day to study the Hungarian language, I seem to have got worse at speaking the bloody thing, rather than better. I've stuffed my head with all sorts of big, impressive looking bits of vocabulary, but they seem to have shoved out the words and phrases that are the building blocks of daily commonplace interchange. It's very disheartening.

Which is why I was amused when I came across a passage about Hungarian in Patrick Leigh Fermor's wonderful book Between the Woods and the Water (if you haven't read it and its forerunner, A Time of Gifts, I highly recommend them both. I think he was one of the greatest descriptive writers of modern times and the story he tells of his walk across Europe is wonderful).

In this extract he has just arrived in Budapest and is trying to get to grips with the local tongue:

'Coming from a great distance and wholly unrelated to the Teutonic, Latin and Slav languages that fence it in, Hungarian has remained miraculously intact. Everything about the language is different, not only the words themselves, but the way they are formed, the syntax and grammar and above all the cast of mind that brought them into being. I knew that Magyar belonged to the Ugro-Finnic group, part of the great Ural-Altaic family. "Just", one of my new friends told me, "as English belongs to the Indo-European." He followed this up by saying that the language closest to Hungarian was Finnish.
"How close?"
"Oh very!"
"What, like Italian and Spanish?"
"Well no, not quite as close as that ..."
"How close then?"
Finally after a thoughtful pause, he said, "About like English and Persian."'

French

My younger daughter sent me this list, which is meant to show French people how they sound when they speak English - or possibly to instruct them in how to speak English:

Etes-vous prêt ?
Ail ou radis ?
Are you ready ?

L'addition
Débile
The bill

Félicitations !
Qu'on gratte tous les jeunes !
Congratulations !

Passer un coup de fil personnel
Ma queue perd son alcool
Make a personal call

Plus d'argent
Mors mon nez
More money

Joyeux Noël
Marie qui se masse
Merry Christmas

Nous sommes en retard
Oui Arlette
We are late

Attirance sexuelle
C'est que ça pèle
Sex appeal

Le dîner est prêt
Dix nourrices raidies
Dinner is ready

Fabriqué en France
Mais dîne Frantz
Made in France

J'ai fait un bon voyage
Ahmed a l'goût d'tripes
I made a good trip

Le boucher
Deux bouts d'chair
The butcher

Il parle Allemand
Il se pique Germaine
He speaks german

Tu as sauvé toute ma famille !
Youssef vole ma femme au lit !
You saved all my family !

Asseyez-vous sur la chaise
Six tonnes de chair
Sit on the chair

Le sel et le poivre
Sale teint de pépère
Salt and pepper

Né pour perdre
Beaune - Toulouse
Born to loose

Je cuisine
Âme coquine
I'm cooking

Épicerie fine
Délicate et saine
Delicatessen

Où est l'épicier ?
Varices de grosseur ?
Where is the grocer ?

Donne-moi de l'argent !
Guy vomit sous mon nez !
Give-me some money !

Prendre le train
Toute ta queue traîne
To take a train

It reminded me of the wonderful Colin Crisp, who taught me French in first year at the Australian National University (another day I'll tell the exciting story of when he lost our French proses) and who also showed us this book, which contained recently discovered medieval French texts:

This was one of the poems it contained, with its accompanying explanatory footnotes:

Un petit d'un petit [1]
S'étonne aux Halles [2]
Un petit d'un petit
Ah! degrés te fallent [3]
Indolent qui ne sort cesse [4]
Indolent qui ne se mène [5]
Qu'importe un petit d'un petit
Tout Gai de Reguennes. [6]


1. The inevitable result of a child marriage
2. The subject of this epigrammatic poem is obviously from the provinces, since a native of Paris would take this famous old market for granted.
3. Since this personage bears no titles, we are led to believe that the poet writes of one of those unfortunate idiot children that in former times existed as a living skeleton in their family's closet. I am inclined to believe, however, that this is a fine piece of misdirection and the poet is actually writing of a famous political prisoner or the illegitimate offspring of some noble house (the Man in the Iron Mask, perhaps?)
4 & 5.Another misdirection: obviously it was not laziness that prevented this person from going about and taking himself places
6. He was obviously prevented from fulfilling his destiny since his is compared to Gai de Reguennes. This was a young squire (to one of his uncles, a Gaillard of Normandy) who died at the tender age of twelve, of a surfeit of Saracen arrows before the walls of Acre in 1191.

