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philthecowThis entry is dedicated to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bkoolkido, also known as "Janet the Magnificent," who thinks that I'm a good storyteller primarily on the basis of one long tangent about little girls on trains and gifts and cookies and mice and Marx. She is also one of the smartest people I know and is going to a wonderful college.
This is my long University of Chicago essay, which is supposed to be about your personal language. Now that I am finally done with all of my college essays and all of my applications are sent out, I can officially declare it my favorite. It amuses me vastly because I'm writing about the style in which I speak in the style in which I speak. (Specifically, I show off my insistence on drawing connections between seemingly disparate thoughts without actually mentioning it explicitly.)
If you've actually met me, and have noticed any other peculiarities about the way in which I speak, please do point them out so that someday I will be able to make an exhaustive list.
“Can I sit in your lap, Erin? Sit in a pal’s lap? Sounds like pal’s slap, but it’s not? Heh, but they’re both palindromes, heh heh, maybe pal’s lap is a palindromedary because it only has one hump but pal’s slap is a palinbactrian because it has two. Because Dromedary camels have one hump but Bactrian camels have two. Because D has one hump and B has two, when they’re written in uppercase, anyway…”
Erin stares at me as if she expects me to apologize for my excessive wordplay, but I am still busy thinking. “God, I hate that! Because B comes first in the alphabet and D comes second, so you’d think B would be the letter with one hump, but no, it’s reversed! That upsets me so much, when alphabetization doesn’t work out the way it should.”
“So do you still want to sit in my lap?” Erin looks upset.
“Yes. Thank you.” And I sit down, grateful for the opportunity. Sometimes I think that exams are the only reason that my friends keep me around. I know that six weeks later, Erin will approach me sheepishly in need of a mnemonic for camel humps. I will give her seven options, she will trot off happily, and I will continue to mutter angrily that I just can’t stand it when alphabetization doesn’t work out the way it should.
I have a slight obsession with alphabetization. My librarian says that this will be useful when (I say if, but he insists when) I become a librarian. I certainly hope it becomes useful someday because it’s only gotten me into trouble so far.
There was one six-month period in the middle of the school year in which a huge number of teachers died, resigned, retired, or were arrested. We were all very sober and serious about this unfortunate chain of events, but one day I had an epiphany “The teachers have been disappearing in alphabetical order!” My friends sighed and asked me what I was talking about, and I explained that there had been an A and then an early B and then a later B and then two Cs at once.
They knew I was correct, but the full implications of the pattern must not yet have hit them, as all they could muster by way of response was “Lauren, that’s awfully morbid of you.”
But for me the beauty of the pattern trumped all, and I went on and on about how it was a linguistic coincidence of the most marvelous sort, how it might be awful to think about but there was a beauty to it, by God! And, I added in hushed undertones, if these midyear disappearances have to continue, I hope they will do so in the same vein, just for appearances’ sake.
They frowned, as they had rather hoped that the next teacher to go would be a certain Ms. W.
Two months later we witnessed the departure of Mr. D.
I flapped my arms and cried “So there!” when my friends told me about it. Due to my inability to say “So,” without following it with “…so, so I will show you another good thing that I know,” an unfortunate habit that can be blamed on Dr. Seuss, this did not come out quite as emphatically as I had hoped. My gestures, however, are always emphatic enough for three. As my friend Rob loves to tell me, “If the history thing doesn’t work out, you can always be an air traffic controller.”
Unfortunately, air traffic controllers (and sign language interpreters, another possible career) have to follow an official set of signs. When I interlock my fingers and twirl my thumbs around each other, it always means that I am bored, but other gestures of mine are so idiosyncratic that they vary from sentence to sentence. Once I was trying to convey to Erin how very much I wanted an orange. “I want an orange,” I explained, holding my hand in a fist, “a nice, juicy, plump orange.”
She looked in her basket of fruit. “I only have apples and bananas,” she said.
“I’ll have an apple,” I sighed, “but how much I wanted an orange!” And at “orange,” I held up my palm and wiggled my fingers back and forth.
“Did you just use two different gestures for the same word?”
“Yes. But the second orange was ephemeral. What words rhyme with ephemeral?”
