Tap

Shortly after I formally announced to the Human Resources and Academic Affairs offices my intention to retire at the end of the current academic year, or, more precisely, within an hour and a half—the rumors in the mill a small university churn with a velocity rivaling the speed of elementary particles in the Large Hadron Collider—folks began to drop by my office or stop me between classes to ask what I’d be doing once I had shuffled off this mortal coil of full-time teaching.  Wanting to be witty and avoid the usual responses—yard work, woodworking, some golf, travel, rereading  Middlemarch—I replied, “I’m going to take up tap dancing.”   I had never considered learning tap.  I simply wanted to be clever and get a reaction, and it just popped into my mind.   But here’s the thing: the more I said “I’m going to take up tap dancing,” the more I actually wanted to do it.

How tap dancing managed to buck and wing its way into my mind I don’t know.  Perhaps I had been subliminally conditioned by the animated film Happy Feet, which I had watched with my youngest granddaughter on DVD.  Perhaps a deeply-lodged memory pod burst to the surface, the one of me watching, spellbound, Bill Robinson and Gregory and Maurice Hines and Savion Glover make moves that outraged probability.   Perhaps it was nostalgia: over the years I have, for one reason or another, remembered when I was a kid purchasing taps, nailing them to the heels of my shoes, and taking great satisfaction in “that clinking, clanking sound” as I strode the sidewalks and school hallways.  Or maybe it was the Italian loafers I once purchased at a shoe discounter, shoes whose heels produced a resonant ring on hard surfaces and prodded me into my best version of John Travolta’s Saturday Night Fever strut.  Whatever the reason, and despite a periodically flaring case of sciatica in my right leg, the more I thought about learning to tap dance, the more it seemed a good thing to do, even a necessary thing to do.

At the very least, I found myself wanting to learn the basic moves--the brush and shuffles (side, back, straight) and  flap and wing and heel-step and step-heel—and how to combine them.  I wanted to transform motion to sound, to rhythmic patterns and precisely timed beats.  I wanted to do something that, as Hawthorne says in “The Artist of the Beautiful,” has no purpose but “purposes of grace.”  I wanted to make music with my feet.

Everything has its music, so why not such humble appendages as the feet?   Everything is entuned and melodied; everything has its pitch and timbre, its progression and harmony, its duration and anticipation.  Smiles, tragedies, sport, gardens, well-tuned engines, a well-chosen word, ritual, money, snowstorms, quantum mechanics, the blue endlessness of August afternoons, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, the drumming fingers of a clerk as I write a check, the brush cymballed stir of conversing voices, coves and glades, the systole and diastole of the heart—everything has its music, everything allegro or adagio, everything the grandeur of a symphony or the intimacy of chamber music , everything the improvisational play of jazz, the jagged-edge of blues, the driving 4/4 beat of rock ‘n roll, the more languid ¾ meter of waltz.   And people—they have their music, too.  In his novel Reservation Blues, Sherman Alexie mentions a guitar chord especially for Indians, a chord only they can play.  I think we all, every one of us, has a chord that, when strummed, announces us, sculpts us in sound, reveals us in a form far truer than the faces we keep in a jar by the door.

Tap dancing.  It seemed a good and necessary thing to do.   I wanted to yield myself to it; wanted to cast myself into the sheer exuberance of it; wanted the kinetic physicality of it; the enwinged corporeality of it; the unclamped, unthrottled, uncoiled experience of it.    I wanted its nerve-ending buzz, its blood-coursing jangle, its free-radical turbocharge, its seemingly frictionless movement, its disdain for the heavy weight of gravity.  I’m not sure why.  An age thing, likely, a beat I was not ready to dance to.  What I do know for certain is that, because tap dancing seems all dazzle and spontaneity, all syncopated and joyful noise, all pistoning feet and a radiant smile, all so happily immediate and inadvertent, so time-stoppingly beautifu, we forget the engineering involved, the close and calibrated planning, the hours of sweat-drenched practice, the cell-deep fatigue.  It is art hiding itself.   It is  cool.  And isn’t that, finally and ultimately, what all philosophy, from whatever age and culture, calls us to be?

