I was sitting in a bar, as I am prone to do, when I fell into conversation with a young lady. Talk turned to books and I mentioned an essay I had recently read that had reminded me of just how amazing the accomplishments of the Mongol Empire were, way back in the 13th century.
She stopped talking abruptly, open her mouth, closed it, darted her eyes to the left and then to the right, in short exhibited signs of confusion, and then finally said, “But I thought they were bad.”
“Well, I don’t know about that, but they certainly were amazing.”
Her confusion quickly became discomfort so I changed the topic.
You see, she had been conditioned to assume that words like “amazing” and “astonishing” are words of some praise – a positive assessment. I had not considered making a judgement on the Mongols’ hundred year rampage, but was simply expressing my wonder and astonishment at what they had wrought 800 years ago. What can one say about a people who depopulated China by 30% and razed literally hundreds of cities to the ground? Well, I wouldn’t let one date my sister, and I don’t even like her that much.
I am reminded of the words James II used to describe Wren’s completed St. Paul’s Cathedral in London – he said it was amusing, aweful, and artificial, which meant at the time it was pleasing to behold, deserving of awe, and full of skillful artifice.
Meanings drift and change through time, to be sure. Meat once meant any solid food, starve meant to die by any means, and deer meant any animal. This drift of meaning is called catachresis. Most commonly, words go from general terms to more specific definitions. One reason, I suppose, for this drift is that people simply do not know the specifics of the words they use, and they never bother to find out (if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it), and so they have certain words indexed in their memories with certain associations, and use them by habit.
People make assumptions about the moral values intended by the speaker based on their own subjective values and associations. In short, people do not listen to one another – rather they listen to themselves listening to one another.
I am reminded of a woman I worked with when I was 18 at a magazine store in Santa Rosa, on a very hot day and we were all sweating, and I asked her if she wanted something to drink, to which she replied “You know I don’t!!!” and stomped off (which made no sense until someone explained she was a recovering alcoholic. But obviously I didn’t mean an alcoholic drink, being a) at work and b) 18 at the time).
I am reminded of Alvie Singer in Annie Hall saying “He didn’t say ‘did you eat’, he said ‘Jew eat’. I heard him!”
I like going up to people, especially if I don’t know them all that well, and making the following statement:
“Adolf Hitler was a great man.”
You can probably imagine the sorts of reactions I get.
The word “great” derives from the German “gross,” meaning big, large. The word in English means large in quantity, size, ability, and so on. We still use it that way today – the greater metropolitan area, a greatcoat, to have great respect for sb/st, Great Britain, and great deal of rain, the Great Wall of China, and so on. Yet most people assume that, when used in conjunction with a person, the speaker is praising the subject. The phrase “Mr. X is a great man” used to mean that Mr. X has extraordinary skills and abilities, or is distinguished in his field, is a larger-than-life character, and so on. It still means that. In fact, the Webster’s Unabridged lists 17 definitions for “great,” with only one of them having anything to do with “admirable.” After all, we are not saying to the Chinese – “wow, your wall is really good and admirable” and there is a whole range of opinions about Britain (especially to the Northern Irish).
Alas, lazy habits have a tendency to win out when practiced for long periods of time. I used to tell my students in Europe that, while the world is pretty much evenly divided over preference for British or American usage, American English will eventually win out, if for nothing else than that the British are aware of and can use most Americanisms, but most Americans are not even aware that there are differences, let alone what they might be, so the Brits tend to simply adapt to their less aware linguistic cousins to speed things along.
The most common response I get to “Adolf Hitler was a great man” is something like “You’ve got to be kidding!” (though often much less polite than that). I say that I am certainly not kidding and challenge the other person to refute my statement.
And then the proverbial fur starts flying.
No one ever bothers to stop and think about what I could possibly mean. I maintain that Mr. H. could have walked around any part of Occupied Europe in, say 1940, and felt totally at home – he would have seen the contents of his own mind, heart, and maybe even soul writ large on the canvas of the world. And it was all his own doing. He considered himself an artist right up to the end, that fateful honeymoon in the bunker.
If you can find a clearer example of a larger-than-life, much much more than average achievement, I would certainly like to hear of it. Sure, he was a diseased, corrupt, maybe even evil guy and his vision was closer to Bosch than Blake, but that is another point entirely. No matter your opinion of him and his work here on earth, everyone – fan and critic alike – can agree that his was a large accomplishment. How many other people have been able to make a huge swath of the planet over in their own image like that?