(The poem is best read out loud).

Care in the Community

After a long discussion with a Polish friend the other day, in which she insisted that the Germans' persecution of the Jews was a direct result of their concept of 'Pflicht', which she claims makes the events of the Second World War uniquely German - a discussion made longer and considerably more muddled by my confusion of the word 'Pflicht' with the word 'Pflege', (although, even now that I've cleared that up in my own mind, I still don't believe a word of her argument) - I was interested to come across this article on the wonderful Sign and Sight site, (although this excellent book, rather contradicts the  statement near the beginning of the article that Jews were never allowed to enter the military).

Clearly, the Germans recognised that the Jews were beating them hands down, and they didn't like it. This is a universal reaction, when one racial group sees a group of fellow citizens of another racial group, (particularly a group who are regarded as incomers), excelling at their own game. For example, at Sydney Grammar just a few years ago, when the school's selective entrance tests seemed to be resulting in a preponderance of students of Asian origin entering the school, there was a push to try to weigh things in favour of 'the all round "more stupid party"' (to quote a quotation within the Sign and Sight article).

Any nationality can feel envy; only the Germans can feel a sense of 'Pflicht'. How nice it would be to relax and think, 'What happened was just something to do with being German; it wasn't an example of the potential nastiness of the entire human race.' I'd love to be let off the hook like that, but I don't think it requires much thought to recognise that envy and resentment can rise up anywhere and, when combined with the wrong economic circumstances and leaders, (and, in that context, I liked the story someone told me the other day about Kokoschka, who, supposedly, applied to Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts at the same time as Hitler, but got in. In an interview years later, he made this comment: 'I sometimes wonder if it mightn't have been better if they'd accepted Hitler and rejected me. I know I would have run the world rather differently'), things can go horribly wrong.

*Incidentally, could one see this statement within the article - 'the intellectual superiority of the Jews was in no way eradicated by conversion to Christianity' - as one in the eye for Richard Dawkins and his ragtag band of zealots?

Language and Art

Thanks to a kind relative, I was given a pass to the Frieze Art Fair, where I listened to some interesting talks, including one about the predominance of English in the art world, which ended by speculating that possibly Chinese would soon take over (a suggestion echoed by Charles Moore in the 15 October issue of the Spectator.  He says this: 'But if, as one keeps expecting to happen any day, the Chinese decide to make blatant their struggle for world domination, surely an obvious tactic would be to try to make life harder for English. The French have failed in this, but they lack the numbers. Drawing on their hundreds of millions and their growing strength in trade, the Chinese could edge the world away from English. If they did so, they would disable most of their western competitors. Anglophone monoglotism - even more extreme in the United States than in Britain - is a symptom of laziness of the top dog, so surely it cannot last much longer.'

I'm not convinced that the power of English is actually fuelled by English native speakers and their laziness. I think its domination is probably due partly to the fact that it is relatively less difficult than other foreign languages for Romance language speakers and Germanic language speakers, because it shares some of their vocabulary, and partly to history, which, via the British Empire, led to English becoming the second language in India, for example. Time will tell who is right.

After going to the Frieze Art Fair and looking at the stuff on display, as opposed to listening to the excellent talks, I was struck by this description of somebody in Edward St Aubyn's new book At Last : 'he collected hideous contemporary art with the haphazard credulity of a man who has friends in the art world.'