 Cool.

 

Being Thankful

The other morning I watched the sunlight bayonet through the remaining leaves of the backyard elm, brilliant blades of light, whitely radiant, and somehow, for some reason, I remembered that old monastic phrase, “vacare deo,” emptying oneself for God.  I wanted to empty myself for that light.  I wanted it to pierce me.  I wanted to be a pane of glass through which it passed.  I was thankful for that light.

*     *     *

A student offered this evaluation of a literature class he had taken from me: “I did not like this class.  I had to work too hard.”  I was thankful for that student’s comment.

*     *     *

When the pain comes from the pinched sciatic nerve, when that tasering jolt of hurt spasms in my lumbar and travels, clamoring and saw-tooth-edged, down my right leg to gather around ankle and shin, I am pestled  into writhing, tears-in-the-eyes, moan-out-loud immobility.  Like Job, I am “smote,” want “to let the day perish wherein I was born,” feel the arrows of the Almighty within me,” “speak in anguish,” feel a “burden to myself.”

But when that moment comes when the pain, just a little, barely perceptibly, loosens its hold, when its tide ebbs, when the promise of its surcease, when the redemption from its blowtorching agony, begins, if I can steel myself and hold on, only hold on, I am thankful.

*     *     *

Like some confectionery conciliator, I bring together in sweet concord, in surgared harmony, in candied peace, the rival houses of Mars and Hershey.  No doubt Poe is right: ours “is a world of sweets and sours.” And given that the sours all too often outnumber the sweets, I am thankful, in equal measure, for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and for M&Ms, in all the original’s subsequent mouth-not-hands-melting incarnations, except coconut.

*     *     *

The kitchen faucet, which I installed about 10 years ago, was leaking from beneath the bonnet covering the hot water cartridge.  I had made this fix before—a simple matter of replacing the cartridge O-rings—and, in fact, not two weeks before, I had replaced a spring and rubber seat to stop a persistent drip.  I duly closed the shut-off valves under the sink, removed the bonnet and lock-down nut, and pulled out the cartridge.  I heard a gurgle and a rushing sound.  Suddenly, hot water geysered from the socket.  I rechecked the shut-off valve.  Closed.  I darted to the basement to close the water valve but could not budge it.  Back upstairs and a panicked call to a local plumber who, leaving his lunch behind, arrived ten minutes later, closed the water valve, reinstalled the spring and rubber seat, and replaced the worn O-rings.

To lessen my embarrassment, he assured me that the water valve was indeed very hard to turn, and that the hot water shut-off valve “was shot” and needed replacement.  The fault lay in the mechanism, not the mechanic.  Still, I was thankful for the humiliation.  We need to be abashed periodically, if only as an aileron to prevent ourselves from rolling into a self-regarding spin, if only to feel that abrading scrape of uncertainty that forces us inward, makes us take stock of our often impenetrable self-reflexivity, if only to nudge us away from being a loiterer in the order of things.  I am more thankful, however, for plumbers, especially ones willing to abridge their hard-earned lunch hour and still find the heart to attend to the fraying self-consciousness of a failed DIYer.

*     *     *

My dreams sometimes involve discovering hidden rooms in my house.  Such dreams are sometimes interpreted to mean the dreamer’s potential has yet to be realized, that the complacent, self-containing shell of the dreamer’s life needs to be breached, that some new direction needs to be travelled, some errand into the widlerness undertaken.  Such dreams symbolize our lives calling out for a greater share of us.  I am thankful for these dreams.  They tell me that, even six decades after my initial appearance on the planet, I am unfinished, unfinalized—maybe, even, unfinishable, unfinalizable.