Erin rolls her eyes, but she is secretly thankful that I am not on a quest to find a word that rhymes with orange. Of course, in my case finding a rhyme might not be that difficult. All I have to do is stumble into one of my famous mispronunciations.
When people first meet me, they’re frequently surprised that somebody so erudite could be so awful at pronouncing things. What they don’t realize is that my reading is a part of the problem. I read so many books when I was little and had so little human interaction that I invented my own pronunciations; by the time anybody bothered to correct me, my mispronunciations were already too ingrained for easy change.
Once I was trying to explain an online theosaurus to one of my teachers.
“You mean like a dinosaur?” he said.
“No, like a theosaurus.”
“Exactly. A dinosaur?”
“No!” I pulled the website up on his computer. “See? A theosaurus.”
“You mean a thesaurus.”
“Oh…” I was resolved not to make that mistake again, but the next week I was talking to the same teacher and criticizing his small vocabulary of insults. “You should get a theosaurus.”
“You mean, call you exotic instead of weird? Esoteric? Peculiar? Obscure?”
“Obscure will do. But you should still get a theosaurus.”
“Not until you get yourself a pronunciation guide,” he smirks.
“I… I just did that again!” And I bury my face in my hands, another trademark gesture.
My family especially likes to joke that although I’m a likely candidate for some of the top schools in the country, there’s no way that I could ever get into Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. “You’d go in for an interview,” they hoot, “and he’d say, ‘Why do you want to go to Rutgers?’ and you’d say ‘I want to go to Rutjers…’ and that would be it. They’d put your file in the shredder. It wouldn’t matter if you had discovered the cure for cancer if you couldn’t pronounce the school’s name.” (The University of Chicago, on the other hand, I have down.)
And so sometimes when I first introduce a foreign phrase into conversation, people think that I’m just mangling English in new and original ways. When I first told my boyfriend that I found his arms “gezellig,” he tried to think of a suitable response for several moments.
“Are you trying to say cozy?” he finally said, “I mean, I didn’t think you could mispronounce cozy that badly, but it does have the z sound.”
“Cozy in Dutch,” I giggled, “also home-like and comfortably warm and welcoming. It’s the quintessential Dutch word for which there is no translation. They’re very proud of it.”
I grew up as an expatriate in Europe, and as a result, Dutch, British, and Spanish phrases pepper my conversation. My family insists on calling the room by the kitchen where we put our shoes the “bijkeuken,” an attractive Dutch alternative to the American “mud room,” and I use the Spanish “Vamonos!” instead of the American “Let’s go!” because I find the rhythm much more conducive to actually getting up and going.
And yet despite the exuberantly rambling tangents, the gestures that could start a tornado in Texas, and the inability to use proper English, strangers often tell me that I sound British. This is the ultimate testament to how deeply engrained my personal language has become—it may be silly, strange, and even incorrect, but I bother to make it proper, to enunciate it precisely, to present it so confidently that you might begin to wonder why the whole world doesn’t speak the way that I do.
And so I assure the strangers that while I am not British, “ I am most assuredly my own Empire. But not the Mayan Empire, as alike as they may sound. Did you know that the word cigar comes from the Mayan language? Isn’t that a funny…” And with that, the entire cycle starts over again.
Twenty-seven days until I see Priyanko!
bkoolkido, also known as "Janet the Magnificent," who thinks that I'm a good storyteller primarily on the basis of one long tangent about little girls on trains and gifts and cookies and mice and Marx. She is also one of the smartest people I know and is going to a wonderful college.This is my long University of Chicago essay, which is supposed to be about your personal language. Now that I am finally done with all of my college essays and all of my applications are sent out, I can officially declare it my favorite. It amuses me vastly because I'm writing about the style in which I speak in the style in which I speak. (Specifically, I show off my insistence on drawing connections between seemingly disparate thoughts without actually mentioning it explicitly.)
If you've actually met me, and have noticed any other peculiarities about the way in which I speak, please do point them out so that someday I will be able to make an exhaustive list.
