Horace and the Snowflakes

(Some thoughts provoked by the discussion at this long-ago blog post: https://ozarque.livejournal.com/547024.html.)

First let me say that I don’t really grok the situation that even started this discussion, back in the 2008 election. I saw Sarah Palin and Barack Obama as a well-matched pair of competitors who should probably have been competing for the same spot, with McCain and Biden at the tops of their tickets. Both are about my age, which, as of 2008, was just old enough to be considered ridiculously young for a President. Both were unusually bright and well disciplined extroverts. Obama, you may recall, was even accused of being an introvert.

Oh yes this is more about discrimination against introverts than it is about intelligence, or even verbal intelligence, per se.

Both were youthful in 2008; only in the White House did Obama’s hair turn grey. Both shamelessly presented themselves as representatives of “Generation X,” although, if a human generation lasts 20 years and the postwar baby-boom started in 1946, they are younger baby-boomers. Both shamelessly tried, too, to twist any questions about their personal traits, their characters, into questions of bigotry against their demographics. According to the campaigners, voters weren’t questioning the wisdom of “Drill, Baby, Drill” as a policy; they were denying the woman’s intelligence. And they weren’t questioning the ethics of someone who admittedly used a lot of illegal drugs; they were denying the Black guy’s morality. And this alleged sexism and racism was allegedly implicit in every voter’s natural reaction, “Presidents are normally at least fifty and usually sixty years old; they have grey hair, if any; looking ‘presidential’ is incompatible with looking ‘cute’ or ‘hot’ or like Bright Young Things such as you. Get some life experience, specifically like getting your children settled in their own homes, and then run for President.”

And frankly I’m not sure that the alleged prejudice against Obama’s alleged intellectualism was anything but a similar ploy. Both of the Bright Young Things were genuinely and indisputably “bright.” Neither revealed a lot of deep thinking; both revealed a tremendous amount of fast and flashy extrovert-type thinking. Neither could be accused of being an egghead like Adlai Stevenson. Obama went to a big-name university but then he worked with people in low-income housing projects. Palin bargain-shopped around at different universities and then had a lot of babies, but then, even if the big-fish-in-small-pond effect was what got her elected, she did pretty well at being mayor and governor. If anyone thought either of them would be tacky enough to alienate a voter with any kind of put-down or mentally lazy enough to be a congenial co-worker for Joe Sixpack, that person was wrong. You would have needed to be bright and energetic to share an office with either one of them for a week. I happen to like that in a person, but whatever.

But did Dreams of My Father, or Obama’s speeches, use “too many big words” for Palin voters? I’m asking. I don’t remember it. Both candidates used plenty of big words (for those who wanted to know that the candidates knew those S.A.T. words) in small sentences (for those who have trouble following a speech that contains complex sentences or complex thoughts, as Palin bitterly complained later).

What is the difference between “showing off” by saying or writing things that may confuse some people, and “dumbing down” things that actually interest people who’ve had some preparation to follow both complex ideas and technical vocabulary? Well…both of those literary sins involve a loss of congruence between vocabulary and/or writing style, and content.

People who resent other people’s talents should get over it. How does someone who was born dyslexic compensate and become a professional writer? Long before I remember understanding that there were such things as professional writers or that I wanted to be one of them, I remember being a precocious reader who looked for things I didn’t quite understand. People challenged me by asking me to read medical journals or even novels-for-older-children aloud, and although apparently I sounded out nearly all the words correctly, I did not understand or remember what I’d read. I "read" Charlotte's Web at four and then read it as a new book, with no memory of having "read" it before, at eight. I did understand, and enjoy, material that was just a little over my “reading level.” I liked the words I had to look up. I remember some of those words yet: pomegranate (when I was five years old), condor (seven), vortex (seven), procrastinate (eight), obstreperous (nine)…

I remember, at age six, feeling attracted to Latin. Foreign languages generally interested me. Many things, like dress patterns, came with instructions printed in French and Spanish, so I was starting to recognize words in those languages. So what about Latin? Well, it happened that my father, who was well known for both muscle and brain, had actively detested Latin, protested Latin, and even deliberately allowed himself to make failing grades in Latin (though not so often as to be required to spend another year on it), in high school. Any overt interest in Latin would therefore be downright disloyal, for me. Dad wanted his children to learn French, Spanish, and German. I learned to read French and speak Spanish; my brother learned to speak French and read Spanish. Neither of us had a good textbook or a native speaker to practice German with, so we left it alone, pretty much. But I have to have been the only thirteen-year-old on Earth who ever borrowed a first-year Latin book from the library, sneaked it into my room in a bag, hid it under the bed, and studied Latin furtively and rebelliously, the way “normal” late baby-boomers my age might have smoked marijuana.