*     *     *

I have a history, but I do not know, will probably never know, the conditions of my probability.  I am a small story, a subplot, perhaps, embedded in a much larger story whose denoeument stands veiled in mystery but whose plot is powered by the gifts of an existence and capacities I had no hand in creating.  They were bestowed.  How, or by whom, I do not know.  As David Bentley Hart notes, “What lies most deeply within us also comes from impossibly far beyond us.”  And though I do not know to whom, to what, for that I am profoundly thankful.

Leaves, and All

Looking out the kitchen window this morning,  I notice that the backyard is carpeted with leaves—carpet bombed, actually, leaf-assaulted, for it was clear the day before.  And I find myself feeling a pleasant anticipation.  I cannot wait to begin raking them up.

I’m not sure why, exactly. 

Sure, there’s the exercise of it, the simplicity of rake and arms, the technology of tool and muscle, briskly applied, haloed in the pale-gold light of an autumn afternoon.  And there is the sight of my shadow, now cast forward, now behind, always connected, and me wondering whimsically, who is the me.  And there is the coming, the unannounced, unaccountable coming, of thoughts, urged perhaps by the rhythm of repetitive motion, re-emerging from the deep recess into which they had silently slipped. And as much as I like watching the tumult of leaves falling, the abandon of it, the mad whirl and drift and tumble of it, the air-skidding intoxicated somersaultedness of it, I relish the neatening raking involves, the restoration, the feeling of satisfaction in looking back when done and seeing the visible change I have made.  But there’s more to it than that.

Each of those leaves is a tongue; my backyard speaks in tongues.  Each of those leaves is a calling card, a keyboard key, a communique of blades and petioles and veins and midribs and waxy cuticles and stipules.  Each of those leaves, scissoring itself at its axil, casting itself adrift, tells how long long enough is.  Each of those leaves is the tree’s self-wounding, an absence in the now making way for a presence to come, a leaving that makes way for an arrival.  Each of those leaves is a sign of transformation, the trees’ summery green chatter turned autumn’s red-yellow-bronze-brown solemn expression turned acrid-woody incense slipstreaming from the thurible of the fire pit.

But more than those things, even, is this: ceasing for a moment, standing still, I will imagine I can feel, slightly but perceptibly, the earth tilting away from the sun, and then I will resume, bending back into the work, lost in the sheer embodiment of it, the feltness of its physical motion, the being in the doing.

Raking the leaves.  It is, for reasons I can enumerate and rank but cannot definitively connect or comprehend, the very thing that, at this particular time, I find it necessary to do.  It is the customized piece for some jigsaw-puzzled need.  What that need is, I cannot with confidence say.  But, then, perhaps not to understand is to understand that which is necessary, that which is true.

 

The Wildflower

 

One morning it was just there.  It hadn’t been there the previous day, as far as I can recall.  But this morning, there it was, as if some nocturnal sorcerer had cast a spell.  A wildflower in my garden.  Bayoneted yellow petals, center-buttoned by a bronze, pixilated bud.   A Golden Ragwort, possibly, or a false sunflower; maybe a thin-leaved sunflower.  The name isn’t important.  Its presence is all that really mattered, the abrupt advent of this alien infiltrator within the landscape I had so mindfully, so vigilantly shaped and managed; this stranger in my familiar landscape; this rebellious bohemian scandalizing the well-mannered guests at my garden party;  this wild intruder, this invader and interloper, this trespasser and marauder, this uncultivated barbarian who breached the gate of my elaborately-planned, assiduously-tended garden. 

And I was perfectly OK with that.

I was OK with it because that wildflower was a shard of sun fixed on a spade-leafed stalk.  I was OK with it because that wildflower was a doubloon of burnished gold strewn by some charitable hand.  I was OK with it because that wildflower was a shout of yellow in the green murmur of my late summer, soon-to-be autumn garden.  I was OK with it because that wildflower reminded me that though we are told a garden was the site of our fall, our loss of innocence, we gained an intellect, a knowledge of true things.  Lucifer fell from heaven.  Our fall was garden-level merely.