“Can I sit in your lap, Erin? Sit in a pal’s lap? Sounds like pal’s slap, but it’s not? Heh, but they’re both palindromes, heh heh, maybe pal’s lap is a palindromedary because it only has one hump but pal’s slap is a palinbactrian because it has two. Because Dromedary camels have one hump but Bactrian camels have two. Because D has one hump and B has two, when they’re written in uppercase, anyway…”
Erin stares at me as if she expects me to apologize for my excessive wordplay, but I am still busy thinking. “God, I hate that! Because B comes first in the alphabet and D comes second, so you’d think B would be the letter with one hump, but no, it’s reversed! That upsets me so much, when alphabetization doesn’t work out the way it should.”
“So do you still want to sit in my lap?” Erin looks upset.
“Yes. Thank you.” And I sit down, grateful for the opportunity. Sometimes I think that exams are the only reason that my friends keep me around. I know that six weeks later, Erin will approach me sheepishly in need of a mnemonic for camel humps. I will give her seven options, she will trot off happily, and I will continue to mutter angrily that I just can’t stand it when alphabetization doesn’t work out the way it should.
I have a slight obsession with alphabetization. My librarian says that this will be useful when (I say if, but he insists when) I become a librarian. I certainly hope it becomes useful someday because it’s only gotten me into trouble so far.
There was one six-month period in the middle of the school year in which a huge number of teachers died, resigned, retired, or were arrested. We were all very sober and serious about this unfortunate chain of events, but one day I had an epiphany “The teachers have been disappearing in alphabetical order!” My friends sighed and asked me what I was talking about, and I explained that there had been an A and then an early B and then a later B and then two Cs at once.
They knew I was correct, but the full implications of the pattern must not yet have hit them, as all they could muster by way of response was “Lauren, that’s awfully morbid of you.”
But for me the beauty of the pattern trumped all, and I went on and on about how it was a linguistic coincidence of the most marvelous sort, how it might be awful to think about but there was a beauty to it, by God! And, I added in hushed undertones, if these midyear disappearances have to continue, I hope they will do so in the same vein, just for appearances’ sake.
They frowned, as they had rather hoped that the next teacher to go would be a certain Ms. W.
Two months later we witnessed the departure of Mr. D.
I flapped my arms and cried “So there!” when my friends told me about it. Due to my inability to say “So,” without following it with “…so, so I will show you another good thing that I know,” an unfortunate habit that can be blamed on Dr. Seuss, this did not come out quite as emphatically as I had hoped. My gestures, however, are always emphatic enough for three. As my friend Rob loves to tell me, “If the history thing doesn’t work out, you can always be an air traffic controller.”
Unfortunately, air traffic controllers (and sign language interpreters, another possible career) have to follow an official set of signs. When I interlock my fingers and twirl my thumbs around each other, it always means that I am bored, but other gestures of mine are so idiosyncratic that they vary from sentence to sentence. Once I was trying to convey to Erin how very much I wanted an orange. “I want an orange,” I explained, holding my hand in a fist, “a nice, juicy, plump orange.”
She looked in her basket of fruit. “I only have apples and bananas,” she said.
“I’ll have an apple,” I sighed, “but how much I wanted an orange!” And at “orange,” I held up my palm and wiggled my fingers back and forth.
“Did you just use two different gestures for the same word?”
“Yes. But the second orange was ephemeral. What words rhyme with ephemeral?”
Erin rolls her eyes, but she is secretly thankful that I am not on a quest to find a word that rhymes with orange. Of course, in my case finding a rhyme might not be that difficult. All I have to do is stumble into one of my famous mispronunciations.
When people first meet me, they’re frequently surprised that somebody so erudite could be so awful at pronouncing things. What they don’t realize is that my reading is a part of the problem. I read so many books when I was little and had so little human interaction that I invented my own pronunciations; by the time anybody bothered to correct me, my mispronunciations were already too ingrained for easy change.
Once I was trying to explain an online theosaurus to one of my teachers.
“You mean like a dinosaur?” he said.
“No, like a theosaurus.”
“Exactly. A dinosaur?”
“No!” I pulled the website up on his computer. “See? A theosaurus.”
“You mean a thesaurus.”
“Oh…” I was resolved not to make that mistake again, but the next week I was talking to the same teacher and criticizing his small vocabulary of insults. “You should get a theosaurus.”
“You mean, call you exotic instead of weird? Esoteric? Peculiar? Obscure?”
“Obscure will do. But you should still get a theosaurus.”
“Not until you get yourself a pronunciation guide,” he smirks.
