Small gestures

Photograph cut out of the El País Sunday magazine supplement.

Maybe it’s the big, structural differences in society that are its warp & weft; but how does someone arriving to a culture for the first time describe them without flat generalization and casual error? Not only is it easier to stick to the ants’-eye view (and what have I been doing here if not that?) – it hews closer to replicating the experience of someone who’s just arrived. The things that disorient and impress you are the little changes, the small gestures.

In Jaén, when a person wants you to come over (I’ve mentioned this, but didn’t do a good job of explaining what it looked like), they tell you with the palm down, facing the floor, & wave the back of their hand back & forth (try it at home), & it looks exactly like they’re shooing you away frantically.

The Andalucíans don’t have an entire vocabulary of gestures & hand movements like the Italians do, but one more comes to mind – sticking your first & pinkie finger out and clenching the rest of your fingers into a fist, (the fingers should be on top of the gesture, so that it looks like a bull’s head); this is calling someone a cuckold (giving them horns), and is a really easy way to start a fight.

There are a collection of small sibilant sounds made with your tongue at the front of your teeth that I hear in Andalucían speech quite a bit. One kind, a short tsk, is used as initial punctuation – you signal you’re about to speak,when you’re talking with a group of people, or you use the noise internally, in the pause between a phrase. There is the louder, longer hiss you make to get somebody’s attention across a room or for emphasis (and it is a sound that is unspeakably rude in the States; I used it once accidentally with my mother in Granada and she told me to stop it).

The open eh sound while you’re thinking of something instead the uh of an English speaker. (A lot of getting an accent right is making the correct noises between the words, pausing in the right places instead of importing English pauses & rhythm.) The noncommittal sound eh-ah (spelling gummed up for English phonetics), which you can make in response to just about anything, somewhere between mm-hm and yeah.

You can think you are starting to read Spanish pretty well and then get completely thrown by text & internet writing, which replaces certain sounds with one-letter equivalents – quiero becomes kiero, guapo is wapo, chico is xico. Laughter is spelled jajaja. The animals all make different noises.

And things as well as language: In Spain the clocks can strike thirteen, just as in Orwell’s 1984 (digital clocks & bus timetables are given in 24 hrs instead of 12). Paper is a different size – the height/width ratio of European paper is the square root of two, and if you put it into an American 8½x11 notebook a little piece sticks out & gets bent & creased. The water faucet marked “C” is for caliente, not cold. The stopsigns, impossibly, still say STOP in white capital letters.

Hofkriesrath, war & peace

“They’re perfect ruffians, especially Dolohov,” said the visitor. “He’s the son of Marya Ivanovna Dolohov, such a worthy woman, you know, but there! Only fancy, the three of them had got hold of a bear somewhere, put it in a carriage with them, and were taking it to some actress’s. The police ran up to the stop them. They took the police officer, tied him back to back to the bear, and dropped the bear into the Moika: the bear swam with the police officer on him. . . . . That’s the intellectual sort of amusement the son of Count Kirvil Vladimirovitch Bezuhov indulges in! And people said he was so well educated and clever. That’s how foreign education turns out.”
- p. 32 

I’m reading War & Peace on a pebbly beach in a town just west of Almería, where the sand is so dark it leaves streaks on your clothing and there are billboards in Arabic. I borrowed it out of an over-developed sense of irony about my beach reads. The beer on tap in the bars here comes from Murcia, and the tapas here come free with your caña as in Granada & Jaén, but in no particular order; you choose what you want from a chalked-up list behind the bar. Night fishermen returning to port in the morning crowd the bus station bar at 6 am. The mountains of the entire province are terraced and covered in flat grey greenhouses, an immensely ugly monotony, beneath which grow a fantastic array of year-round fruits & vegetables; Almería province has been compared to Jaén, if Jaén were on the Mediterranean, the cliffsides along the highway (which reminded me of the PCH) dotted with little ruined watchtowers, a mecca of fruit & not of olives.

The migas I was served here, instead of coming with green peppers & chorizo, were lighter & covered in onions, dark reddish squid, little fried fish & zucchini. Salmorejo is uncommon, & the olives aren’t as good. The little beach bars are just beginning to open up this week & the next, the season beginning. 

The omnipresence of French among aristocratic Russians in War & Peace is interesting to me (the way the language people choose to speak characterizes them, an Austrian general’s obscure pleasure at getting a Russian idiom right when he gives a speech, society conducted bilingually) — as is the way the translation into a third language makes all that French-in-Russian something still more indirect.