Were my garden a mind, that wildflower would be an edict recalling the imagination from parched exile.  Were my garden a heart, that wildflower would be an unsludging odd beat, an arrhymic swashbuckle to disrupt sclerotic drift.  Were my garden a soul, that wildflower would be a spindle entwined with golden yarn to darn its robes.  Were my garden a cathedral, that wildflower would be a steeple, a spired sign of human aspiring. Were my garden an alphabet, that wildflower would be the letter before “A” or after “Z;” were it a sentence, that wildflower would transform it from simple to unparsable compound-complex; were it a word, that wildflower would be an extra syllable, a prefix to undiscipline stale discourse.  But it is a garden after all, a hybrid place, a zone of indistinction, a fist bump between artifice and nature.   The wildflower stands resolutely on the side of nature, a warning of sorts against my becoming too big for my britches, lest in my frontal-cortexed pride I forget that I, too, am a biological being, a rooted creature.

I’d like to think that wildflower chose my garden, considered it a hospitable place, a sanctuary, maybe, to stop and stay a while.  But I know its arrival was purely random, a chance deposit blown by the wind.  Still, as with genetic mutations, randomness is sometimes a strategic procedure.  “There are some enterprises,” Ishmael tells us in Moby Dick, “in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.”   A wayward seed, invisibly riding an invisible current of air, made its arcane way to my garden and took on another form, became a visible presence, an enigma made material, provoking wonder, deepening my familiar garden, reminding me to pay attention to the cryptic beauties that appear all about us, who knows why or how.  That wildflower—an ambassador from the far-off and elsewhere, from the kingdom of mystery, toward which we should travel, must travel, even though it is a kingdom in which, finally, we cannot dwell.

What Mysterious Covenant

 

Looking from the kitchen nook windows into the backyard garden one morning, I saw a cat, a tabby, familiar in the neighborhood, appear from around the trellised, purple-detonating clematis and make its nonchalant way up the flagstone path.  Suddenly, it froze, then slowly swiveled its head toward a corner, dense with ferns and hostas, where the breezeway abuts the garage.  It stared, intently, for perhaps ten seconds, then took several steps toward the corner, each paw deliberately, delicately, placed.  It stopped, raised its nose, and began sniffing.  The another couple of stalking, gingerly-placed steps forward.  More staring, more listening, more sniffing.  Slowly, its ears moved back, its tail lowered, and its body hunched.  And it stared, still, calculating, anticipating, pounce-ready, preparing tooth and claw to incise its red gashed calligraphy. 

And in that moment, all I could wonder was, what must it be like to have every sense, every heart pulse, every muscle fiber, every glandular secretion, every corpuscle in every capillary, every synaptic exchange, come to one compacted point of convergence, one massively dense moment in time, wholly present, wholly singular, wholly coincident with itself. 

And then, as did the poet Alexandre O’Neill, I wondered, of what “obscure force” was the cat “the dwelling place?”  To what wordless “law” was it an “accomplice?”  A William Blakean mood possessed me.  Did He, I wondered, who made whatever small, shivering creature hid amid the ferns and hostas, also make thee?

But obscure forces and laws and purposeful creation suggest the cat acted only within the carapace of instinct, a feline marionette stringed and tugged by its evolutionary past, its actions baked in and thoughtless, habitual and reflexive rather than calculated and purposefully imagined, without consciousness, without self-knowing, without concepts, without the symbols by which, according to Susanne Langer, thought escapes its cinctures “from the immediate stimuli of a physically present world.”

