In Love With Lorum Ipsum

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit… So begins Lorum Ipsum. Long used by graphic designers, the text that constitutes Lorum Ipsum, originally a section of a book by Cicero, serves as filler in sample layouts or web pages. By varying in word and paragraph length, the text is much more useful in creating templates and designs than repeating "place text here" 500 times. For more on the history of Lorum Ipsum and to generate your own dummy text (you know you want to), please see www.lipsum.com.

I do design work, but that's not why I'm writing about this Latin today. What surprises me is that I love reading Lorum Ipsum. I use reading liberally here, since I don’t comprehend a word, but that doesn’t stop me from having a go. When I come across it—and this actually does happen from time to time in my line of work—I stop what I’m doing, take a few minutes, and read this text that I don’t understand.

I love the sound of the words as I pronounce them in my head, those fluent vowels and tweaked combinations of consonants in words that are vaguely familiar. I love the variety of sentence length; early on we get the two-word sentence “Nullam posuere.” Is this a command of some kind, or some kind of slang? In between two longer sentences, it’s lovely in its brevity. I mostly love the paradox of the text—so random by its intent, but so intentional on the page that seeing it filled later with English seems unfitting. Et harum quidem rerum facilis est et expedita distinctio, as they say.

I take the time when I have the time to soak in the words because my mind reacts with the satisfaction of comprehension, even if I can’t tell you what I’m comprehending. Is this so hard to imagine? Language is the one piece that separates us from the rest of what lives, the one thing we’ve got that no other being has. Anthropologists tell us that humans are almost identical physically speaking—it’s the extremely tiny remainder of chromosomal patterns that distinguishes how we look. I have to believe that language works with the same ratios, its purpose and intent almost 100% the same, despite coming in 6,000 varieties.

Don’t some words speak to you beyond their meaning, or as an extension of their meaning, or possibly in spite of their meaning? This happens in tongues we don't know, but also in our own language. The word woebegone haunts me: its meaning is evident just in how the word looks and sounds. So it goes with joy, and go, and sometimes eye. And I enjoy very much how awkward the word awkward is. These words take me to places my mind will not, on an unintended, unplanned, sub rosan journey.

Other members of the same language call me back home, but I don't lose what I gained. On a recent odyssey I drifted toward tintinnabulation. That’s my ultimate example of a word losing its arbitrary nature and existing on equal terms with its meaning. It’s not a big word, but it takes us on a big orbit, so evident, so lovingly crafted. I remember hearing the sound of bottles being cleaned up in London on New Year’s Day so long ago—thousands of city workers sweeping the broken glass through the streets hours after the city broke in celebration.



Like the Latin that pushed me to ponder that wormhole between language and meaning, tintinnabulation shatters the boredom of my insides in a melodic crash. This word, accessible but mythical, places language in its right place, full of mystery and artistry as it helps me understand my place in history, that place discovered upon its death.

I originally published a version of these words in Some Other Magazine, the online baby of good friend Beth Marois and me. You can still visit this lovely pub in its grave.

Sentences That Melt Us Like Ice Cream on a Tongue

The right sentence hits us like a precise body walking past just when we need it. Speechless, ironically, that's how the perfect utterance leaves us, as if that crystalline grammar triggers some safety catch to prevent us from diminishing the significance with an inferior follow up. (Or for those more spiritually inclined, surely an intense angel wraps our mouths with ethereal duct tape to keep a divine moment so.) We freeze in the mouth; our insides burn.

We are lucky to hear a handful of perfections in our life. There's so many components that go into making something great into something more, something strong enough to make us change our career, or cheat on our husband, or remain in a daze as our subway stop is suddenly behind us, the driver's words about which stop silent to our engaged mind. But why list them, why bother? It's a simple thing to break down what comprises a good sentence, a good body—firm structure, concise message, original form, comfortable context, explosive confidence. But something perfect? If we can see the hydrogen separately from the oxygen in a glass of water, are we better for it?

