language – Sage Telling Your Story

No, I probably won’t, but I suspect that expression might soon need to be protected under the Endangered Species Act. It surely must be close to extinction. Extremely popular as recently as our younger days, attitudes have changed so much that people rarely say, or even think, these days, you’ll never know … whatever.

Not only people, but computer systems, know more about us than we do ourselves. King Soopers knows what I eat, Argonaut knows what I drink, Amazon knows what I read. A part of us seems to resent and fear this, yet we relentlessly feed the world endless information.

We shout everything from the rooftops. We tell everyone everything, from inane trivia to what would once have been deep dark secrets.

Take Facebook for instance. (Please, take it! I don’t want it.) So many people telling me so much more than I could ever need, or want, to know. Am I supposed to be enthralled by the final success of some friend of a friend’s grandchild’s potty training? Or someone whose name means nothing to me proclaiming that he, without fail, flosses his teeth six times every day? Or the myriad of lunatic responses to this claim from people I don’t know and don’t want to know?

I’d like to say that I hate Facebook, but in all honesty I simply stay away from it so I’m not involved enough to hate it. I do, however, regret the way in which it has created impersonal communication from the personal.

Once upon a time – and not so very long ago – cousin Fred would send a postcard when he visited New York. It would have the same tired photo of the Empire State Building on the front, and some version of wish you were here on the back. Nevertheless, how nice of him, you would say, to think of me. It was personal. It made you feel good.

Now, you look at Fred’s photo-journal on Facebook, detailing his trip to Bangkok. He recounts every event of every day, down to what he ate for dinner. You can imagine his trip much more vividly then you did from the old postcards, but what happened to that warm fuzzy you used to get from them? What happened to the personal touch? What happened to that oh how nice of you to think of me feeling? I haven’t a clue whether he ever gave me a thought or not. He sent this report out into the ether to be read by anyone who cared to do so. I would really get more out of a boring photo and a banal message; at least it was for ME.

A while back I heard via a mutual friend that a good friend of mine had just returned from New Zealand.

‘I didn’t even know she’d gone to New Zealand!’ I wailed.

‘It’s all been on Facebook,’ she replied, looking pitying and puzzled as if I’d just told her I couldn’t read.

A couple of weeks ago, a group of old lesbians Betsy and I belong to were joined for lunch by a few teenagers who shared with us their experiences with being …. um …. and here I shall begin to flounder because I am not too sure what they would consider the politically correct terminology. My apologies to any of you wonderful young people who happen ever to read this, which I think highly unlikely. I think their version of the alphabet soup was LGBTQIA+, the QIA being questioning, intersex, and asexual. What an education these kids are. They talk with assurance about identifying as gender-queer, gender-fluid, non-binary, and half the time I’m not sure even what they’re saying. It’s another language. And here we were, many of us in this room, when we were that age, ignorant of even one word to describe what we knew, at some level, ourselves to be. I recall that huge hurdle, as it appeared at the time, we had to leap in order simply to inform others that we were attracted to those of the same sex, or that we were trapped in the wrong body. Can you even begin to imagine trying to explain to your parents that you are never sure, at any given moment, whether you will feel that you are female or male, or to which sex you may feel attracted. Or that you chose not to identify as any gender. You just are.

For some of them, their preferred pronoun is ‘they’ rather than he or she, which is vaguely possible in the English language but when I try it I find it very confusing.

It was all starting to make my head hurt.

Don’t get me wrong though, I have every admiration for these young people: out to the world, apologizing for nothing, completely proactive on their own behalf. I’m not foolish enough to think it’s easy for them, but none of them is ever going to think, in some secret, inner, self, you’ll never know ….

Everyone knows, and I bet they’re all out, loud and proud, on Facebook.

Perhaps, if I used Facebook, I would be more familiar with the the language of today’s LGBTQIA etc. youth, though I am not ashamed to admit my deplorable ignorance face to face.

Maybe I just have to accept that if I am to keep up with what is happening in the world in general, and with those nearest and dearest, I shall have to resort to Facebook. But I’d still rather receive a postcard.