So time passed. I looked for opportunities to read French or speak Spanish. I read books translated into those languages from English after reading the English versions first, or read books printed in French and Spanish with dictionaries at hand until I didn’t need the dictionaries so much. I rented a room in a house where Spanish was the official language. My husband had done similar things; he had learned German, but had neglected and forgotten it, and wanted to keep the French and Spanish sections of his brain active. English was the official language in our house but in practice it was a trilingual house. People whose native language is French have seldom understood any of the noises I make when I try to speak French, but since French was my husband’s third language too, he understood my fractured French easily.

We had to make an effort, speaking our second and third languages. We had to plan and choose our words, even go and look them up. I enjoyed that, too.

I’ve thought of it again this year because, years ago, one of Mother’s friends gave me the jewel of my old book collection, an early nineteenth century edition of the collected works of Horace, annotated, all in Latin—the distinguished professor’s notes as well as Horace. It collected dust for a while, and someone with whom I shared storage space tore off and probably didn’t even keep the front cover. I didn’t try very hard to sell it. Some part of me wanted to try to read it. So, last winter, I began—reading at the computer, looking up words when possible, working around them when necessary. At the time of writing I have actually read, with some understanding, about 300 pages of a 600-page book printed entirely in a language I’ve never officially studied. I have to be in the right mood for this mental exercise; when I am I’m having terrific fun trying to figure out what Horace meant.

Who was Professor Ludovicus Desprez, and why did he choose to write two or three times as many words as Horace wrote about each of Horace’s poems and letters? I don’t know but I’m forming a mental impression of him from his writing. He was fearfully well read; French was his first language, English his second; he might have been one of the émigrés who lost their rental properties and had to demean themselves by things like teaching classes after the revolution. He had a snarky sense of humor; I might have enjoyed a class he might have taught. Was he “showing off” by writing his notes entirely in Latin? In the fifteenth century everyone did that; in the nineteenth century I hadn’t heard that anyone did. So, as he wrote, was he thinking some grim French equivalent of “If I must demean myself by teaching, I shall be the most learned pedant these maudits Anglais have ever seen!”, or did he just feel that it was proper to write his comments in the language of the text on which he was commenting? The world may never know. All I know is that, whatever his intentions were, two hundred years later I’m enjoying his work.

I don’t think a person who expects people to enjoy per writing, after two hundred years, feels any need to “show off.” But perhaps I’m overestimating the long-gone professor. Perhaps he did. “Showing off” is not always all bad. It may always be motivated by immature emotional reactions but it’s not always all bad.

What use is Latin, today, anyway? There are people, mostly in Europe, trying to use it as an international language; they’ve decided among other things that the Latin translation of “hey, hi, hello” is Salve and the translation of “okay” is Amen. Mostly Latin is studied by people who want to pore over ancient crumbling texts in utterly ivory-tower-type jobs where, these days, job openings are few and salaries are low. Parents don’t have to hate Latin as much as my father did to have a reason to advise their children to study something more likely to lead to their being hired and promoted. I’d advise a student to do that too. Attention Nephews: you are hereby advised to take a trade school course first, if you’re not snapped up by a nice paternal corporation that will pay you to go to college part-time while working there, and study some reasonably useful subject like math, law, or nursing. But some word-nerds just like the sound of Latin and the pleasure of discovering the seeds of contemporary thoughts in those ancient crumbling texts, and one reason a reasonable person might have for writing a book in Latin is to delight those word-nerds.

