Language Acquisition Pranks

People have told me I'd make a good father, and the greater part of me is sincerely flattered. The other part of me, though—the part that would read a Finnish grammar straight through—doesn't quite believe it. A child is a miracle, a focus and giver of affection, a vulnerable but autonomous being, and I agree. But to the inquiring mind, one's child is also a linguistic test subject, minus all that ethical and institutional red tape. Now that's a miracle.

Now in real life, my own child would have to be adopted, and would be raised in an English-speaking culture. Even if I went off the deep end and tried to teach them Backwards Greenlandic, someone would probably stop me from yelling "Qaugnnaignulaan!" at my bewildered three-year-old. For the following scenarios, let's imagine I've married an eccentric billionaire and moved to Siberia with our three children, each adopted at the time of birth. Even the people who do live in Siberia don't talk to us much, as we've weirded them out by doing whatever gay American billionaires do in Siberia.

The Line; or, How I Understand My Body

When I took a printmaking class last fall, I was obsessed with line. Shape, color, and texture were certainly interesting from a craft standpoint, but it was always the lines I reacted to viscerally. They seemed to possess character, gesture, personality, life.

A solid shape on paper, my instinct told me, depicts a physical thing, maybe even a living thing. Say, an elephant. But I couldn’t make myself instantly perceive that an elephant-shape represented aliveness. Unconsciously, I recognized the shape of an elephant, but it took some effort to interpret the elephant-shape as alive because I know an elephant should be alive. Only then did the elephant’s pose become meaningful. As the function of a living, nerve-lined body, it became a gesture rather than a shape.