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty years. We have been married since 2013.

We need some new words; new defining words.

But we’re creating them daily, probably hourly, I can hear you thinking. And that’s fair enough. Just how recently did I adopt, or adapt to, words like server and processor, not to mention bits and bytes and firewalls and apps. But those are all techie terms. I’m talking about sociological terminology which seems to be mired in the mud of decades.

I find it very strange, for instance, that in the English language there is no word for a parent who has lost a child. We dignify the situation of one who has lost both parents with the noun orphan. You lose your spouse, you’re a widow or widower.

But surely the loss of a child is one of the worst things that can happen to a person, and yet our language offers no linguistic easy way out. A wife who has lost her husband can simply say, I’m a widow, and leave it at that if she wants. But a parent must stumble through some agonizing sentence, even if one as clipped as, I lost my only son.

The author Karla Holloway, in an essay on NPR back in 2006, addressed this topic.* She expressed it as needing to ‘name the pain’ in order to assist in healing. I saw what the loss of two children, before I was born, did to my parents in the long-term. I wonder, had there been a single word to express what had happened to them, if they might have found a way to tell me, instead of leaving it to my aunt eventually to clarify for me the presence of that huge elephant never absent from our home.

There is considerable on-line chat (surprise, surprise!) on this topic, and from it I discovered that few languages have such a word. The exceptions are, apparently, the semitic languages. German has an expression I find very touching, it translates literally as ‘orphaned parent’ but still it is not incorporated into a single word. Why is a single word that sums up this horrific situation so rare?

A few ideas are offered on line. Some suggest that it is only recently that infant mortality has dropped sufficiently to make it an unusual situation for a child to pre-decease his/her parents. That does offer a certain uncomfortable logic I suppose, but I don’t see how it translates into the absence of a word. Someone else offered the explanation that, with it having been such a common situation until recent times, and still being sadly frequent in much of the world, having a word for it would be redundant, like, this person, obviously a MAN, says ‘having a word for a man with a penis.’ The insensitivity of this analogy angers me, but then if I am going to be so precious I need to stay away from posts on the internet.

Another, herself a bereaved mother, suggests that it is something too terrible to be put into words. I sympathize with the idea, but we have words for so many still worse things, just take infanticide and genocide for instance, that I can’t go along with that explanation either.

Others believe the absence of the word is due to the broader social insignificance of the event. Becoming an orphan, widow, or widower, changes a person’s status in society, whereas losing a child does not. I find that incredibly hard and cold, and don’t want to believe it. Are we, the majority of the world’s population, so calculating that we only see sorrowful events which change people’s lives in the light of how they might affect us? Now we might have to support that child, give that widow a pension, or marry that widower. But we are not affected by the death of a friend’s child so consider it unimportant? Even at my most cynical, I truly don’t believe that most of us are so uncaring; so unaffected by the sorrows of our friends and neighbors, or even complete strangers.

So I remain simply baffled by the lack of this, what I consider very important, word. Someone on line suggests adopting the word ‘shadow’ because anyone who has lost a child becomes a shadow of his or her former self. Personally, I like it. It certainly describes my own parents. I have so often wished there were some way that I could know what they were like before they lost two children. But I can only extrapolate from the parents I knew, and from old photographs in which they looked so much happier than I ever saw them in my lifetime.

But I don’t expect this or any other word to appear in general use any time soon. Only technology will continue to toss new words at us faster than we can grasp them, and I shall go on struggling with Dvi/Hdmi adapters and why my Thunderbolt port doesn’t work and does it matter? Or maybe I have a vga port and does that matter?

And are these all defining words? Only my computer knows for sure.

* http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5511147

A postscript from Gillian –

After I read this to our group, Ray S. suggested using a new adjective rather than a noun.

Just as we say ‘childless’ of a person or couple without children, we could say ‘childloss’ of those who have suffered that terrible bereavment.

Thank you, Ray, I find that moving and beautiful in it’s simplicity.

Tag: language

You’ll Never Know, by Gillian

About the Author

A Defining Word, by Gillian

About the Author