On This July Fourth, Let’s Say Farewell to This Word

Now that the US government has done a word purge of “alien” from its immigration policy manual, replacing it with “noncitizen” and “undocumented individual,” it may be time to toss out its frequent companion as well.

Let’s say farewell to “foreign.”

“Foreign” stems from the Latin foris, meaning outside in the physical sense. A close etymological cousin is “forum,” originally a public place—i.e., outside.

So far, so good—and, you may be saying, so what? After all, dictionaries still start their list of meanings for “foreign” with such benign explanations as “situated outside a place or country.” This is the first definition in Merriam-Webster.

But keep going down the list and you’ll soon come to a very different meaning, of “alien in character: not connected or pertinent” (Merriam-Webster’s fourth entry). And there we are, back once again to “alien.”

Freighted and fraught

I vividly recall being described as a foreigner the year I lived in England. And yet, I didn’t feel like an alien, or that I was not pertinent. I just felt like an American who was in another country—not a foreign one, just a different one.

The problem with “foreign” is that it’s freighted. Fraught with negative connotations—stranger, outsider, unknown to the point of being suspect—it has a circle-the-wagons sentiment to it.

So why do we continue to call the familiar “foreign”? Our planet is a globalized, world society now, and in many ways has been for millennia. (In the year 1000, for example, there was a brisk Persian Gulf-China trade route that also connected to East Africa.)

Yet diplomats continue to engage in foreign relations, when the goal is to find connections with other countries. And would a foreign language be less intimidating to those of us who don’t know it if we thought of it as a world, or a global, or simply another language instead? Ditto for its native speakers.

Fight vs. facilitate

“Foreign” has its place, of course, as Veterans of Foreign Wars can attest. These soldiers were fighting enemies whose essential values threatened to undermine our own: that were alien to our national character. The debt we owe them is huge.

But when we don’t need to fight, let’s use words that facilitate tolerance rather than fight against it, however unconsciously. When we can swap “us-versus-them” language for words that instead suggest “we,” let’s do it. It’s just the kind of thing worth thinking about as we head outside to celebrate on this Fourth of July.                                                                     

Image by Tom Walsh, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

What is this thing called ‘hug’?

 

(Wikimedia Commons photo by Todorov.petar.p)

Have you hugged…somebody today? (The expression began as “Have you hugged your kid today?” Now it’s gone so far as to ask, as an Etsy selection does, “Have you hugged your burrito unicorn?” Um, why?)

Thanks to a shot, or two, in the arm of a Covid-19 vaccine, many of us now feel safe using our arms to clasp, cradle and cuddle one another. No longer will expressions like “bear hug,” “bro hug” and “group hug” seem like quaint artifacts of a pre-pandemic world. Calendar note: January 21st is National Hugging Day; might as well start gearing up now.

Humans have been hugging since the 1560s—actually, far longer than that, but that’s when the meaning of wrapping your arms around someone became wrapped around the word hug. In Old Norse, people engaged in hugga, or comforting. The word evolved from hugr, which meant courage, and which is worth pondering. Old English weighed in with hogian, to care for.

The French, who like to linger over lunches and other pleasing things, stretched the pleasure of hug to the four-syllable embracier in Old French. Yes, that would be our modern “embrace.” The “brace” reaches back to the French, Latin and Greek words for arm, for the obvious reasons. Spanish makes it clear: el brazo is an arm; el abrazo is a hug.

“Hug” has its own brand of onomatopoeia. If you can sigh, you’re halfway to saying it.

And so we sigh—with relief, with unrestrained emotion, with no longer having to long to hug. We’re living high on the hug, and loving it.

 

                                             

‘Civil’ comes back in flower

Among its many other triumphs, Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem was a disarming, uplifting reminder that in our words lie powerful incubators of our deeds. One such word that her poem summoned for me was “civil.”

Some of the strongest buttresses of our democracy are bound up in that word. Civil discourse. Civil liberties. Civil society. Civil rights.

“Of or relating to citizens,” Merriam-Webster tells us about the word, presenting its first meaning. The Romans gave it to us in the form of civilis, deriving from civis, or citizen.