On p. 89, Tolstoy invents a formidable German compound word: Hofskriegswurstschappsrath. The footnote: ’Literally, the “sausage-schnapps-war-council” (German); the neologism is a play on the German word Hofkriegsrath (“council of war”).’ Further down, we’re reminded that national stereotypes are always already fixed, undeniable, & as constant as water. See early 19th c. Germans as notorious cowards & military pushovers:

“Bonaparte was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He has splendid soldiers. And he attacked the Germans first too. And any fool can beat the Germans. From the very beginning of the world every  one has beaten the Germans. And they’ve never beaten any one. They only conquer each other. He made his reputation fighting against them.”

Back to Jaén on Monday, and goodbye again to English prose, in translation or no. I’m sunburned on only one side of my body & wearing pistachio-green pants & going to get some tapas.

Popsicle stands

My father comments, via email, in regards to this:

Did I ever tell you this? Pre-school my lunches consisted of either a peanut butter & jelly sandwich or a peanut butter & mayonnaise sandwich. I liked both and would switch for variety. Figured other kids did the same. Got to kindergarten and found out that most other kids did indeed eat peanut butter & jelly sandwiches. But peanut butter & mayonnaise? No one else did that nor did they want to! That was a surprise. Yesterday I read “Oodles” (your March 13 blog) [...] In it you mention “Let’s blow this popsicle stand.” When I was a teen we picked up tongue-in-cheek what we thought was a 1950s colloquialism; “Let’s blow this pop stand”. In family talk your mom and I took to saying “Let’s blow this popsicle stand.” I don’t remember hearing anyone outside of our family say it that way. Interestingly a Google search suggests that “Let’s blow this popsicle stand” is just as common as “Let’s blow this pop stand”. And the usages may go back to the 1920s. So perhaps “Oodles” was not a peanut butter and mayonnaise faux pas after all.

My father’s forgotten that his parents also introduced the grandchildren to the strange, piquant world of the peanut butter & mayonnaise sandwich – we were fed them while we were small as a matter of course. I associate it as much with that white house on Lake Macatawa as I do Vernors ginger ale.

I like the phrase “in family talk,” though right now I lack the words to describe how or why without just restating it.

I went back & followed the google search, and found the same paragraph cut-pasted into a lot of different question pages (many more than I expected – I had no  either that this went beyond our family) dating it to post-1924, citing the year that the San Francisco Chronicle coined the term “Popsicle,” and suggesting it’s just an update of “blow this joint,” with the most common joint being a soda fountain or pop stand.

But the cites are pretty slim on the ground, and it doesn’t explain why my dad would have thought it a pretty 50’s thing to say, or why Midwestern teenagers in the late 60’s were using outdated expressions in high irony – although I suspect that it has something to do with the whole American Graffiti-hoop skirts counterrevolution that followed.

I’ve decided that when I get home I’m doing an ultra-pijo renovation of the pb&m sandwich, with homemade mayonnaise, real peanut butter, raisin bread from the farmer’s market, maybe some kind of garnish or additional condiment. Suggestions for variations are welcome. Pictures promised.

Poppies

In the olive-filled country outside of Jaén, the empty riverbeds are full now from spring rain & snowmelt in the Sierra Máginas. Between the rows of trees, & amidst the other wildflowers – lavender, pale yellow (1) - that cover the sides of the hills, & in the weedfilled ditches on the side of the narrow highway, poppies are growing singly or in little groups, their big blossoms a shock of red, as though somebody had taken a brush & daubed the landscape with the pigment.

In Spain, poppies are amapolas. My American counterpart at the primary school next to the instituto in Bedmar told me in the bus the other day that back home in Puerto Rico amapolas are a different flower entirely – red, still, but with the petals splayed out around a tall, bright yellow stamen. She’d gotten into an argument with a Spanish friend about it.

Conquistadores – this is what I’ve supposed – saw flowers that looked close enough to those they knew, called them by the same name. I’d read this somewhere (a practice in English, too, I believe. Someone more learned than I will have to confirm other examples). Surrounded by a world new in entirety, bird & bush, you try to find likenesses, maybe especially at first – surely God in his wisdom only created so many plants, only so many animals survived the Flood.

Two contradictory, yet complementary linguistic practices: You give old names to new things.  (There are many Jaéns in South America, in the Eastern U.S. many English villages.) But at the same time, you find yourself unable to name everything, there aren’t old words enough, & you have to beg & borrow words from the people you are displacing or enslaving or ammalgamating (2), create a new language entire (3).

I’m thinking about this on the bus, falling asleep between the pueblos with my head against the window. Poppies – amapolas - on the roadside, slipping by.

