“What is it?” I asked, my mind still on the fair-haired girl.
Armann tapped the tape player on my table and then pointed at the text in the book. He read out:
“Since the Sony Walkman was introduced, no one has been sure whether two of them should be Walkmen or Walkmans.” He looked at me and asked if I had ever considered it.
I shook my head.
Then he carried on: “(The nonsexist alternative), that’s in brackets here,” he added, “(The nonsexist alternative Walkpersons would leave us on the hook, because we would be faced with a choice between Walkpersons and Walkpeople).” He stopped reading out loud but stared at the page as if he was still reading silently. He nodded, looked at me and then at the educated woman, no doubt hoping that she was listening too.
“That’s a question,” he said.
“Yes, it is a question,” I agreed and took the tape out of my Walkman, not to turn it round but just to keep my hands occupied.
Armann took a good sip of red wine before he continued, and as I picked up my glass to keep him company the woman at the window did exactly the same, although she didn’t seem to be aware that we were drinking simultaneously.
“That’s the crux of the matter,” Armann said. “They produce one instrument, for example this one here,” he tapped my player again, “but as soon as they use technology to produce a second player and then number three and so on, they no longer know what to call their invention in the plural. They are faced with a grammatical problem that no instrument has been invented to solve. Of course it is the same dilemma that parents have to cope with when they give birth to twins or triplets. Really they should all have the same name, that is if they are identical and the same sex; they come one after another from the same producer, they are as identical inwardly as two such instruments from Sony and the only thing that differentiates them is—at least superficially—the same thing which differentiates one Sony instrument from another.”
At this point he paused and looked at me over his glasses; he obviously expected me to be keen to find out what it was that differentiated one instrument from another.
“What can that be?” I asked.
“What differentiates identical twins is the treatment they receive, at least how they are treated as children and teenagers; what they are fed, what noises, words and music they hear. In other words: upbringing. I don’t mean just musical upbringing, rather upbringing in general, which I have always thought should be called treatment.”
“Isn’t that too clinical a word?”
“Treatment?” He almost seemed to snort at my comment. “It could well be that it is clinical but I think it is more suitable to express upbringing, at least from a general point of view. Most children are of course not brought up in any way, instead they just undergo some sort of treatment from their parents. Naturally, the treatment varies, but quite a few of them simply just get such rough treatment that they will never be anything else but children. I know about that.”
He paused again and in the meantime I imagined that something had gone wrong in his upbringing, something that he realized had had an effect on him as an adult. Then he carried on:
“But whatever happened; if you had an identical twin brother, which I doubt you have, then he should really be called . . .?”
It took me a few seconds to realize that I was being asked a question.
“Emil,” I said. Just as I had expected, he didn’t remember my name.
“Emil. Yes, that’s as good a name as any. Emil Jonsson.”
“Emil Halldorsson,” I corrected him. “Emil S. Halldorsson.”
“You know who Emil Jonsson was, don’t you?”
“Can’t say I do,” I answered.
“It can be useful to know about famous people who share your name,” he said and sat up straight in his seat. “Emil Jonsson is not the worst namesake one could think of, I am quite sure of that.”
“I don’t think I have ever heard him mentioned,” I said, and it occurred to me to mention my namesake in the Swedish Smålands, but I changed my mind.
“But perhaps you are no better off knowing about someone who bore your name in the past,” Armann carried on. “Least of all if he is dead.”
For a moment I wondered whether my namesake, whom I had thought of mentioning, was still alive or not, and whether characters in stories grew old in the same way as, for example, their authors.
“But you aren’t a twin, are you?” Armann asked. He smiled and waited for my answer, as if he wanted to make sure that I had come into this world alone, was one of a kind and so on.
I said I wasn’t.
“Consider yourself lucky,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Not to be a twin.”
This last comment made me think that he was hinting at his own personal experience of being a twin (could he even be an identical twin?), and yet it was unthinkable that there could be another version of such a man.
“Then it mentions slightly further on,” he went on and turned over the page of the book. “It states here: ‘Fearing that their trademark, if converted to a noun, may become as generic as aspirin or kleenex, they,’ that is Sony, of course, ‘sidestep the grammatical issues by insisting upon Walkman Personal Stereos.’ In other words they avoid the issue by removing the grammar from the name of the instrument. Or the name of the technology, to be more exact.”
“Is that so?” I said. “The company directors have started controlling how we talk?”
“There is no question about it,” Armann answered, clearly very happy that I showed interest in the subject. “They cut out the grammar in the name of their product because they don’t have a good enough grasp of language. One who knows that he is in the wrong naturally tries to convince everyone else that he is in the right; that is usually the way that information is passed on from man to man. They can produce an instrument that enables you to enjoy your favorite songs at thirty thousand feet above sea-level but when it comes to giving this remarkable instrument a name, they haven’t the ability to name more than a single copy; all the other copies are left in some problematic limbo. People all over the world who own the instruments are totally helpless because they don’t know how to name them when someone asks. But there is also the other possibility: that each copy is different.”
He fell silent at this point, as if he was giving me the chance to say something. Then he asked for my opinion.
“On what?” I asked.
“Whether each copy could be different?”
“That’s a question,” I said, and I realized as soon as I had said it that I had answered with this phrase before. It looked as if I had only one response on hand in reply to what the linguist was telling me and that answer had to include the word question.
“But