And that made me wonder if the cat really was devoid of an interior life, really was incapable of forethought, memory, emotion, awareness, symbolic imagination.  Namit Arora wonders, too, in her essay “The Inner Lives of Animals,” pointing out that many animal behaviors, in a human context, would suggest the sophistication of symbol use.  Squirrels gather nuts, which could indicate the conception of oncoming winter and the lack of food resources it brings.  Beaver patiently gather construction materials well before actual construction begins.  Magpies recognize themselves in a mirror. Crows create and use tools and make future plans. Elephants mourn their dead.  Prairie dogs use alarm calls that distinguish gun-toting humans from those unarmed. Vervet monkeys have three distinct calls to warn of the approach of eagles, leopards, and a snakes, each call arbitrary, in no way related to any sound made by the three predators. Various animals practice deception by playing dead.  Do animals form concepts, employ symbols, make plans, or are they mired in the shallows immediate sentience only?  How can we know, really?  I’d like to think they do experience themselves phenomenally, experience what it is like to be themselves, to have sensations with qualities that are mentally represented and spur action.  What’s the harm, other than to our pride? We humans dislike extras in our vanity production.

I wondered all this, was led to wonder all this, because I have had experiences of contracted, fully charged, thrumming attention that mirror the cat’s.  I, too, have been seized by experiences—in the classroom, while raking or mowing or woodworking, watching leaves ruffled by a breeze or children at play—where I have fallen deep inside myself, somehow liberated from the sealed circle of the clockface, lulled into a mental cadence that resonated with the rhythm of my actions, the outer and inner confluent, compressed, concentrated into a palpable point of being, of unthought thought, of displaced emplacement, of suffused and radiant aliveness. 

And I could only wonder what bandrity stole me from then and padlocked me in now, what dispossessed me into a mustered self-possession, what deep grammar spoke me.  I wondered, of what obscure force was I the dwelling place, to what unsayable law was I an accomplice, to what sorcerer was I apprenticed, to what intimate economy of exchange, to what inscrutable liturgy and mysterious covenant, to what more than literal truth, had I yielded myself to?

 

 

Greetings and Salutations

Could it be that, although I heard no rushing mighty wind, nor saw anything cloven and fiery, tongues of some sort have descended upon me, enabling me to speak the languages of grump and grouch, in their various dialects of peeve, churl, spleen, crab, and curmudgeon.   What makes me think I’ve been thus linguistically gifted?  The churning irritation I experience with the checkout clerk at the local grocery store, that’s what.

For more than eight months now, Philip has plied the register when I make my customary lunch hour “small shopping” run to the store to restock necessaries prior to the next “big shopping.”  And for more than eight months, as I deposit my basket on the counter, Philip has said the same thing: “How you doing today, sir.”  Always.  The same thing.  Exactly.  For more than eight months, Philip has taken my checks and listened to me discourse on the merits of braeburn apples and sprouted-grain bread and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.  For more than eight months he has heard the produce manager and butcher and assistant manager and manager and other customers address me by name, ask after the family, inquire how my classes are going or the progress I’m making on my latest home-improvement project or whether I’ll take up golf again.  Eight months, and still he remains quarantined behind a practiced smile and the frayed cuff of a phrase: “How you doing today, sir.”  And not just me.  He uses the same greeting for everyone, varying only the last word if the customer is female: “How you doing today, ma’am.”

Perhaps my irritation is shamefully self-absorbed, or trivial, or even wasted, there being so many other things far more irritation-worthy.  Still, it’s real enough, palpable enough, and it’s got me thinking about the way we greet each other in our culture, why is has to be so impoverished, so flat-souled; why anything beyond the brisk and passing “How’s it going” or “How are you” and the bright, upbeat response “Fine” is a breach of decorum so outrageous it’s beyond the reach of the confessional; why, as with Philip’s, our greetings and salutations are so manufactured and   homogenized and rinsed clean of all particularity; why they are Lysoled to sterility, dehydrated of personal significance; why they are such Disneyesque simulacra of inquiry and concern, such gestures of exchange rather than the full-blooded reality of exchange; why we tune ourselves to the frequency of social interaction while engaging in woefully abridged and illusory version of it.  And that’s if we even get a chance to offer a greeting: so often, we encounter others so intent on  some smartphoned attraction or so involved in some cellphoned conversation that a greeting seems a punishably intrusive  breach of privacy.

