EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 WORDS

My friend from another galaxy, the Alien C. W. still drops by to see me from time to time. Here is what happened today as I was trying to understand our modern times.

C.W. often becomes confused by our language so so I was scarcely surprised when he showed up at my door dressed as a monk. He smiled and raised his hand in a gesture of forgiveness as I opened the door.

“Sed do absolutionem, fili mi,” he said.

“Get the hell out of the hall before someone sees you,” I said.

He looked confused.

“What is this ‘hell’ that I can remove from your corridor?” he said.

“Give me a break,” I said as I ushered him in.

“How does one ‘give’ an act of forcing a division?”

I grimaced. He sat and arranged his monk’s robe carefully before speaking.

“I have been learning Latin,” he said.

“Marvelous.”

“Your modern English derives largely from that forgotten language, I understand.”

“Quite so.”

“So why all the confusion about word order?”

“Confusion?”

“Yes. In Latin, if one combines the words ‘house’ and ‘cat’ the order would make no difference.”

I thought for a moment, then said, “You have a point there.”

“And the combining of two innocent words for off-pigment purposes is beyond my understanding.”

“How so?”

“For example, you take a valid term used to describe a prolonged period of high winds.”

“You mean ‘a blow’”?

“Yes, my son.”

I ignored him.

“And then you attach to it the term used to describe what one does for a living …”

“That’s quite enough,” I said. “My wife is sleeping in the back room.”

“Speaking of your wife,” he said. “I have heard her on occasion use a term that I find particularly baffling.”

“And that is?”

“She refers periodically to a “Sin Erase Date.”

“Yes.”

“And that means?”

“That refers to the date that a politician with a checkered personal life uses to pinpoint the exact moment when he or she embraced a religious dogma.”

“I don’t understand.”

I explained. “That is the date before which one cannot question the politician’s past since, at that time, he or she ‘found religion’ and was absolved of all previous bad behavior.”

“Sort of a ‘Get out of Hell Free’ card?”

I smiled. “Sort of.”

“Does your so-called ‘news media’ fall for it?”

“Ask George W. Bush.”

He sighed. “I see.”

“Has this been any help?”

He went into repose as I continued with the headlines.

Language

Had an interesting meeting yesterday. Met with a group of folks who actually have to administer the rules and regulations that urban planners write. Interesting.

When we use the term "front yard," for example, what does that mean?" If we say someone can't park a travel trailer in the front yard, what does it mean? What if they have a large estate and it's 200 feet from the front property line to the front facade of the house, does it mean they can't park a trailer 150 feet back?

Things like this make my wrinkles disappear and my gray hair turn brown again, or something like that.

English is a pretty concise language at times. I remember reading a science-fiction novel, A Canticle for Liebowitz when in my teens. A character who had grown up speaking and reading Latin had trouble, for example, understand why, in our English tongue, the term "house cat" didn't have the same meaning when the words were reversed, as it would in Latin.

The meeting included what my old legal mentor Argumento de Minimus, the Harvard-bred lawyer, calls "say a man" questions.  He says lawyers get them a lot as in, "Say a man (not me of course) was to … ." We, urban planners, get them as in, "I know you can't run a manufacturing business in a residential neighborhood, but, say a man was to makes cutting boards in his garage woodworking shop, maybe once or twice a year, and give them away as holiday gifts, but may ever once't in a while sell one at cost, mind you, for a friend to give away as a gift, and, maybe park a truck in his driveway with the name of his shop on it and … ."

Oh well. It turned out to be an edifying meeting, seeing things from different eyes. Maybe we all ought to try that at times.