I Haven't Quite Finished

Sorry to bang on, but I'm still thinking about how much I love learning languages and I think I forgot to mention these things earlier:

a) how the study of another tongue makes you realise that all human communication is a feat of interpretation - trying to discover what the tone is, the intention of a statement, the mood and convictions and character of the being behind any set of words. Even communication that doesn't use language - a stop sign, for instance - has to be translated, so that one understands that it means, 'Stop the car, but don't turn it off', rather than, 'Stop talking or driving or even breathing', Stop, turn round, go home and do something else instead'.

b) how, as Elberry points out, limited knowledge sometimes makes thinking, if not easier, certainly different - and therefore you could argue that learning a language is as good for mind-altering as drugs, but not illegal (yet - knowing my prescriptive local government, it will probably soon be banned [before long living in Canberra will be like a perpetual Sunday with the Wee Frees]).

c) how there is an unexpected pleasure in finding words that seem much better fitted than your own to their meanings. Sometimes the words of another language seem to possess a kind of onomatopoeia of meaning (although not literal onomatopoeia, since a lot of the words in question refer to abstract concepts). Here are a few I am particularly fond of:


i: exigeant - for some reason this strikes me as much more 'demanding' than demanding does;


ii: Tocka,  which Nabokov claimed was untranslatable, although I think he was very inclined to make such remarks about Russian's superiority of expression. For me, it means longing and it is a better embodiment of that emotion than 'longing'. For those who like that kind of thing, here is Nabokov on the subject of its real meaning:  "At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.” The problem for me is that I think our word 'longing' also expresses all these gradations. As I've said,though, I do think - as he obviously does - that the sounds and letters and everything about tocka expresses longing better than 'longing' does.


iii. körülbelül - this is the Hungarian for 'approximately' and I think it sounds all muddled and approximate itself.

iv. beborult az ég - this means, I think, 'it's overcast' in Hungarian, and I like it because there is something almost cheering, like a fizzy drink, about the phrase which goes some way towards removing the gloominess of the thing it is describing. 

v. gyönyörű - this, again, is Hungarian, and it means marvellous; to my ear there is something much more generous about the word than there is about any of our adjectives covering the same ground.

vi. разочарование and Enttäuschung - both these words somehow speak to me of disappointment in a way that our word doesn't. If I had to pick one, I think the German option would win the day, disappointingly, (ha ha), for the Russian.


Possibly I have already described the other enormous joy of language study - when you go to university, you have to do a translation every week in any language you study. When you've done the translation, and the teacher has marked it, you gather together with your classmates for an hour and you go through the text you've translated, picking out phrases, turning over possible tenses you could have used,  being shown little idiomatic expressions that fit perfectly but that you would never otherwise have heard of. Frank Morehouse once wrote a story that I've never been able to find since I heard it read out on the radio in 1979 called The Girl who Loved Tutorials. I sympathised with that girl, but my passion wasn't tutorials. It was prose classes. Forget book clubs (ugh) - if I could go to a prose class or two each week I would be just as happy as a bean.

Mutual Admiration

As I said in my last post, I am not a very good student of languages. When I encountered my French teacher shortly after I left school, I realised that she agreed with this assessment. It was just a few days before university started and we were both standing waiting at Canberra's very first ATM, (this encounter took place back in the 1970s).

Out of an inability to think of any way to avoid talking to her, I greeted my former teacher, for whom, since her method of teaching had been the one Montaigne describes - "The usual way is to bawl into a pupil's ears as if one was pouring water into a funnel" - I had almost total contempt.

As I had never completed a single piece of homework for her or, in fact, done any work at all (I preferred the time honoured strategy of all lazy and arrogant young students - swotting for 20 hours a day for the four days immediately before the final exams, so that for a very brief interval, ideally including the exact scrap of time occupied by the exam itself, each piece of information necessary to answer the paper's cunning questions would hang with uncanny clarity in the empty cavern of my mind, ready to be deployed at a moment's notice before evaporating forever from my consciousness) - she wasn't exactly in love with me either.

Which was why I wasn't that surprised when her face didn't light up at the sight of me.

'Hello, ZMKC,' she said. She looked as pleased as if she'd discovered she'd just stood in dog's poo. 'What are you up to?'