Compared with writing an entire book in Latin, I can’t think of any other things writers or speakers can do that would be classified as “showing off” on a comparable scale of magnitude. Some of the bloggers discussing Obama’s alleged intellectual elitism tried silly little things like using a single foreign word (always one that’s fairly commonly borrowed by people writing in English) as ways to say “Look, I’m showing off too.” I don’t see it.

For any writer or speaker, recognizing the audience’s level of comprehension and choosing words the audience understand are what our job is all about. If you write something, or worse yet say it to their faces in a live speech, that your audience are not able to understand, you have failed to communicate. Every job and hobby does have its own jargon, which makes it possible for anyone to write badly by choosing terms the audience will not understand. The French word for that whole category of Wrong Words is latin, with a lower-case L, implying that using technical terms from your job vocabulary is as bad as writing in Latin. As one of the bloggers observed, using phrases like “hit that one out of the ball park” or “cable stitch” or “polarized plug” can fairly be considered a way of “showing off” and confusing rather than informing the audience. Most Americans have a vivid mental picture of what happens when someone, preferably you, your date, or your kid, hits a baseball out of the ball park; the rest of the world may not. Our late lamented Grandma Bonnie used to get on my case about that kind of thing, at this web site… “On my case.” How can foreign readers know that I am not saying that I own a little box and GBP used to come out and sit on it? When Americans “get on someone’s case” they’re behaving like police officers actively investigating a crime. This idiom comes from pop culture (detective stories) and would never be classified as “showing off” if everyone in the audience speaks U.S. English fluently. It seems to be familiar to American children. It might be considered to exclude foreigners.

I’m with the bloggers who said that listeners/readers have some responsibility to work with a presumption of good will, at least in campaign speeches…not to be snowflakes. For me at a formative stage it was true that, when people said things I didn’t understand, they were overestimating my understanding because I was a word-nerd before age three. I think that’s true to some extent for most children, although apparently most children hear more of the shrill, exaggerated, let’s-imitate-baby-talk speech that makes kiddie TV shows such a turn-off than they hear of inappropriately adult-to-adult intellectual discussions.

There can be unexpected gaps in anyone’s ability to understand anything. People seldom expose these gaps on purpose; they honestly expect the listener to understand something the listener does not understand.

I once visited a lady during what she hoped would be the first of many long visits with her grandchildren, who I think were three and five years old. While doing something else with her hands she said to the older child, “Can you hold the keys for me?” The child accepted the keys. Little did we know that the child probably didn’t hear the lady’s words at all; she just saw that someone was passing an object to her, and held out her little hand. Then when she turned to the child, “Could I have the keys?” the child had no idea what she was being asked. The grandmother tried speaking on a higher pitch, in case that helped; I tried speaking on a lower pitch, in case that helped; both of us tried speaking more loudly. At some points the child did start to hear adults screeching and booming, at her. “The KEYS! The KEYS Grandma gave you! Where did you put the KEYS?”

And apparently the child, whose ability to hear digitally synthesized tones put her just inside the border of “hard of hearing” rather than “deaf,” had no idea what “keys” were. She didn’t hear enough words to understand almost any words. She looked old enough to go to school next fall. Appearances are deceptive. That child was very good at reading nonverbal communication but probably understood fewer words than a normal child does before it’s a year old. She reacted to the nonverbal communication, found it unpleasant, and defended herself as children do; she cried. The doting grandmother made adjustments and enjoyed years of visits from that child. I just added the memory to the list of Evidence That I’m Not Good With Deaf People.

Then of course there are those who willfully refuse to understand. In recent years the Democratic Party has recently adopted a strategy of ignoring the actual content of anything people outside their party say, sticking their fingers in their ears and screaming “You’re racists, you’re racists.” It’s particularly unimpressive when they throw in put-downs and stereotypes that actually are racist. 