Among other elements constituting this alchemy, it's the lack of details that create the memorable mystique. We don't understand why that certain phrase said by this specific person in that extant place during this nonce time affects us, but the reason is too individual and secret to warrant an examination. When the combination of structure, inspiration, and allure activates chemicals in our brain that flow so quickly we swear we can feel their movement, shoving our blood from a steady state into a torrent, we've been made, we've been knighted, we have sprung, we blossom, we are on, we are.

So when the Brazilian woman serves me English beer in a Chinese bar, those five or six lines that shaped the course of my life pulse through my now-perfect life. I may never have a beer this important again, but I'm willing to keep trying.

Dead Letters

I envision Ned Maddrell’s last days with fear. I make an image of him—chiefly a craggy face and absurdly bushy white eyebrows that move independent of each other, because don’t all old Anglo men look like that? And a birthmark on his right cheek. Now he is as different as his circumstance.

When he dies, say a month later, the ancient Manx language becomes the extinct Manx language. Not all that many spoke it in the years prior to Mr. Maddrell’s final time—Sage Winvig is said to be the last that could have spoken with him in their tongue—but surely there were some. Once he dies, no one is left to speak it, at least in a frequency that the living can hear. Some will speak it once he's gone, but that doesn't change how life became for Mr. Maddrell, when his tongue became inert.

In between his community and his death, he is a human alone with his language. How incredibly unnatural; we are not wired to possess a language in this way. Marie Smith Jones, Ka'chi Lobo Golden, Tefvic Escenc, Dolly Pentreath, Laura Somersal, Sindick Jimmy, and Red Thunder are, with Mr. Maddrell, among the distinct few: to have a unique voice in a world of broken ears.

Those first days after Ms. Winvig's funeral must be quiet, as the very practical matter of an uninterpreable predicate occurs. With two or more speakers, subjects can act. When the language dies, the subject ceases to be. But the brutal in between, the predicate tells about the subject in a void. The actor is out of work despite a wonderful script, or she has her greatest performance in a barren theater.

I see him in front of me, speaking something organized and real, yet completely unknown; imagine a plant interacting with carbon dioxide as someone walks past thinking about the weather. He looks lost. Does he call to his wife, or Ms. Winvig? Those days must be past—perhaps he calls out to the bartender from his town, or Stephen, the boy who taught him all the bad words, or maybe even the man who stole his wallet decades back. To hear "give me your money" in one's native language must be a joy when no one has been speaking to you in a meaningful way. As the lone speaker, he ceases to be a speaker, and instead curates Manx as an artifact.

But then his time is at a close—how long or short those years of silent speech must have been are difficult for we in a language community to imagine. At the end, we know he celebrates his celebrity. This is not a silent man, but an extant culture, embracing peace, embracing the liberty of a perfect language. Without the possibility of being misunderstand, a flawless communication has resulted. Can you see him now in his joyous isolation: an atheist praying, or your exact likeness driving next to you on the highway as you happen to be looking the other way?

Despite this serenity and power, his speech amputation frightens me. This whole concept is not for any of us that meet on this page. But that's for now. In 1974, long before web logs and days before he dies, Ned Maddrell destroys the basis of our dialog, as he figures out the perfect explanation for the color red in a language no one else knows, and then drops into a long, long sleep.

I used several articles for reference, namely "let them die" by Kenan Malik.

Embark

I need an audience, even though I'm doing this for me. I'm just not built to be meaningful alone, or to project beyond myself, despite my previous convictions on the matter. I wait to write and I don't. I cease to write and I can't. This is good, though: in cyclones my heart is lax, I have recently found. Now, intermittence unsettles stuff within me again. An agony of a good life.

But why here? Meaningful writing has a clear purpose, and I'm not with liberty to idenify why I'm here. I certainly can't, then, give you a satisfaction to why you find yourself moving both eyes left to right and slowly down at a pace of my making. Do you join me to pass seconds between better times, or to find meaning with me? Or is the meaning in the foggy drift, not the destination?

There's room for everyone as we figure this out together.

Here we
are. Let's
go.