Now, I am aware that our greeting style is a species of what linguists call “phatic communication,” nonreferential salutation rituals not intended to solicit or convey information but, rather, to meet social expectations.  They are culturally coded interactions, designed to  politely acknowledge another’s presence, nothing more.  They are inessential essentials, impertinently pertinent, unassailably decent and decorous and courteous and civil, to be sure, but so astringently impersonal, so devoid of warmth or at least the flavor of the person who utters/mutters them.  We encounter each other and, like threatened hedgehogs, we roll ourselves into  protective balls.  We meet and greet and quickly retreat. We occupy a shared space without being much occupied about it.  We pledge ourselves to sociality while disavowing our participation in it.  And to go beyond the formulaic response, to breach the ritual requirements, to actually explain how one is doing or how things are going, seemingly makes one a fit subject for police surveillance. 

And yet, I can’t help but wonder how it is that we accept such cultural conscription so compliantly, why we give it such snappy salutes.  Perhaps the problem is that I am so bad at it.  Perhaps I want too much.  I am insatiably curious about others.  I really do want to know how things are going for them, how they see and feel about things.  If we’re going to open a hailing frequency, it ought to be for a moment that feels whole, not an eighth or a sixteenth.  If we pay the price of a greeting, we should get some value in return, not a distanced and distancing “Fine” or “OK”  or a flutey “hello” that hangs in the air a beat or two after the speaker has hastened on. Where is it we hasten to?  What summons us away with such importunity?  Why are we in such desperate haste, Thoreau asked.   More than two millennia ago the Greek philosopher Heraclitus observed, “We share a world when we are awake; each sleeper is in a world of his own.”  Our greetings a sleeptalking, and what they say, what lies coiled implicitly within them, is, “You’re marginal, a matter of peripheral vision, worth no more than a sidelong glance, only to be engaged as ritual requires, an inhabitant of a parallel world that is momentarily contiguous to mine and which I am obliged to acknowledge but only in the most formulaic manner.” 

Every meeting with another, every encounter, is a moment of connection.  Why not make it several moments, just several, and hem them together into an economy of exchange with more solidity than interstellar dust?  It would seem a shame to waste them, especially if the many chroniclers of our waning social connectedness, are correct.  If, as they assert, we yearn for social contact, need it, why is it we become bystanders in the very act of initiating it?  Why not make those encounters more consequential, less frictionless contact; why not make them denser with recognition, less an impassive passing? 

My colleague Brian greets every student that appears at his office door with a hearty, surprised-and-delighted “hi,” that rings down the hall.  My colleague Barbara sweeps students into her office, offers them a chair, slides her computer aside and asks about important past or upcoming events they may have previously mentioned.  Another colleague, coming up behind me as we toiled up two flights of stairs to reach our classrooms, said, “You know, I’m convinced that every summer, in the dead of night, some malign elf enters the building and adds one step to each flight.  It’s the only way I can account for why each year I grow more fatigued climbing these stairs”—a slyly revelatory comment which got us talking about age.

I use a strategy suggested by the poet Jon Cotner’s Spontaneous Society, which is dedicated to making “gentle interventions” that puncture “urban anonymity”: initiating a social exchange by making observations about what others are doing or what is happening around them.  Last week, as I walked through the science and math building, I came upon one of my students looking frazzled before an open organic chemistry book.  “O-Chem has to be the hardest subject of all,” I said.  The student looked up and smiled wryly: “It’s so complicated; I can’t keep it all straight,” she said.  “I know exactly what you mean,” I replied; “I barely passed it when I took it in.  What’s the hardest part for you?” 

It is hard, exceedingly hard, maybe impossible, to make the phatic emphatic, to make greetings occasions, to be fully present in them, to fashion them into instants of authentic inquiry and regard.  The mundane has its own insistent demands.  They muddle our mindfulness, meander it, loosen its tensile grip.  It is hard.  But it is important.