If people are really locked into that bad habit, probably the best response is to declare the entire party insane and require extensive psychological treatment before anyone who uses the “Republicans are racists” meme, or other “I am prejudiced and hostile” memes, can be allowed in any other position where person could participate in public discourse. However, in private life we meet individuals who are prejudiced against us in individual ways that can never be addressed by public policy. When they don’t have a political party to back up the fingers-in-ears screaming routine, they usually try to make their versions of “I’m not going to listen to anything you say” less obvious, and that is the origin of the criticism of individual style we hear outside of professional editors’ offices. Kids learn to say “I can’t understand those big words!” or conversely “I don’t do BABYtalk any more!” as ways to derail primary school teachers, regardless of whether anyone else even in the same classroom has any difficulty understanding what those teachers are saying. People who are ready to move beyond about grade four should make sure they have completely outgrown this behavior. Adults are free to take what other people say about their religious experiences, e.g., with the proverbial grain of salt, but they need to be held accountable for not spewing hate and bigotry at everything with which they happen not to agree.

How can we tell whether someone is trying, honestly and without prejudice, to understand what someone else is saying and failing to understand a certain word, or words, or whether the person is spewing hate and bigotry? By the emotional quality of their reactions, of course. There’s nothing wrong, or even disrespectful, with asking people to define their terms; serious intellectuals do that regularly, especially when scientists are lecturing or students are “defending their theses” in a kind of oral examination. Asking for definitions (or spellings, if you want to do additional research) is a sign of respectful interest in what is being said. Whining about how the person’s use of a word that’s unfamiliar to you was “elitist” or “unfair” or “obfuscatory” is one of those sneaky ways of spewing bigotry. (If what was said was something like “Trailer trash never make any positive contribution to any neighborhood,” of course, the use of a long—and vague—phrase like “positive contribution” might be evasive but it would not be elitist; the meaning of that sentence would be what is elitist.)

I’d agree that a speaker is to blame if, in a conversation, the speaker does not recognize evidence that the listener is not understanding. I would not agree that a speaker is to blame if, in a speech, the speaker expects everyone to hear and understand more than some people do. In a politician’s campaign speech, making an entire speech in a foreign language would be “showing off.” Using commonly borrowed words like ergo or Q.E.D., or for that matter pronto or gung ho or au revoir or gesundheit or shmear, is not showing off; these words are not technically English but most Americans both understand them and feel that they’re the appropriate words to use in some situations. Of course the politician’s campaign team would usually understand that a phrase that’s familiar to one audience may be unfamiliar to another audience. Of course the ideal politician would know when to forego the familiar use of the borrowed word in the context where it makes sense, and just use the English synonym. Carpe diem may sound precisely right to people who remember one or more of its historical contexts, the original poem or any of the dozens of later works that alluded to it; with people who don’t, “use the time we have” is better.

With several of the examples the bloggers gave, it’s painfully obvious that a bigger vocabulary is better, no matter how much some people kick and scream. Obviously some people have reasons for questioning this. One of the bloggers happens to be Cuban-American. Whenever people travel between countries that use different languages, they tend to find that the best word for what they want to say belongs to the language that is not generally used in the country where they are. They discipline themselves to “Keep It Simple, Stupid.” They dumb down: “Don’t say ‘scarlet,’ say ‘red.’ Saying ‘scarlet’ might alienate some people.” I’m not sure which people those would be. In Spanish and English, specifically, it’s the polysyllabic words that tend to be cognate; red sounds less like rojo than scarlet sounds like escarlata, and “scarlet” is still used enough in spoken English that preschoolers usually know it’s a rich deep shade of red. They don’t know why the Bible writers symbolized sins by scarlet stains rather than black ones, but they know which crayon to use if they want to draw a picture of someone who “is not afraid of the snow, for all of the family are dressed in scarlet.”

Anyway, in most situations it’s not necessary to mention colors at all, but if you do want to mention, e.g., the scarlet leaves that from on new growth and fall before the yellow leaves fall from a Norway maple tree, I have no problem with the person who says “scarlet” and a big problem with the person who whines about feeling alienated by it. If a catalogue offers a shirt in red, scarlet, crimson, burgundy, ruby, carnelian, and watermelon, then describing the scarlet one as “red” would be a misrepresentation—not necessarily important to everyone, but obviously essential if you actually want to order that shirt. Not all people are born with the ability to see seven different shades of bright red. Some people are going to be excluded from any meaningful discussion of those shirts or of why they should order one rather than the other. If those people are intelligent, they accept that they’re color-blind and get someone to help them choose their clothing. Many people, however, can see all seven shades of red, and feel enriched by knowing their different names. The ability to see subtle variations in color is an advantage. No one benefits from dumbing down a discussion of shirt colors, if people want to discuss shirt colors at all, or from the store’s offering only one shade of red so as not to confuse people who might look better in a different shade but who might also feel upset by having to learn the words for different shades. Everyone benefits from an agreement: There may be no known reason why anyone would ever choose “utilize” over “use,” but when synonyms actually communicate nuances of meaning, the more synonyms people know and can use, the better off everyone is.

