Thought That Came Unbidden

It’s official: English is now a dead language.

Merriam Webster announced its pick for “Word of The Year” today. Beating out facebook (as a verb meaning to add someone to a list of friends on facebook.com or to search for friends on a similar social networking site), surge, and bluetooth, this year’s winner w00t marks the demise of English and the rise of…something else.

I’m all for a living language and can get squarely behind Oxford’s choice of “locavore” as a solid portmanteau (local+omni/herba vore = locavore (someone who cooks with mostly locally grown ingredients that do not require extensive shipping or preservatives)) but the inclusion of a word that, yes boys and girls, has two numbers in the middle of it signals to me the death of actual language and the first step into our move toward textlish(TM).

Granted, w00t (an exclamation of joy or excitement) came not out of the global SMS/cellphone world but out of the gaming world, and circa 2002 at that, and while the use of numbers to substitute for letters becomes a weeding out mechanism, the proper substitution is known only to the elite (or l33t), including such a “word” in the official lexicon isn’t proper recognition of a living language it’s the sinking of lexography and the rise of slanguage.

Of course, given that in American parlance it has become common to refer the totality of a woman’s genitals as her vagina I’m not really surprised by M-W’s choice. We clearly can’t use the language we already have.

There is something inherently romantic about falling snow. I’m not talking about the blizzards that descend on those northern places leaving foolish drivers blinded and drifts of heart attack inducing proportions behind. No, I’m talking about the kind of snow that falls at a rate that leaves 5 inches in as many hours.

Most people who subscribe to the idea that a sufficient dusting of snow – usually defined as enough to completely cover the brittle, winter desiccated grass of your neighbor’s yard – probably believe that it is snow’s ability to visually remove imperfections (that pile of leaves, the dog shit that someone didn’t bother to bag, the pothole that the city just won’t fill) that imbues snow with its transformative quality. The white blanket covers all rendering the world clean and pure, at least until traffic comes along and you get a sense of what it is you’re really breathing every day. The people who believe that snow’s primary transformative quality is visual are wrong. It is aural.

It’s true without a doubt that snow changes the visual landscape. It takes the shadows of everyday life, the gray concrete, the brown telephone poles, and it turns them into reflective surfaces smoothing the edges and making the world, paradoxically, a little more visible. In the snow covered landscape the visual becomes high contrast.

But in the aural landscape exactly the opposite occurs. Falling snow seems to deaden sound. It fills up the space between you and everything else with something that is more akin to grey noise than silence. The rush of frozen water, thousands of unique particles of it, cuts you off from the rest of the world and the clamor of the daily soundscape. Falling snow creates an aural illusion of privacy and in the right situation can lead you to the grand place where you can forget and avoid the noise of others, where instead of the honking of horns and the sound of rushing traffic there is only the huff of your breath as it issues from your lips and the thump of your heart in your chest as it pumps blood around your body. To welcome the company of another in such an environment, then, becomes the ultimate act of intimacy: you are acknowledging that person’s existence. Since intimacy is the implied promise of romance the act of welcoming someone into your private soundscape naturally takes on the flushed-face, world falling away aspect that we are led to believe constitutes true romance.

The auditory illusion breaks, though, once the snow stops falling. Then you are left with nothing but a landscape devoid of shadows and filled with the sound of rushing water as nature tries to restore the balance.

One of the few privileges of living in Washington DC is the plethora of free museums and the quality of exhibits they attract. Running currently in The National Gallery’s East Building (that’s modern art to you) is a fantastic, if crowded, exhibit on Edward Hopper of Nighthawks fame.

Hopper’s works often featured figures that seem isolated both from each other and from their surroundings. Having seen the exhibit I would suggest that much of this isolation is due to the fact that Hopper just didn’t seem to be very good at painting people. Indeed, they are more simulacra of people than they are actual people. Hopper’s skill with light, though, rivals that of the much vaunted Dutch Masters. In some of his paints of Gloucester Massachusetts you can pratically feel the light hitting your skin as you look at the buildings.

Take a look at and explore Hopper’s paintings via interactive Flash movie or watch a video podcast on Hopper featuring the National Gallery’s senior curator (requires Quicktime).

In other news, I looked out my side window today to find that the Sparrow Hawk that haunted the woods behind my house last year is back. No ravaging of the current bird population as yet, at least none that I’ve witnessed, but I don’t doubt it’s coming. Still, there’s something magnificent about an animal that knows its place in its world.