For the Romans, so strongly was the idea of civis connected to one’s identity that to utter Cicero’s pronouncement of Civis Romanus sum—“I am a Roman citizen”—was to immediately command respect. It’s no accident that some of this country’s foundations as a republic trace back to the ideas and ideals of Cicero. Even though not in Rome, Americans have been known to do as some of those ancient Romans did when it comes to government.

From civis to civilis is just a few short steps, as civilis speaks to public life and the civic order: both the rights and the duties of a citizenry. Walk with that concept a little farther and it’s not long before you arrive at the familiar, everyday meaning of civil: polite.

Civil discourse is how democracy works best because it means we listen, politely, before deciding a course of action. So to once again practice civility is more than a nice gesture, the kind thing to do. It’s also to be an American citizen. It’s our democratic way to both command respect, and show it.

 

A comforting phrase pandemics can’t touch: ‘like a balm’

When this is over, we will emerge changed in many ways, and our language will not be immune. Perhaps “pre-pan” and “post-pan” will enter the lexicon. Or “pre-covid” and “post-covid.”

Already we have additions to Merriam-Webster, “social distancing” and “self-quarantine” among them. But the terms, though necessary, do little to console.

So let’s dig into that vast trove of English words and phrases and find something comforting we can use right now. One that sounds right to me is like a balm. “Balm?” you’re probably thinking. “Isn’t that something you rub on your lips?”

Well, yes. It’s any healing ointment, actually, and usually fragrant. Something soothing, in other words. It harks back to the Latin balsamum, which gave us the aromatic balsam.

Why balm works

The beauty of balm is that it’s linked to the physical, to touch. And reassuring touches are what we crave right now, as we don’t hug, huddle, gather or otherwise affirm one another’s physical presence. Solace is soothing, too, as it seeks to console us, but not in a physical sense.

Like a balm floated into my consciousness recently as I read one of the emails from Books & Books. Owner Mitchell Kaplan and his dedicated team have taken their physical spaces—the various Books & Books venues in Miami—and turned them into a devoted community of readers.

At the moment, those physical spaces are closed. But the messages that Books & Books is sending customers are like a balm. Here’s part of the one I received on Friday…

None of us knows what the future will bring, but we know we have a shared community that is planning to emerge from these dark times into a brighter day. Stay calm and read on. We will meet in that land that readers inhabit. It's a safe space, a life-giving space, a space unlike any other. We all know it and now take shelter there -- together. 

Beautiful, don’t you think?

And there are other things that act like a balm right now. One, for me, was reconnecting with a friend from so long ago it seems like yesterday. Another has been the emails and texts and phone calls (phone calls!) checking in with relatives and friends and colleagues.

The lovely watercolor you see here is by Renee Reese.  She shared it with her friend Andrea, a dear friend who shared it with me. The daffodils offer solace. The fact that my friend took the time to virtually share them with me is like a balm.

The philosopher Joseph Campbell encouraged us to follow our bliss. That may be too distant at this particular moment. But I hope you’re finding those special, small gestures and kindnesses right now that act like a balm.

Perhaps the oddest New Year’s resolution yet: give cursive a(nother) chance

If the story in the New York Times a few weeks ago is any indication, cursive writing might just be making a comeback, modest though it may be.

Contrary to what those who shun, eschew, lament, rail against, and run from cursive might think, the word does not derive from “curse.” But the running from is actually close. “Cursive” is from the Latin currere, to run. Letters in cursive writing flow, or run, together.

I think we should seriously consider a cursive revival. I say this even though my own cursive writing is cacographic—a fancy way of saying borderline illegible.

It’s not because I think that people will always have to sign their name the way we do now; I doubt that we will. It’s because cursive can be a potent tool when you're seeking transparency. 

For a good example, just read Lincoln.

“The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here,” intoned President Abraham Lincoln at the memorial service for Union soldiers on November 19, 1863, “but it can never forget what they did here.”

Lincoln was right on the second point but wrong on the first. We do, indeed, remember what Lincoln said at Gettysburg. In fact, the Gettysburg Address is set in stone on one wall of the Lincoln Memorial.

But is that really what he said that day?