-

1. (For as much as I write about plants, seasonal fruits, the countryside, I’d be a much better & more specific writer if I had a background in botany or farming – as it is, I’m reduced to vague descriptions of colors – no names, no details. The empty aesthetic of the gaze.)

2. (Who is the “you” in the sentence above? I found it slipping as I wrote, trying to account not just for death & depopulation but for mestizo & creole, appropriation, assimilation, mutual recognizance. The “you” itself changes – not just the language, but the people speaking it.)

3. (Isn’t this notion of a new language necessary to confront the endless American landscape a constant feature of American [both Americas] & letters? Whitman, say.)

Oodles

A little while back, I was made happy when a friend sent me a note signed, Miss you oodles.

Speak international lingua franca English long enough, and you begin to strip eccentricity & unusual construction from your speech. You learn to avoid folk sayings, dialect, obscure words, americanisms; the accent alone is hard enough for people to understand. Nobody but you cares about the difference between a picture hung & a man hanged, or that the collective noun for larks is an exaltation, for apes a shrewdness.

You lose too the semiprivate language we all develop with friends and family. I can’t remember the last time I said, Let’s blow this popsicle stand or See you later, alligator.

And so it becomes a rare kind of pleasure, finally, to speak or to hear or to read interesting English. Oodles — you smile. You’d forgotten you even knew the word at all.

“But what,” asks the Polish university student* at the high school, “does it mean?”

This is where things get tricky.

*(European students studying English philology at the University of Jaén through the Erasmus grant are offered three month stints, with shorter hours & reduced pay, doing essentially the same thing I’m doing: assisting in English classes, or tutoring bilingual subject teachers.)

One of the habits you also end up having, aside from avoiding nonstandard language, aside from learning to say sofa instead of couch, sweets rather than candy, chemist’s not pharmacy, is learning to think in terms of rules for usage – particularly with regards to words that are basically synonyms.

So what does it mean? I shrug. “Lots,” I say. But, of course, it doesn’t mean lots. Not quite. And why is it so funny? Oodles. It just sounds funny.

(As a native speaker, you are alone in this – in thinking words have this natural essence. And words that second language speakers like the sound of can be completely mundane or unremarkable to native speakers. A few weeks later, she & I will talk about an English-Spanish translation class she is taking, & she will tell me she’s frustrated – translating Spanish into Polish, she can tell when something is clumsy, or off – the taste of it. But even though she’s fluent in English, she still can’t tell just by the taste of a sentence if it’s right or not.)

So what is the rule for oodles? It means lots – it’s a collective noun, rarely used, a little quaint, used for humorous effect. Oodles of what? You can’t use it for just anything.

Sitting there, at the brasero in the teacher’s lounge, early afternoon – I’m stumped. Oodles of noodles. Of course. Nonce word, comes from noodles. Collective noun, used to describe . . . any noodle-y mass. Miss you . . . Or abstractions? Emotions? Hate you oodles. Impossible.

Is the difference countable/uncountable?, I’m asked. No – can’t be that. Noodles is uncountable, but so is, I don’t know, coal. And you just can’t say oodles of coal.

“Sounds right.” This is not a way to teach usage. And how many ways do we use oodles, anyway? It sounds strange no matter what word you add. The repetition alone begins to confuse me. Maybe it’s used more as a response? “Do you have any such-and-such?” “Yes, oodles of it.” There are no English dictionaries in the school – just English-Spanish references. None of them have the word “oodles.” We have no appeal to authority.

Oodles. It can’t be paired with serious things, except to deliberately undercut them. Emotions, yes, but positive ones. Silly things. In the end, I throw up my hands. Oodles. Nonce-word, from noodles. Means “lots.” Rarely used. Practically useless for a non-native speaker. An unusual word, but not anachronistic – just rare. (Spellcheck recognizes it.) Made me smile.

How odd, that there can be a word that any native speaker would recognize – not an obscure word, not difficult to understand, just rarely used – that, by virtue of being unteachable, without utility, uncommon, almost no non-native speaker would have ever heard or know to recognize. What a curiously unbridgeable gap.

I think of all the things that I will never know in Spanish.

A few weeks later, I realize another reason why I liked the note so much. Oodles, usually a collective noun, has been repurposed here as an adverb – How do I miss you? Oodles.

Words bent out of shape, plucked from obscurity & rearranged, parts of speech changed, nouns verbed – all of the things that you are taught makes good writing, that you enjoy reading. All of the things you don’t teach as a foreign language, things to be avoided, things that add nothing but unnecessary confusion, that do not serve tourism, nor the hospitality industry, nor international communications. Miss you oodles.