If I ever get a chance to explain what I mean by using the word “great,” the assumptions continue to pile up anyway. I am told that I am “playing word games” (which is all speaking is, anyway – “games of truth” in Foucault’s phrase) and purposefully manipulating them, which is just their way of saying that they got all worked up about something, found out they were wrong, and then THAT worked them up even more so it must be my doing. They are embarrassed at being caught having a sudden, extreme emotional reaction based, not on facts, but on assumptions that can’t even really be called “theirs” since they are pretty much unaware of them.
I sometime get chided quite roundly for devising such a trap, since I should “know how people are going to react.” But, you see, this whole thing never started out as a “trap,” but rather grew into one.
One day some years past, I came across a line about Hitler standing there in the bunker with a glass of bubbly and saying that he still considered himself an artist. Since I think people never think that what they are doing is wrong, no matter what they say, this statement helped me to understand some of the horrific puzzle that is his legacy – how could he have done what he did, how did he justify it?
In Mein Kampf, he writes about what was clearly a, if not the, defining moment for him. He was broke, starving, making just enough to get by, kind of, by selling his mediocre postcards on the streets of Vienna, and then was denied entrance to the art academy. Broken-hearted and half mad from stress, he wandered by the Jewish quarter. There he saw those weird (to his eye) people, with their oddball language and their freaky religion and their strange beards and goofy curly locks and they didn’t even use the same damn alphabet, and then he saw a couple of them on their way to the art academy where he had just been rejected, and where they attended classes. His emotions turned into hatred, loathing, and rage. He, a German, could not get into the academy, but these two Jews could! Something was very wrong with this picture, he decided. They must have bought their way in their and look at their fat, greasy…well, we all know what Hitler thought of Jews. Here we see, in his own words, the birth, or acceleration of his anti-Semitism which would eventually flower into the chilling bloom of the Final Solution.
The academy had told him to go be an architect. And, in a manner of speaking, that is just what he did.
So, I was thinking about all this when it struck me what a personality this guy had had, what force of will. He had gone on to architect plans on such a colossal scale that we still talk about it today. Let’s face it, without Hitler, the History Channel would go out of business. And the word that came to my mind was “great.” As in an ambition that was so vast in scope as to successfully eradicate any and all human conscience for others and so powerful it imposed that system of disregard upon and entire nation.
Time passes, and some time shortly thereafter I am chatting with someone about power and history and the like and somewhere in there I said, “I was thinking about what Hitler managed to do and I realized what a great personality he was.” The other person suddenly reacted with such verbal violence that I was taken aback. I tried to use my hands to show what I meant but it was too late, they couldn’t see my hands describing a wide area over the table top, in fact they were no longer looking at me, but instead were focused on some internal image or sensation. I guess this image got projected onto me and I got it with both barrels. Then they stormed off and I sat there with my mouth agape, trying to figure out what the hell had just happened.
After some thought, I guessed that it was some misunderstanding based on what they had thought I’d meant by the word “great.” They thought I was saying that Hitler was “a great guy”! Ha, what a joke! But I never explained what I meant to the other person because I was offended that they would assume I was some closet neo-Nazi with a printing press and a stack of “Root Out the Jewish Rat” pamphlets in my basement, especially with absolutely no evidence whatsoever. And they had heard me speak on the issue of racism and knew that racism is one of the things I cannot tolerate in the slightest in my presence. Yet all that information went out the window, because of their automatic reaction to what they thought a single word I had said meant.
In all the subsequent years, I have met only one person who immediately thought “large” when I said “Hitler was a great man.”
All this begs the question – how many times do we do this, do we jump on an assumed meaning without checking on what was actually intended? Most of the time, if my day to day conversations are any ruler to measure by. I have noticed this tendency in myself and have taken steps to, not distrust instantaneous emotional responses, but to be wary of them.
So the story of Hitler’s rejection in turn becomes the story of my linguistic watchfulness and wariness. “God created the universe because He loves stories” goes one Yiddish proverb and one story contains the seeds for countless others, blown by the winds of human breath through the fields and orchards of time and history, and no one has the monopoly on truth (whatever THAT means).
No comments:
Post a Comment