On words

I recently heard a story where someone described being made, as a schoolboy, to write a “composition” for discipline. When did we start saying “essay” instead? An essay is a kind of composition, not a synonym for it; the older word held music and painting and argument all in one hand, and somewhere we narrowed our language to a specific kind prose.

“Inshallah” is not “I hope so,” and it is not “maybe.” It is an appeal made with no expectation that what is asked for will arrive, a whole theology folded into one word that the closest English keeps flattening into a hedge. Some words don’t survive the crossing; what arrives on the other side is a tourist’s version of the thought.

“Atypical” is not the bad version of “typical”; it is just a neutral other. But “irrational” is the bad version of “rational”: it has no content of its own, only a negation, with a moral charge smuggled in beneath it. There is no respectable place to stand outside reason, because the language built the only exit as an insult.

We have a word for a thing out of its time (anachronism) and none at all for a thing out of its place. Anatopism, if we coined it. The gap is strange, because displacement in space is at least as common as displacement in time, and arguably it is the condition of the age. A language shows what it has had reason to notice by what it bothered to name.

A name written in one alphabet has no single correct spelling in another. Carry it from Arabic into Latin letters and it splits into a dozen versions (Muhammad, Mohammed, Mohamed), none of them authoritative, because the two scripts disagree about which sounds exist. Transcription is never a copy; it is a translation, and a translation always chooses. A name stays one in its own script. Only in crossing does it shatter, and whichever version a document happens to fix becomes you. The rest are misspellings of yourself.

Nobody has rewound anything in twenty years, and we still say it: rewind the tape, rewind to the part where. The verb outlived the machine that named it; the cassette is gone and its gesture is fossilized in the language, working a spool that no longer turns. Speech is full of these dead technologies still walking around, and most of the time we never notice we are operating a machine that doesn’t exist.