Among intelligent people, beginning with the expectation that someone will understand or appreciate something is a polite, even flattering, way to assess their level of interest and open an interaction (it can be a musical jam session, or other things, as well as a conversation) that is not “for the folks in Rio Linda.” So one of my mother’s friends—the one who gave me Horace, actually—having heard that I’d published articles about insects, and meeting Mother and me on a quiet residential street where we were taking separate evening walks, rushed up to us waving a paper cup in which she’d scooped up something in the stag-beetle family—one of those mostly harmless beetles that are about as long as your finger, but wider. “See what I’ve found! I was just going to look it up…isn’t it gorgeous?” She had not been warned that my appreciation of insects diminishes considerably when live specimens are in my personal space. She and I never really bonded. In principle I think she was right; in practice I think people should at least be prepared for the possibility that new acquaintances may feel more aversion to stag beetles than they do to, e.g., the guitars some musical friends like to offer to visitors who haven’t brought their own musical instruments with them.

In the first few political speeches to which I listened, or tried to listen, there was a lot of content I didn’t understand. (I was ten years old—with a seven-year-old brother who was determined to do everything I did.) People still had distinctive regional U.S. accents and I still had trouble recognizing words in recordings of what Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, or Carter said. I was prepared to look things up or let them go…perhaps not quite so many things as was necessary. The first time we wanted to sit up late and listen to a presidential debate, both of us were asleep in twenty minutes. I didn’t blame the candidates for that. I didn’t even beat myself up for it. I looked up what I remembered to look up, forgot all about several things I might have looked up, and knew I’d be better prepared next time.

That is what the young need to do today, instead of accusing speakers and writers of “intellectual elitism.” Elitism is a kind of bigotry that forms prejudices against people based on things they couldn’t change if they wanted to—in the case of elitism, money and “background,” as, in the case of racism, skin color and facial features. It would be involved if someone said, e.g., “I’d never hire that person for any job! Look at that awful, tacky, faddy suit!” But overestimating a person’s interest, experience, or information is the reverse of elitism; it offers everyone, even the person in the faddy suit, the chance to be included in a group where money matters less than the activity the other members have in common. If you want to be “inside” and the word that overestimates your experience tells you you’re “outside,” it also tells you how you can get “inside” the group.

It takes a lot more effort to do the research to justify silly claims like “People in this or that group don’t recognize this word so the person should have known never to use the word with us,” than it does to look up the word. And when you look up the word, now you do know the word. Knowledge is power. You’ve scored a point off the speaker; you’ve learned a word. Total win-win. You should thank the person who overestimated your word power and thereby added to it.

I only wish I’d tackled Horace in time to thank Mother’s friend, who was 98 years old when she gave me that book, properly. I thanked her for adding a rare piece to my collection, of course, at the time. I think she would have liked to know that I actually read it—limping along without a good dictionary, looking up words online or not at all, missing a lot, but thoroughly enjoying the book.

And so, when other people stop crybullying and look up what they don’t yet understand, will they enjoy a lot more of life than they now do.

Whatever extroverts may feel with their poor defective neurons, the purpose of learning more words is not to communicate a feeling of exclusiveness, but to communicate more facts with more precision. Expanding your vocabulary is a way to increase the amount of satisfaction in your life. We all started out as infants who couldn’t walk, or talk, or chew food. Maybe some infants do feel that people walk and talk and chew food just to make babies feel left out of things, and it’s not faaair. Maybe that’s why some infants cry so much. Healthier infants, however, just practice until they become able to walk, talk, and chew food too, and as they grow older and can do more things they continue to look for ways to recapture the joy of learning new things. Try learning to use new words; you’ll like it.