the latter would “cycle” to a “home” for a “dinner” of “greens” and a “sweet.” Mitford elaborated on Ross’s findings, playing expert witness to his court reporter. “Silence is the only possible U-response to many embarrassing modern situations: the ejaculation of ‘cheers’ before drinking, for example, or ‘it was so nice seeing you,’ after saying goodbye,” she wrote. “In silence, too, one must endure the use of the Christian name by comparative strangers and the horror of being introduced by Christian name and surname without any prefix. This unspeakable usage sometimes occurs in letters—Dear XX—which, in silence, are quickly torn up, by me.”
Wilmington had its own codes. Visitors were “company,” a two-syllable word. Coupon was pronounced “cuepon”; the emphases in umbrella and ambulance were “UM-brella” and “ambu-LANCE.” You “mowed the lawn,” but you didn’t “cut the grass.” On a summer night, it was inadmissible to say you were going to “barbecue” or “grill”; you had to “cook out.” A noun rather than a verb, barbecue was reserved for what most people would call—I can hardly write it now—“pulled pork.”
Scientists say that in order to speak a language like a native, you must learn it before puberty. Henry Kissinger, who arrived in America from Bavaria, via London, at the age of fifteen, has an accent that a reporter once described as “as thick as potato chowder.” His brother, two years younger, sounds like apple pie. My brother and I had spoken Southern from an early age. But as the offspring of Yankees, our peers reminded us, we existed on a sort of probation, forever obliged to prove ourselves in their ears. We endured as much teasing for the way our mother pronounced tournament—the first syllable rhyming with “whore,” not “her”—as we did when my father, in a cowboy phase, broke both arms riding an Appaloosa, generating speculation during his convalescence as to who had wiped his ass.
BEFORE I WENT TO BED, my father and I would read. A scratch-and-sniff book was one of my favorite portals to sleep. I’d run a fingernail over a blackberry and find myself in a bramble, juice trickling down my chin. Turn a page, and my bedroom was a pizzeria, reeking of oregano and grease.
One night, as we inhaled, an unusual look wafted over my father’s face. He asked me if he could take the book in to work with him the next morning. Sure, I said.
When his car rumbled into the driveway that evening, I flew down the stairs. I was waiting at the door when he came in the house with his jacket creased over his elbow, the sure sign of a win.
That afternoon, he said, he’d tried the case of a client who’d been charged with possession of marijuana. An officer had pulled him over, searched his car, and confiscated several ounces of an herbaceous green substance.
The only weakness in the prosecution’s case was that the officer had failed to send the contraband off to the state crime lab for analysis. When he testified, my father had asked him to identify a sample of the substance.
“It’s marijuana,” the officer said.
“How do you know it’s marijuana?”
“It looks like marijuana, it smells like marijuana. It’s marijuana,” the officer replied.
My father handed him my scratch-’n’-sniff book, open to a page that showed a rose in bloom.
“What does it look like?”
“A rose.”
“What does it smell like?”
“A rose.”
“Is it a rose?”
Juliet swore that a rose by another name would smell equally sweet. My father, by luring the officer into a converse fallacy—if marijuana, then herbaceous and green; herbaceous and green, therefore marijuana—was arguing that a “rose” wasn’t always a rose. Both of them were getting at something about the fallibility of language. The great design flaw of human communication is the discrepancy between things and words.
Proper names, uniquely, work. Each one corresponds to a single object, meaning that if you say “Napoleon Bonaparte Barefoot,” you’re referring to a specific man, not to a set of people who share Napoleon Bonaparte Barefoot’s characteristics. But words are basically memory aids, and if every particular thing had to have a unique name, there would be too many words for us to remember them all. Unless we were to heed Lemuel Gulliver’s proposal—“Since words are only names for things, it would be more convenient for all men to carry about them such things as were necessary to express the particular business they are to discourse on”—a functional language must include words that refer to types of things rather than to each particular manifestation.
General terms are unbalanced equations. As abstractions, their correspondence is one to many, rather than one to one. In “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” John Locke explored the dilemma, asking whether ice and water could be separate things, given that an Englishman bred in Jamaica, who had never seen ice, might come to England in the winter, discover a solid mass in his sink, and call it “hardened water.” Would this substance be a new species to him, Locke asked, different from the water that he already knew? Locke said no, concluding that “our distinct species are nothing but distinct complex ideas, with distinct names annexed to them.”
Three centuries later, the linguist William Labov took up the problem of referential indeterminacy, devising a series of experiments in which he showed a group of English speakers line drawings of a series of cuplike objects. Labov’s experiment revealed that even among speakers of the same language, there was little agreement about what constituted a “cup” versus a “bowl,” a “mug,” or a “vase.” No one could say at exactly what point one verged into the other. Furthermore, the subjects’ sense of what to call the objects relied heavily on the situation: while a vessel of flowers might be called a “vase,” the same container, filled with coffee, was almost unanimously considered a “cup.”
Labov was building on a distinction that Locke had made between “real essences” (the properties that make it the thing that it is) and “nominal essences” (the name that we use, as a memory aid, to stand in for our conception of it). “The nominal essence of gold is that complex idea the word gold stands for, let it be, for instance, a body yellow, of a certain weight, malleable, fusible, and fixed,” Locke wrote. “But the real essence is the constitution of the insensible parts of that body, on which those qualities and all the other properties of gold depend. How far these two are different, though they are both called essence, is obvious at first sight to discover.” Replace gold with marijuana—a body green and herbaceous—and my father’s point becomes clear: a rose is only a “rose,” and “marijuana” is only marijuana, in a linguistically prelapsarian world, when the properties of a thing and its name are perfectly equivalent.
After his accident, my father remained in the hospital for weeks. Thanksgiving came and went—familiar food at a strange table. I was seven, child enough to be entertained by a makeshift toy: a plastic tray filled with uncooked rice. When he was well enough, I went to visit. A vague but specific imprint persists. A right turn from a corridor. Plate glass and a prone silhouette.
Terror came as an estrangement of the senses: a blindfold, a nose clip, a mitten, a gag. I remember only what I heard.
“Do you know who this is?” the nurse said, with the bored cheer of the rhetorical questioner.
He didn’t, though. My father looked at me and committed a category error. Instead of my name, he said, “Bluebird.”
TWO SUMMERS