“I… I just did that again!” And I bury my face in my hands, another trademark gesture.
My family especially likes to joke that although I’m a likely candidate for some of the top schools in the country, there’s no way that I could ever get into Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. “You’d go in for an interview,” they hoot, “and he’d say, ‘Why do you want to go to Rutgers?’ and you’d say ‘I want to go to Rutjers…’ and that would be it. They’d put your file in the shredder. It wouldn’t matter if you had discovered the cure for cancer if you couldn’t pronounce the school’s name.” (The University of Chicago, on the other hand, I have down.)
And so sometimes when I first introduce a foreign phrase into conversation, people think that I’m just mangling English in new and original ways. When I first told my boyfriend that I found his arms “gezellig,” he tried to think of a suitable response for several moments.
“Are you trying to say cozy?” he finally said, “I mean, I didn’t think you could mispronounce cozy that badly, but it does have the z sound.”
“Cozy in Dutch,” I giggled, “also home-like and comfortably warm and welcoming. It’s the quintessential Dutch word for which there is no translation. They’re very proud of it.”
I grew up as an expatriate in Europe, and as a result, Dutch, British, and Spanish phrases pepper my conversation. My family insists on calling the room by the kitchen where we put our shoes the “bijkeuken,” an attractive Dutch alternative to the American “mud room,” and I use the Spanish “Vamonos!” instead of the American “Let’s go!” because I find the rhythm much more conducive to actually getting up and going.
And yet despite the exuberantly rambling tangents, the gestures that could start a tornado in Texas, and the inability to use proper English, strangers often tell me that I sound British. This is the ultimate testament to how deeply engrained my personal language has become—it may be silly, strange, and even incorrect, but I bother to make it proper, to enunciate it precisely, to present it so confidently that you might begin to wonder why the whole world doesn’t speak the way that I do.
And so I assure the strangers that while I am not British, “ I am most assuredly my own Empire. But not the Mayan Empire, as alike as they may sound. Did you know that the word cigar comes from the Mayan language? Isn’t that a funny…” And with that, the entire cycle starts over again.
Twenty-seven days until I see Priyanko!
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no subject
Date: 2004-12-18 05:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-18 08:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-18 06:09 am (UTC)And that's a fabulous essay. I really wish my essays sounded like that. *shrugs* Can't have everything, I suppose.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-18 07:02 pm (UTC)second off (which you can't even really say), i luuuuuuuuuuuurve ur crazy gesturing - it amuses and entertains me to no end.
third off (now i know you can't say that), your mispronunciation of words just adds to your perfect lauren-ness. and your dutch, well, that's just freakin cool.
great girl writes great essay and gets great compliments...WOOT!
Smiles, Jen
no subject
Date: 2004-12-18 07:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-18 11:18 pm (UTC)love your hilarious, stream-of-consciousnessish essay! good luck with applying.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-20 12:42 am (UTC)Thanks for the essay-compliments. *grins* I actually used to mispronounce it "compleements," but no longer.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-19 05:19 am (UTC)So I guess this is just a roundabout way of saying I'm adding you, because if this is any indication of what the rest of you're writing's like I definitely want to read more.
PS-I see that you also list I heart Kant as an interest. I remember seeing a bunch of people running around Dickinson wearing I heart Kant shirts in '02-I gather that was your class?
no subject
Date: 2004-12-20 12:46 am (UTC)Yes, that was my class. John Duberstein's section of Existentialism. What class were you in? Oh, and I like your CTY-related icon. It's awfully shiny.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-20 03:56 am (UTC)I was in music theory and relatively antisocial that summer-no CTY fame for me.
Were you by any chance in the same existentialism class as (formerly) blue-haired Dave?
no subject
Date: 2004-12-20 02:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-20 08:18 pm (UTC)Coincidences like this make me incredibly happy.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-20 08:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-22 02:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-19 05:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-20 11:24 pm (UTC)Yet I realized there was something funny about the words, which I realize in retrospect must have been the fact that I never saw "debree" in print, and never heard "derbis" said out loud.
Needless to say, my classmates were quite confused when I started talking about "flying derbis" in class one day.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-22 10:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-26 07:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-08 03:39 am (UTC)-Mousey (from OD)