'I'm about to start university,' I told her, 'I'm studying modern languages - in fact, one of the languages I'll be studying will be French,' I said.

She couldn't help herself. Her face convulsed.

'You - studying French', she said. The words almost choked her

 I smiled. I decided it would be wise to change the subject. 'What are you doing?' I asked, congratulating myself on my grace and charm in the face of her appalling rudeness.

'I'm getting married tomorrow,' she answered, with a simper.

Her - she must be at least 30. And she was so unattractive. And annoying. Before I could stop myself, and even while my mind was still awash with my own moral superiority in the face of her lack of civility and tact, I heard myself saying, 'You, getting married,' with exactly the same tone of utter amazement and horror as she had used to me.

The Joy of Babel

I love learning languages. This seems to surprise lots of people - not the fact that I in particular love learning languages, but the idea that anyone at all would enjoy such a task. Many English speakers appear quite content to remain within the gilded cage of their own language's confines. To them it seems to be a pointless effort to bother learning some foreign Johnny's lingo. After all, most people in the world understand some English, so why make the effort to learn to speak anything else?

Amazingly there are even a few foreigners who share this view. Certainly  the sub sub-Zsa Zsa Gabor I met soon after arriving in Budapest gave every sign of doing so: when I told her I might try having a bash at learning Hungarian, she seemed genuinely shocked. Raising her perfectly tended eyebrows and grasping my wrist with her manicured, heavily jewelled fingers, she asked in a shrill voice, 'Darling, whatever for?'

In fact, there are many very good reasons for learning a foreign language, not least avoiding experiences like the one Shaun Tan, the Oscar winning illustrator, recounted in the newspaper the other day:

Of course, balanced against the advantage of understanding what is going on around you when you go to a foreign country - or even avoiding making unnecessary trips to that country, because you have understood that you have not in fact been invited - is the considerable hard work involved in learning another language, at least for me.

Because saying I love learning languages is not at all the same as saying I am good at learning languages. I'm not at all. I have heard of - although I've never actually met - people who have a gift for picking up languages, mastering strange grammars and vocabularies in a matter of days. I'm not one of them.

And if I were, I don't think I would actually love learning languages, for it is the never-ending, day-in-day-out, slow-acquiring-of-a-complex-skill element that is part of the delight of learning a language for me. I like activities involving steady perseverance. In fact, I believe it is those kinds of activities that actually provide the greatest satisfaction to humankind.

And, useful though being able to communicate and understand communications is, the ability to speak and understand on a daily basis is the smallest of the pleasures that learning a language holds, in my view. Apart from anything else, I find conversation somewhat harrowing in any language - even my own mother tongue. I am hopeless at gathering my thoughts, finding the right words to formulate them, remembering what I want to say while at the same time listening to what others are telling me and thinking of ripostes while actually on the spot rather than two days afterwards, when it is too late.

This partly explains why, while some people enjoy the opportunity a new language offers for self-reinvention, I would never want to be taken as a native speaker (not that I could probably ever manage it anyway, except in my own on a good day).While Nicole Diver in Tender is the Night observes, 'In French you can be heroic and gallant with dignity ... in English you can't be heroic and gallant without being a little absurd', I am unwilling or unable to shake off my English sense of absurdity and throw myself wholeheartedly into the new identity that goes with a new language.

What I like more than talking a new language is the discovery of the language in a more abstract sense. I enjoy encountering new approaches to grammar, which reveal subtle shifts in the way different nationalities view reality - the odd Hungarian verb form variants that depend on whether the object of the verb is definite or indefinite, the Slavic languages' aspectual system, which focuses so surprisingly on whether actions are completed or not, the mystery of why so many languages retain a formal and an intimate second person and why we Anglos chose to dispense with that, and, when we did choose to do so, what made us decide to get rid of the warmer, more friendly, 'thou'.

I find the different vocabulary available to different nationalities equally intriguing - when we saw, for instance, in a visitors' book in a country museum in Austria that the people before us had written under the heading, 'Reason for visit', the single word, 'Kulturausflug', I wondered whether it was the Germans' innate pomposity that had led to the creation of such a word or whether they were led by their language to have to express themselves with such solemnity.

