Scrubs vs. Golddiggers

Some guys are cheap, but most guys just want to avoid attracting golddiggers who will squander their life savings and make their children take out loans to go to community college. Others have modest means but have a wealth of creativity and thoughtfulness to offer a special someone. Some women are golddiggers, but most women just want to know they're not taken for granted in a relationship. For further explanation, please refer to the flow chart below.

UPDATE: Here is a functioning link for "You might be this guy. Requires a separate flowchart. "

Mental Illness: Part II

Why does it hurt so when the ish hits the mental fan? I came across this quote researching the second in the series of posts on loving someone dealing with mental illness..

“Mental illness is feared and has such a stigma because it represents a reversal of what Western humans . . . have come to value as the essence of human nature.

...Because our culture so highly values . . . an illusion of self-control and control of circumstance, we become abject when contemplating mentation that seems more changeable, less restrained and less controllable, more open to outside influence, than we imagine our own to be.”

-From "The Americanization of Mental Illness" published on Jan. 8, 2010

Linguistics of Love Part III: Developing Dialects

Gary Chapman, an American pastor, witnessed plenty of confrontations in his family counseling practice. Couples came to him on the precipice of divorce, bitter because they still loved each other and angry because they thought that love should have been enough.

From observing these families, each a Tower of Babel unto themselves, he wrote a book The Five Love Languages which identifies five different "languages" people express and understand love: words of affirmation, touch, gifts, quality time, and acts of service. Basically, if you love someone, but you do not love them in their language, they won't understand your message and will feel suffocated without love, like a plant in a dark pantry. Conversely, if you feel suffocated, but you know that person loves you, maybe you're just not recognizing the love language they're speaking.

This point of view helped me love my friends better (not more, because I can't love them more), as I knew instantly what their love languages are. Because I like languages, I'm trying to be fluent in all five.

This understanding helped me make smarter matches, too, for myself and for others. Someone that needs words of affirmation, however, should not be fixed up with the strong silent type. I express love in acts of service, and that's great, because that's how my Beloved understands love. Lucky for me, he is very organized, so once he learned that quality time is what I need, he was able to make time together a priority even though his natural instinct is to give gifts.

He learned another love language being with me just as he perfected English in his studies in America. We've developed our own dialect with euphemisms and idiomatic expressions and gestures of love, just as my parents spoke a Vietnamese dialect borne of their inter-regional marriage, a linguistic manifestation of the compromises and shared experience that tie all couples together over time. (To my linguists: when we have kids, we'll have our own speech community.)

Love can be expressed in many ways, and that’s part of the fun. Be open to any expression.

“I love you” is expressed by “I want you” (te quiero) in Spanish, “(you) are (a) love(-source) (to me)” (suki da) in Japanese, “I love towards you” (aku cinta pada mu) in Indonesian, “I love a part of you” (!) (rakastan sinua) in Finnish, “I wish good (things to happen) to you” (ti voglio bene) in Italian, “to-me from-you love is” (mujhe tum-se pyar hê) in Hindi and many other languages spoken in India, “love I-have-you” (maite zaitut) in Basque, “to me you me-love-are” (me shen mi-kvar-khar) in Georgian (Georgia, southern Caucasus), “I I-you-love” (she ro-haihu) in Guarani (Paraguay). -A Language-Lover’s Dictionary of Languages (French edition: Paris, Plon, 2009) by linguist Claude Hagège

Love is not a prescribed set of actions. How boring would that be? It's a practice at understanding, an act as colorful, varied, surprising, and irregular as language.

Previously: Linguistics of Love Part I: Confusing the Language
Linguistics of Love Part II: Learning Another’s Language

Linguistics of Love Part II: Learning Another’s Language

Sometimes, learning English, I felt heady with victory at comprehension or making myself understood. I could lick the words “Zamboni machine” at the ice rink the way the other kids relished an ice cream cone. Other times, the process made me an unknowing object of derision and filled me with rage like a wild animal on a choke leash. But now I speak English, nay - LOVE English- and everything's tops.

Since Babel, every one speaks a language unto himself, and we long for someone to speak our soul fluently. Luckily, language can -with effort- be learned. The best way to acquire a new language is to learn it in terms of itself, without translation, just as monolingual native speakers acquire the language as children. Once, I found myself on Lan Yu aka Orchid Island, off the coast of Taiwan where the Yami people live; they do not speak English. When the first old man I met would point to the sky, I would try to figure out if the word he uttered meant sky, cloud, up, or grey. Rock was straightforward, as was "drink up." Usually, I got him right; sometimes, I gladly learned that I had mis-learned. But mis-learning isn't the same as NOT learning. Hell, in America, I mispronounced the verb “to iron” (I spoke it just as it’s spelled ire-run instead of i-urn) until I was 23, and I still can never remember whether I should cry over spilt beans or not.