The reporters who were there didn’t get it right. It’s not that Lincoln talked fast, but he talked short: a mere 270-odd words in under three minutes. Nobody was expecting that.

But while we may not know verbatim what Lincoln said, we do know what he wrote in his own hand at various times, and for different reasons. Five extant versions of the Gettysburg Address demonstrate Lincoln’s neat, highly legible cursive.

Therein lies my argument for why we should learn how to write cursive: so we will know how to read it.

In cursive courses truth

Source documents like Lincoln’s five versions of the Gettysburg Address allow us to see what Lincoln really wrote, and by extension, what he was thinking at the time. It’s the same with Jefferson and the draft of the Declaration of Independence that contains the 80-plus edits of John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. 

And with JFK, whose determination to put Americans on the moon was in his mind well before his galvanzing, "We choose to go the moon" speech at Rice University in 1962. In gathering his thoughts for topics for his 1961 Inaugural Address, the first word Kennedy scrawled on the front of an envelope was "space."

So let’s resolve this year to keep cursive alive as a way to more fully partake of our country's past. The ability to literally read our history through the hands of some of those who made it means we better understand what they were seeking. 

That kind of truth without filter is a powerful tool to possess. Let's run with it.

The word is bereft: remembering Peter Mayer

In the space of just a few weeks this spring, the world of readers lost three of the great ones—Tom Wolfe, Philip Roth, and Peter Mayer, a publisher unlike any other who passed away earlier this month at the age of 82. Peter's passing has left me feeling bereft. I had always considered him one of The Immortals.

If Peter’s name is unfamiliar, here’s my favorite way to introduce him: the first time I met Peter, I served him a slew of eighteenth-century insults…and he loved them.

At the time I had recently and somewhat improbably licensed an (abridged) edition of Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary to George Gibson, then the owner of Walker Publishing. You need to meet Peter Mayer, George advised. He will have ideas for you.

I needed some. I was the editor of a small specialty-publishing imprint that was a sideline business to a larger company in Florida. I was tasked with publishing books that would not be sold anywhere else but would still sell.

Put another way: I was nobody in particular in the publishing world, and I was going to meet someone who was legendary.

At that point Peter was in the last chapter of his extraordinary publishing career, after his time as CEO of Penguin in Britain, and after he had published Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses despite the death threats. Peter was by then running Overlook Press out of his very-downtown Manhattan office, whose squeaky wood floors and lively hum signaled to visitors that this was no corporate bland land of publishing.

Peter's preposterous idea

Peter and I met at the London Book Fair, in 2003. I wanted to take him something for our first meeting, but what? A book was superfluous. As a line extension to the Johnson dictionary, we had created a set of magnets that each sported one of the more colorful insults from the book—slubberdegullion, fopdoodle, and the like. So I took Peter a tin of Samuel Johnson’s insults.

And that was how our friendship began. The consummately shrewd Peter immediately grasped what I was trying to do with this small imprint and, just as George promised, had an idea. He would reprise some of the more expensive, out-of-print books he had published in years past, and we would publish new versions of them as high-end, limited-edition books.

The only way I could successfully sell them, though, was if I sold them exclusively, not jointly with Overlook. For anyone else, this would have been a deal breaker. For Peter, it was barely a shrug. He would wait until I’d sold through my stock and then bring out a slightly different version for Overlook.

The word bubbling up in the head of any publisher reading this is most likely: preposterous. Who does this? Who sits on inventory until somebody else sells through their stock?

The word is generosity

I never did fully understand why Peter was so uncommonly generous to me. He was a savvy businessperson, evident in his commanding presence. He punctuated it with a voice that was unmistakable—a Cary-Grant-on-steroids voice, but with more of a New York accent, his home for most of his life (although he was born in England). It was a voice that spoke of keen intelligence, to say nothing of experience.

Most of all, Peter really didn’t need this idea of his for his own imprint.

But he was of his own era and mind, a book man who believed in the near-alchemistic powers of books. Even more—and more simply—Peter was kind.

He and I published some stunning books together: Jerusalem, The Saga of the Holy City; The Grimani Breviary; The Sarajevo Haggadah. I confess that when Peter proposed the last one to me, I didn’t know what a Haggadah was. Aren’t you Jewish? he said incredulously. Half-Lebanese, I assured him.

