I wanted to make a joke to my boyfriend about the word ‘scrub’, but I realized I didn’t know exactly what it was. It was vaguely pathetic flora, right? I started doubting myself. I asked him, and he spat out an eerily precise definition.
As I often do, I demanded, “How do you know that?”
Yesterday I asked this after he explained how shareholders had chosen the direction of a joint-stock corporation centuries ago vs now. He said that, as a teen, he’d gotten interested in early firms and had read a lot about the East India Company. Today, asked about scrub, he said he’d probably learned it from a nature documentary.
So that’s one reason I don’t know things. I don’t watch documentaries. I’m not curious.
Another is that I learned English from text, without talking regularly to people in it until I was nineteen. After returning to Korea from America, my parents read me only English books when I was a toddler so that I would have a shot at retaining a little bit. But I took to books much more than to people, and spent much more time reading in English than speaking or hearing Korean. I must have read the word ‘scrub’ hundreds of times. But if I saw scrub in real life, I didn’t link it to the word.
Earlier this year, my husband surprised me by referring to the neighbor’s tree whose shade was stunting our apricot tree as ‘the beech’. How did he know it was a beech?
I get very frustrated when I try to describe foliage or architecture in fiction. I don’t know what things are called. As a child, I skimmed those descriptions – even if I looked a word up in the dictionary, it would say, “a kind of tree” or “one of the things that dangles off the walls”. What was the value of remembering such words? I learned to tune those words out.
I said a condensed version of all this to my boyfriend and added, half-jokingly, “I learned language without reference to what words correspond to in physical reality. I learned language like an LLM. Or a set-set in Terra Ignota.”
When I arrived in the States for college, I occasionally biked around campus feeling crazed with my ignorance of what I saw. How could I write fiction if I wasn’t able to describe what was right in front of me? What were these big blocky poles called that are meant to keep cars out of certain roads? After posing many stupid questions to Google, I learned they were called bollards. I put the word in Anki to memorize, but it took a long time to enter permanent storage. My goal in knowing it was to generate more text. Words as corporeal and narratively insignificant as bollard seemed irrelevant.
There are so many bits and flaps and dongles everywhere that I don’t know the words for.
I’m looking at a lamp right now. The light part is surrounded by a fabricky diffuser part, and that’s held by a curving arm that rises out of the heavy base on the ground. I’m already better than I used to be – I know ‘diffuser’ is likely the right word here, and ‘base’. I’m not so sure about ‘arm.
(I just asked an LLM, which said the fabric should be labeled a shade, not a diffuser. “Diffuser is a more technical/optical word, and it’s typically flat or a cover, not a fabric drum around a bulb.” And it said “stem” is a bit better than “arm”.)
I only seem to learn what the words mean by doing and buying. So many things snapped into place this year when I started living in a house. When I picked tile for the house and had to think about the color of ‘the grout’. When I bought a ‘trowel’ for the garden. When ‘wainscoting’ became a thing I wanted to wipe down occasionally. When I cleaned the ‘flanges’ of a breast pump every day for a few months.
Textual data and world-data wheeling around each other and merging like galaxies.
My daughter will not learn English like this. My partners will point out bollards and scrub for her. She will learn what a trowel is when she helps me garden. I suppose it’s better. It sounds like a richer life, I guess. But my way was wonderful too. Korean was the language I endured life in. English was a splendid subterranean stream of text within me. Can my children understand one day that the language we speak over dinner was once my private, sightless, noiseless world of dreams?