Small talk in small moments in small encounters, fleeting, to be sure; but also, I’d like to think, small transfigurations, the melody of greeting in sync with its music, a momentary bond hijacked from the cubbyholes of fragmentation and isolation. 

Banished Words

As it has every year since 1976, Lake Superior State University has released its latest “List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse, and General Uselessness.”  The annual list, the impish brainchild of LSSU’s Public Relations Office, contains the twelve most nominated words among the thousands sent mostly by folks from the United States and Canada.  The 2012 list of unfriended words includes the following: amazing (the most nominated), baby bump (a close second), shared sacrifice, occupy, blowback, man cave, the new normal, pet parent, win the future, trickeration, ginormous, and thank you in advance. 

Of more interest than the list, however, are the comments that accompany the nominations, for they reveal a rather flinty linguistic conservatism, a curmudgeony sense that words have gone wild, have wrinkled proper discourse beyond the smoothing ministrations of even a steam press.  Like beleaguering lexical Visigoths, the comments suggest, the nominated words have battered down the gate and spread their rampaging, disarray within the sacrosanct wall of the language community.

One large group of comments asserts that overuse, especially by celebrity culture, has led to a degradation or even possible loss of the word’s original meaning and has usurped a simpler and better word.  These commenters see overuse as a kind of lactic acid buildup leading to meaning muscle fatigue.  They appear to assume a meaning checkpoint beyond which a word should not stray, lest it wander into a Claymore-filled semantic field .  Martha Stewart is particularly pilloried for overusing “amazing.”  “Every talk show uses this word at least two times every five minutes,” writes one commenter.  “Hair is not ‘amazing.’  Shoes are not ‘amazing’. . . .  I saw Martha Stewart use the word ‘amazing’ six times in the first five minutes of her television show.”  Writes another, “I blame Martha Stewart because to her, EVERYTHING is amazing.”  Perhaps we now know one reason Hallmark Channel’s cancelling Stewart’s show, due to its paltry average of 225,000 viewers.  And lest we think such criticism is gender exclusive, another commenter notes that “Anderson Cooper used it three times recently in the opening 45 second of his program.” 

Other indictments of celebrity culture include “baby bump” (“I’m tired of a pregnancy being reduced to a celebrity accessory”), “the new normal” (“Often hosts on TV news channels use the phrase shortly before introducing some self-help guru who gives glib advice to the unemployed and other people having financial difficulties”), and “man cave” (Overused by television home design and home buying shows” and “has trickled down to sitcoms and commercials”).  We adore our celebrities.  We despise our celebrities because we despise ourselves for adoring them.  Do we contradict ourselves?  Well, that’s OK; we’re large; we contain multitudes.

Other commenters note that overuse has diluted they take to be the word’s true signification.  For “amazing”: “People use ‘amazing’ for anything that is nice or heartwarming.  In other words, for things that are not amazing.”  “There are any number of adjectives that are far more descriptive.”  “The word which once aptly described the process of birth is now used to describe such trivial things as toast, or the color of a shirt.”  For “baby bump”: “Why can’t we use the old tried-and-true ‘pregnant?’  For “occupy”: “It has been overused and abused even to promote Black Friday shopping.”  For “blowback”: “the word ‘reaction’ would have been more than sufficient.”  For “trickeration”:  “What’s wrong with ‘trick’ or ‘trickery?’”  For “ginormous”: “This word is just a made-up combination of two words.  Either word is sufficient.”