It was only the second time I knew Peter to be (momentarily) nonplussed. The first was when I told him, between tears, that I could never repay him for what he’d done for me.

The last book we published together was a collection of Redouté’s famous flower paintings. We produced it as an “unbound book,” an idea that I suggested and Peter enthusiastically endorsed. If anyone actually beams with pride anymore, I did when Peter said he liked the idea.

There was another, bigger project afterwards that we planned to collaborate on. But then the sideline-business imprint got sidelined. I wrote Peter to let him know. He immediately wrote me back, distraught. When he called me shortly after that, I could hear the concern in his voice. I was to come see him anyway, when I came to New York.

I never got that chance. But Peter had given me a much larger chance—the opportunity to do, at least for a short time, the work I loved best.

I was a small, insignificant speck in a world where he was a giant. There was really no reason for him to help me the way he did. But that was the way Peter Mayer lived.

When books become sanctuary

Two remarkable events for readers and word lovers occurred back to back just a few days ago—the National Book Awards dinner and the Miami Book Fair. The Book Awards’ elegant function was black tie. The Book Fair’s ebullient weekend street fair was awash in tank tops. Different as they were, both reminded me that in books, we find not just knowledge and ideas and the power to transport. Not only wisdom and solace. But also, sanctuary.

Sanctuary: from the Latin sanctus. A holy place, a sacred place. A place that offers asylum and immunity.

A refuge.

For those of us who feel whipsawed by the often dystopian (dystrumpian?) world we’ve inhabited this past year, both these events offered a reassurance that yes, things are not at all as they should be, but there are people who can give voice to this in ways that just might give hope to us.

Annie Proulx, in her acceptance speech for the National Book Foundation’s lifetime achievement award, railed against the “Kafkaesque time” we lived in. But she also said this:

“Somehow the old discredited values and longings persist. We still have tender feelings for such outmoded notions as truth, respect for others, personal honor, justice, equitable sharing.”

The word of the weekend

Perhaps it was just the happenstance of the sessions I chose to attend at the Miami Book Fair (there are hundreds), but even so—the word of the weekend seemed to be empathy.

“What we lack is empathy for real people,” Chris Matthews told his audience. Norman Ornstein alluded to the need for it when he reminded his audience that true patriotism is “not negative nationalism.”

George Saunders, who also spoke of empathy, cautioned that “the enemy right now is despair.” To George Saunders belongs the prize-winning book, Lincoln in the Bardo. The term “bardo” draws on the Buddhist concept of a transitional state, which perhaps inspired this observation from the author: “I’m convinced our country is on the brink of a beautiful breakthrough.”

Please oh please, George, be right.

Joe Biden joined in…and Charles Dickens, too

To George Saunders also belonged the conversation with former Vice President Joe Biden. “You learn empathy,” the Vice President said, talking about his childhood. From his mother he learned this: “You’re defined by your courage and redeemed by your loyalty.” And from Joe Biden, we in the audience learned this: “Silence is complicity.”

Book Fair audiences also got a behind-the-scenes look at the new film, The Man Who Invented Christmas. It’s based on Les Standiford’s book, which found a book-to-film champion in Mitchell Kaplan.  Mitchell is the impresario behind the 33-year-strong Miami Book Fair, along with Dr. Eduardo Padrón, the president of Miami Dade College. He is also the owner of Books & Books, and now a film producer as well.

The Man Who Invented Christmas is its own backstory, of how Charles Dickens came to write A Christmas Carol.  Lots of us at the fair “got pinned” with one of the big campaign-style buttons promoting the film. It featured a Dickens quote…but not the Tiny Tim one that would have been too easy.

Instead, it was in keeping with the E-word: 

“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.”

Or who offers sanctuary to mind and spirit.

In the root of “sanctuary” is also a verb, sancīre: to hallow. These two sacrosanct events for readers reminded me in the most uplifting of ways that one thing we can do is hallow our books.

But let’s give the last word to Annie Proulx, and her acceptance speech.

 “The happy ending still beckons,” she told us, “and it is in hope of grasping it that we go on.”