I also enjoy the certainty that grammar and its cast-iron rules provide for me.  I like the fact that there is no need to formulate original and complex argument when learning a language. Instead, all you have to do is memorise structures and bang words into your head. You do not need to question - in fact, it is best if you don't do any questioning. You just need to understand the relationships between the various components and also to remember how the various components are spelled.

Which is not to say that there aren't intriguing questions to be asked - who set down these rules, who decided that these particular sounds would henceforth designate this thing? These are fascinating and mysterious lines of enquiry, However, they are destined to remain ultimately enigmatic. There will never really be any satisfactory answers to be found to them and so, instead of asking them, it is wiser to spend your time accumulating vocabulary, heaping it up in your mind until you have a trove of different, sparkling words, which you can run like jewels through your mental fingers (I think there is a case for the New Yorker cry of 'block that metaphor' at this point.)

Learning a language is also a very inexpensive means of travelling. Without leaving the comfort of your home, by learning a language you can get a lot of the pleasure that comes from actually visiting a foreign place. Just as when you go abroad, everything becomes suddenly interesting by virtue of its novelty - even the milk cartons look different and therefore ever so slightly exotic - so, when you embark on the study of a new language, all objects become fascinating and foreign, by virtue of the new names that you discover exist for them. Clad in their new labels, each spice in your kitchen cupboard, each piece of furniture in your sitting room, each whitegood, each ornament, all your possessions acquire the allure of strangeness for a while, just as a new place does until you get to know it well.

And later, as you penetrate further into a language, there is the pleasure of reading its literature, using a dictionary if necessary, so that the meaning emerges like treasure being dragged up and out of water, at first blurred and dim and then finally coming into the bright clear sunlight. And there is also the pleasure of translating into the language you are learning - for, in the same way that trying to play a piece of music is a good way of really coming to comprehend its structure and trying to draw an object or scene is a good way of really seeing it, so trying to translate a text is a marvellous way of gaining a thorough understanding of it. The reverse is true also - if you ever want to truly clarify your thoughts, try expressing them in a foreign tongue. Nothing crystallises the mind quite like it.

Finally, if all the other attractions of language learning fail to entice, there is the joy to be found within the language textbooks themselves: each one contains countless sentences of startling strangeness. Whole novels could be based on many of them.

To find an example of what I mean, I open 'Introducing German', completely at random and immediately I discover this surreal single phrase - Er hat die Tauben im Park vergiftet. It stands there quite alone, this profoundly odd and entirely unexplained statement. Who he is, why he did it, what happened next, what had happened before he decided to poison all the poor birds, all of this is left to the - in my case, possibly over-active - imagination.

Opening another textbook - Russian this time - I come upon a set of exercises that together might well qualify as a found poem:

A cool wind was blowing
Lightning flashed
It is snowing
The first snow of the winter falls
A lesson is in progress
The decisive minute arrives
Silence falls
The lime trees blossomed

Last of all, in my high school French book, the page falls open at this sequence, which I imagine in a voice over to a Jean Luc Godard movie, or possibly discarded in a wastepaper basket belonging to TS Eliot:

He spends a lot of time in the mountains
The road is lined with beautiful poplars
There are no flowers in the garden
You always make too many mistakes
He wore a silk shirt and cotton trousers
The palace was surrounded by green lawns
The swallows have not returned this year
The clock stopped at midnight last Wednesday
A shot was heard
The curtain rises
Where do the Orlovs live?

Even those who don't care about tenses or vocabulary must also find themselves drawn in by these odd and haunting passages. You may not want to learn French but can you honestly say that you won't lie awake tonight at three in the morning, repeating that age-old unanswerable question: 'Where do the Orlovs live?'

I Have Already

Thought of an addition, that is: 'my bad'. Ban it. I will vote for you, whoever you are, whatever else you stand for, if you do.