Ving, Vang, Vong. Or, the Pleasures of a New Vocabulary.

[Harold Schiffman]

 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

April 9, 2008
Editorial Observer
Ving, Vang, Vong. Or, the Pleasures of a New Vocabulary.
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

Lately I've been thinking about the word "vang." It is a sailing term,
and if you look it up in the glossary of Royce's "Sailing
Illustrated," you find that it refers to a line to prevent "the peak
of a gaff from falling off leeward." That is how it goes when you're
learning a new technical vocabulary. The language seems self-enclosed
at first, each new definition an opaque cluster of words that
themselves need defining. I was taught, during vocabulary in grade
school, to try using a new word in a sentence. "There is a vang." "Can
someone show me the vang?" Those are my best efforts so far. Part of
the trouble is that I have never seen a vang. But it's also that
"vang" doesn't sound like a noun to me. It sounds like the past tense
of "ving," which sounds like something you might do to a "vong." And
those are words with no meaning — nautical or otherwise.

It brings me back to that childhood feeling of being happily
encumbered with new words and trying them out tentatively, watching to
see, on the faces around me, whether I'd misused them. I trust myself
to employ only a few easy sailing terms, like mast and anchor. I worry
about the rest. I somehow imagine myself standing at the tiller and
shouting out nonsensical commands: "Vang the leach!" "Steeve the
bumkin!" "Harden the Quangle-Wangle!" At sea, I am fit only to crank a
winch, unless, that is, one "winds" a winch. I am a longtime reader of
sailing narratives, and when I come to the technical bits — where the
bumkin is being steeved and the leach vanged under gale-force winds —
I always let my mind glaze over the way I do when I come to the math
in books about cosmology. Something important is happening, and I'll
wait till the plain English tells me what it is.

But there's no glazing over when you begin sailing, as I did under
tutelage for the first time a few weeks ago. You find yourself at sea,
awash in the natural world, and yet at the same time you find yourself
immured in a vigilant kind of properness, a clear sense of how things
should be. It's not just a matter of proper names. It's a matter of
proper actions and responses, without which there is a world of
trouble. There is something deeply ethical about it, as there always
is in the command of language.

Being lost in all this terminology — struggling, for instance, with
the nautical meaning of "scandalize" (a temporary reef [which means
gathering-in] of a sail) is a familiar feeling. I realize that I've
spent most of my life happily sailing into fogbanks of specialized
language. Some, like the vocabularies of philosophy and literary
theory, never lost their slightly foggy quality, thanks to their
inherent abstraction. But others, like the languages of fly-fishing
and hog-raising and horse-riding, cleared up just as soon as I laid
hands on the objects they named. I wondered for a long time what a
"pulaski" was, (a multipurpose firefighting tool) until I used one.
There is something endlessly appealing about the care with which the
contents of the world, and especially the tools of the working world,
have been named.

Those words — like "fid," (a tool for splicing rope) — seem to have
been smoothed by the friction of so many hands over the years. This is
the elemental poetry of the human mind. And yet it is all just
vocabulary until it comes alive. Sailing is just one more thing I've
taken up as an adult but wish I'd begun doing as a child. The reason
for wishing that isn't just the experience that would have accrued by
now. It's the innateness you feel for things you have been doing a
long, long time, the utter lack of self-consciousness with which you
inhabit a language that seems outlandish to newcomers. I look back and
wonder what it is I've been doing innately since childhood, and I can
think only of this. I've been picking up words one by one, feeling
their heft, wondering who's used them before, and slowly adding them
to my permanent collection.

 From the NYTimes

-- 
**************************************
N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to
its members
and implies neither approval, confirmation nor agreement by the owner
or sponsor of
the list as to the veracity of a message's contents. Members who
disagree with a
message are encouraged to post a rebuttal. (H. Schiffman, Moderator)
*******************************************