When learning a new language, one often encounters "false friends," words that sound the same but don't mean the same thing. A well-known one is embarasada in Spanish. It means pregnant, not embarrassed. Often, there are false friends between the language that Men speak and the one that Women speak. When my brother says, "Man, my USB mouse isn't working," my boyfriend understands to help him fix it. When I say, "Man, my USB mouse isn't working," it sounds the same, but roughly translated into Manspeak, I said, "Empathize with my frustration, while I fix my USB mouse.*" (*Technology terms are the same across many languages.) I am able to translate this false friend because (a) I observed them having this conversation among their own kind and (b) I have spoken similar Woman idioms and received similarly perplexing replies in Man. (Most only have to make the mistake a few times to learn that "to be embarrassed" is "se dar vergüenza.")

Without these confrontations with confusion, comprehension cannot emerge.

Previously:
Linguistics of Love Part I: Confusing the Language
Coming up:
Linguistics of Love Part III: Developing Dialects

Linguistics of Love Part I: Confusing the Language

{define: word} n. a speech sound, serving to communicate meaning

"Is ‘I Love You’ merely a set of sounds?" I surveyed some friends. My Beloved, whose first language is German, answered that he loves me in every language, while his roommate, who speaks English and Patois, feels that “I Love You” in either tongue doesn't have the weight he's told it's supposed to. In my own family, whose primary language is Vietnamese, we never heard the words until my father dropped me off for college. In the parking lot, he said, “I love you,” in English, as if the Vietnamese words are a curse stalking survivors of the Second Indochinese War. It seems, from my informal survey, that the meaning of love and the speech sound that represents it are no more necessarily acquainted than third cousins.

But if words cannot be counted upon to deliver even the most universal sentiments intact, how can we trust any speech? Why do I bother calling my parents or writing this blog under the long shadow of Babel?


The legend from the book of Genesis goes that the sons of Noah planned to build a tower that would reach Heaven, The Tower of Babel. To punish our arrogance, God “confused the language of the whole earth.” From then, even two workers facing each other could not communicate to move a brick, so they stopped building the city, and “the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of the whole earth.” God, doesn’t that explain so much? Now, even people ostensibly speaking the same language can feel the distance of continents between them.

Coming up:
Linguistics of Love Part II: Learning Another’s Language
Linguistics of Love Part III: Developing Dialects

My Christmas Letter to You

Happy holidays, Dear Readers!
I didn’t think it would be possible to summarize the last two months in one blog post, but it turns out, there’s a genre that was invented to project four-dimensional lives into tidy missives: THE CHRISTMAS NEWSLETTER LETTER. I’ve never received one of these letters, but I read about it in the WSJ and did some research on the internet. So, y’know, I’m kind of an expert now.



I have no children doing precious children things, but my English improves every day. Last week, while I was looking for the name of words that can be used as both verbs and nouns (like flock, arm, blog, and rise), I came across the word “anthimeria” which describes words deployed as a part of speech other than their accepted parts (ie She poemed that. That was so L.A. I felt angry and whiskey.) I was disappointed not to find the word I was looking for, but I’ve been using anthimeria as a verb with impunity ever since. (More on double-meanings in an upcoming blog post on the linguistics of love.)

For our annual Thanksgiving service project, my company volunteered in shifts at the USO in Atlanta Hartsfield International Airport. Seasoned volunteers from any cause will tell you that a volunteer gets more out of volunteering than the folks she's helping, but a stint at the USO is exceptional in this aspect. We'd spent days baking cookies, organizing, and making holiday cards for soldiers. We cheered and applauded soldiers coming up the escalators that all flights empty into. We learned to tell who was starting R&R or ending R&R by their reactions. We organized the luggage for a couple hundred soldiers flying to Iraq- two days before Thanksgiving. How can I describe the powerlessness of my oatmeal cookie offering to a young, very young, man or woman getting in the frame of mind to commute to the hardest job I can imagine?

Later, I got into a debate on immigration policy, half my mind occupied by the soldiers I'd met that morning. We had predictable economic arguments, but who could care about economy that day? We send our bravest to defend freedom halfway around the world while turning away people looking for the same thing on our doorstep, and examining why sent me headlong into a bourbon. Only one, though, because I had to go to Dallas for the seventh wedding this year.

Thanksgiving weekend, four weeks after he told me he would and three days after he landed in our hometown on leave, my brother got married.


After a week of lobbying for him to tell our parents that (a) he had a girlfriend and (b) he wanted to marry her this month, he did, and wedding planning commenced like a Texas tornado. Here I am at the beginning of the toast:

"When my brother overheard the saying 'love makes fools of all of us,' he said, 'Not me.' I think he's right. False love is blindness that makes us forget who we are. But true love is lucidity that shines light on the good and the bad. That way, we can be ready for both.

But I had to power through the end:

"Matthew and Jessica, may you embrace the good, the bad, and each other all your days."

I'm powering through the end of 2009, too. (Did you catch that anthimeria?) It's not that I oppose charity, togetherness, and peace on earth. It's just exhausting to squish the bulk of our quota in 5 weeks. So forgive me for sending this mass letter to all seven of you, dear readers. I wish you the happiest of holidays, and I sincerely hope to get Christmas newsletters from each of you soon.

Peace,
Ivy