Freedom of Speech

I thought of Thomas Jefferson, red headed, a gentleman farmer, and a
free thinker, and what he might have to say about free speech and...

Please take the Cacophony out to the Rutabaga
English is a funny language.
If you are a native born speaker, all of its little quirks, tricky grammar, and strange sounding word come second nature as we grew up with it: we heard it every day. Imagine, though, if you had to learn it as a second language, and learn it fast….total immersion, as if you were picked up by a helicopter and dropped into a village in, let’s say, Botswana.

This was the problem that faced the adult students I volunteered to teach English as a second language. I wondered what they thought…how they coped in Wal-Mart.
We are a nation of immigrants. The only “Natives” here bore names like Iroquois, Penobsctot, Lakota, or Hopi: strange, beautiful words. We immigrants brought along words from our own languages, odd words describing things in daily use. These words were used, repeated, spread around and eventually adopted by others as part of the language, words like “rodeo”, “lariat”, or “pita”.

OK, I’m and English Lit major, a fact that makes me lethal in some categories on “Jeopardy”. I read “Beowulf” (not, the movie, the original version from the 1400’s) in the original old English, which is a blend of Celtic, old German, rustic English and archaic French among others. You’ll need footnotes; lots of them, and an old English dictionary.

Take ‘glockenspiel”, a tower with a clock in it, and charming carved and painted figures like immense Hummels that come out of it and dance to a quaint German tune. There’s one in New Ulm, Minnesota, and one in Frankenmuth, Michigan (also the home of fabulous chicken dinners and a spectacular Christmas ornament store). Everybody in Michigan likely knows what a glockenspiel is, as do German speakers, but what of new immigrants, from, say, Viet Nam?

In English such words sound wonderful as they roll off the tongue, musical and rhythmic. A substitute teacher I had in high school, a college professor on sabbatical, told our English class the most beautiful words in the English language to her were….”cellar door.”
Ooooooohhhhhh-kaaayyyyy….!

I do love the sound of words, words like “akimbo”, “trans-mandibular”, “vestibule”, “cacophony”, “balderdash”,” farthingale”, codswallop”, or my personal favorite, “rutabaga”. Even the sound of these words, spoken aloud, adds excitement, interest, or at least perks up the ears. What????? What was that???

While these old words, driven by unfamiliar combination of syllables, can make people look up with quizzical expressions, there is a one syllable word that goes unnoticed these days…except by me.

In old English (not as far back as Chaucer, but back there a way), there was a word that meant to turn over a field to get it ready for planting, to add fertilizer and mix it in the soil. That word is FUCK.

So hideous that it was once bleeped by censors, banned from schools, churches, synagogues and mosques, its use in public would get you arrested .Today it exists as a whole grammar. Oh, don’t pretend you’ve never heard it, Sister Mary Immaculata!!!

F--- you: a verb
Let’s go f------ nuts!: an adverb
Who the f---?: a pronoun
Where the f--- is T-Dawg?: an article

There, apparently, for lack of a “better” word, goes the English language.
The next time you feel compelled to tell somebody “f--- you”! remember the root of the word is farming. Picture a rutabaga growing from their head…