Alas, language changes whether we want it to or not.  They have to: things change, we change, and language changes so we can talk about it all.  As University of Illinois linguist Denis Baron says, “Like all living languages, English is always changing: new words are coined and old ones are modified or discarded, as we scramble to keep up with the human imagination and an ever-changing world.” And that means words broaden and narrow their meanings, or we metaphorically extend words ready at hand.  “Holy Day” became “holiday;” “cool” once referred to a specific style of jazz rather than a general expression of approval.  “Meat” once indicated any kind of food, “deer” any kind of animal, “vulgar” once meant ordinary, “girl” any young person.  We “surf” the Internet, likely using a “mouse” to do so and hoping to experience no “bugs” or “viruses” or “worms.”  Language is irrepressibly mutable, gloriously so, I think.  The only immutable languages are dead languages.

And “trickeration”?   You can find it in the Oxford English Dictionary, which records it as part of African American Vernacular English, first used in 1940.  Langston Hughes’s 1951 Montage of a Dream Deferred contains the lines, "I believe my old lady's pregnant again! Fate must have some kind of trickeration to populate the cullud nation."  And “ginormous?”   It’s included in the 2007 update of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary and was first used in 1948 in a British dictionary of military slang.  And “blowback?”  Sure, it means “reaction,” but that meaning has been extended to include effects and practices in such areas as forensics, jurisprudence, helicopter rotors and smoking marijuana—as well as being used as the title of three books, a film, and a role-playing game.  And “baby bump?”  Could it not be an attempt to make “pregnant,” which has no gradations to denote more or less, a gradable term meaning “just a little bit pregnant”?  We see such an attempt when folks say “very pregnant” to indicate a late, quite noticeable stage.

The fact is that words are always prone to vandalism, to being pilfered from their secure semantic niches and made the possession of others, to serve their own particular purposes.  And amid this linguistic leveraging, it’s unlikely that whatever prototypical meaning a word  has will be lost.  After all, we all know, and will continue to know, what “pregnant” means, even if we do use such phrases as “a pregnant pause,” or “a pregnant question” or describe a thundercloud “pregnant with rain.”  And we will continue to find it amazing.

Many of the comments on the banished twelve centered on their sound, specifically, the disagreeable sensation the word provoked.  Banish “amazing,” one commenter said, “to stop my head from exploding,” while another claimed it made her “teeth grate” and her “hackles rise” and “annoyed” her dog to boot. “Baby bump “makes pregnancy sound like some fun and in-style thing to do.”   “Pet parent” is “cloying” and “capable of raising my blood sugar,” “trickeration” “sounds unintelligent,” “ginormous” “makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck every time I hear it” and “just sounds ridiculous,” “the new normal” fosters “cynicism about the ability of government to improve people’s lives,” and the overuse of “occupy” is not “palatable.”

Linguists will tell us that words are simply strings of sounds, and that those sounds in no way determine the words’ legitimacy.  An opera in Italian is not better than one in German because you dislike the supposedly “harsh,” guttural, deep-in-the-throat sound of German.  Being put off by the soundscape of a language is a matter of taste, a subjective experience of its words, not an objective fact about them.  The bickering such judgments foster leads nowhere, for every person’s experience is, finally, true.  Still, it is interesting that we do more than see and hear words; we feel them.  Language is embodied, not just a baked-in set of abstract principles.  Words have physical impact, a texture, a sensation.  They are visceral, and perhaps this helps explain linguistic conservatism: any change is felt, not simply noted.

But, as Columbia University linguists John McWhorter maintains, language is “disheveled,” logically untidy and convoluted enough to send an efficiency expert scrambling for the exit.  According to McWhorter, language conservatives are textbound; they cleave to the change-resistant written word and view deviations from it as a ginormous trickeration toward language traditions they cherish and, therefore, wish to preserve.  For journalist and author Robert Lane Greene, such “aggrieved conservatism” is blowback against a change of style they feel should go out of style.  But, as Greene notes, “Yesterday’s abomination is today’s rule.”  As the life of any language reveals, language conservatism is a position cannot be long occupied, is thankless in advance, and will not win the future.  Language change is the old normal.  The spoken word always has and always will amble blithely away from its written tradition, with scarcely a backward glance.