Stop! Hesitate and listen!
I had a fascinating conversation at a party this weekend with a linguist (an, of course, cunning linguist) about the unrecoverability of the meaning of words as used in the past. These days policy wonks encounter that problem when fighting over Constitutional originalism or the like... for example, in asking what did "liberty" mean to that document's drafters? Given that historians can point to perhaps a dozen mutually distinct meanings of "liberty" as currently or then-recently used circa 1787, this is an important question. Unfortunately, that wisdom does and forever will remain, unrecoverable. This is, of course, a problem.
The problem gets worse when dealing with "Old English," which the aforementioned linguist maintains isn't English at all. (He is, by the way, a medieval literature scholar too, if that matters). The precise meanings of any word more complicated than "hill" or "tree" cannot ever be discerned, and who is to know whether "tree" didn't carry some tactit freight that the slender documentary evidence cannot reveal? As an example of how alien, how unEnglishlike Old English is, he pointed to the first word of Beowulf. The word is "Hwæt!," meaning "Pay attention! Listen up!" Today, it is meaningless except insofar as it reminds us of our own "what?" and related interjections.
I don't know whether "hwæt" is a cognate or a false cognate of our modern "what," but I do know one thing. That rap guy Li'l John is a canny deployer of anachronism.
Consider. In his productions, Li'l John frequently makes use of the interjection, "What!" At first blush, this and his other trademarks "Yeah!" and "Okay!" (as so ably parodied by Comedy Central's Dave Chapelle), seem to be pure solipsism, nonsensical sounds valuable for their noise and rhythmic utility only. Not so. In truth, every time Li'l John says "What!" he is really saying "hwæt!" in the finest bardic tradition, urging us the listeners to stop and pay attention to the story he has to tell. "Hwæt!" is the hook, demanding our attention. "Okay" and "yeah" are similiarly weighted, not merely noises but coming as they do on the heels of the grab for our attention, they become epistemiological affirmations of the mores of the replendently hedonic life Li'l Jon leads. Not for him, the 9-to-5, the retirement account, and the ten o'clock bedtime, and in the face of this powerful refutation of how most of us structure our lives, we cannot help but feel those lives a little poorer for the comparison.
Seen in this light, Li'l Jon's simple rhymes about women and clubs and skeeting transcend kitch and pop and slip across the transom of meaning into a dialectical relationship with Strunk & White linguistic proscriptivism. "Hwæt!," he says, "pay attention! For we of Atlanta have arrived and are determined to leave our lasting imprint on the culture and folkways of this great land!"
Walking the line between ludic and ludicrous, hysteria and history, metaphysics and mondegreen, Li'l John has ridden our unwitting and slippery relationship with our own unrecoverable linguistic history to the top of the charts, entreating our respectful attention with every "hwæt!" and grunt. Hats off to Li'l John, bard of the moment. In guttural interjections, he speaks for us all.
Please, take a moment to savor the interplay of sense and nonsense, the rich imagery, the complicated rhythms and rhyme scheme, and oh! those kennings!, in the Li'l John & The Eastside Boyz classic, "Get Low:"
3,6,9 damn she's fine give it to me sock it to me 1 mo time
Get low, Get low, Get Low, Get Low, Get Low, Get Low,Get Low
To the window(To the window), to the wall, (to dat wall)
To the sweat drop down my balls (MY BALLS)
To all you bitches crawl (crawl)
To all skeet skeet motherfuckers (motherfucker!) to all skeet skeet got dam (Got dam)
To all skeet skeet motherfuckers (motherfucker!) to all skeet skeet got dam (Got dam)Shorty crunk so fresh so clean
can she fuck that question been harassing me, in the mind
this bitch is fine
I done came to the club about 50-11 times
now can I play with yo panty line
the club owner said I need to calm down
security guard go to sweating me now
nigga drunk then a motherfucker threaten me now
And then more like that, except profoundly unprintable. "Hwæt!," indeed.
on
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§ 4 Comments
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Well, it's not so much that
Well, it's not so much that Old English isn't English at all as it's English only incidentally through geographical accident. Otherwise, it's as "English" as any of the teutonic/nordic languages (and, not being a linguist actually!, cavaet: I might be fuckin some of this up).
Studying Old English as the wellspring of 'our' language and literature reinforces outdated (if only they were outdated!) teleological history, as if Beowulf leads inevitably, say, to Lil' John. I would think students of Old English need to be students, not of Middle English (which is much more our English), but of the other old Germanic and Scandanavian languages. That is, they need to make quasi-synchronic rather than diachronic connections in their scholarship, always being wary of the greatest sin of analysis, prolepsis. The Old English wyrd leads to our "weird" only in the way that monkeys lead to people: by adaptation and accident. The danger in defamiliarizing Old English as English is that the concept of it being "our language" remains, and what's substituted for the specificity of an English that might go on to include the various Englishes spoken all over world is, instead, a pan-Teutonic consciousness, whose results we remember were quite oogy.
Oh, John, I remember the book I recommended: Christopher Dawson's Mission to Asia. It's a hoot.
I smell what you're cooking.
I smell what you're cooking. I would be much happier if historians, especially historians of culture, would treat their subjects as the products of circumstance, convenience, and often naked accident rather than as deterministic narratives of class, race, or identity. Military history got over that years ago, but the most po-mo of the po-mos seem to circle and circle teleology without ever committing or giving it up.
Deterministic narratives are
Deterministic narratives are not merely a problem looking back - look at what trying to force the future into a deterministic narrative has wrought over the last century.
That's a different kettle of
That's a different kettle of fish, though. The future can be anticipated, and shaped. Sometimes successfully, sometimes (*cough, Iraq, cough*) w/ gross malfeasance.
I'm not trying to discount agency. In fact, I'm trying to highlight agency and responsibility by dislodging notions of fate and inevitability from the past.
To put this all a bit counterintuitivly, sort of, you know, koan-like, the future is a good predictor of the past but not the other way 'round, man.