Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentinian genius (my word) once wrote a biographical note about a blasphemous Swedish cleric/philosopher named Runeberg. Runeberg's blasphemy was to consider that the ultimate and only sacrifice for a redeemer to make for mankind was for him/her to willingly go to Hell for eternity.
For Runeberg Judas was the son of God!
Except that Runeberg was just something, not someone, to hang an idea on. Complete fabrication. Just like yesterday's Santa Claus story! So if there are any kiddies out there, I fibbed! Honest! Although I believe you CAN get high on fly agaric!
Do you ever wonder about the unconscious decisions you make, when you use language? And how they impact on how others then relate to what you say or write? Not so much the actual word you might use but the motivation behind the word(s) you do use? You see, Douglas Hofstadter's 'I am a strange loop' arrived today.
Now, Doug and I go ways back. All the way to 'Godel, Escher and Bach' but I don't mean on a personal level; I doubt he'd come here and I have real no desire to go to him, but I'm the only penguin/person in my little group who reads him. And, like Borges, I find his ideas endlessly fascinating. He's essentially a researcher in AI (Artificial Intelligence) with a special interest in the concept of 'analogy making' among sentient beings, whether they be human or penguins. Oh alright, he's not interested in analogy making in penguins but he might well be if he knew we could do it!
For me, it's hard to steel myself, gird my loins, man the barricades and not start reading it NOW. But Moby must take precedence. I have made a decision, I WILL stick with it. But tempting, oh so tempting......Like those Belgian chocolates......Just one!...........So I just dipped into it, once. Opened it at random and found a short little dialogue 'twixt two 'children' in which the subject of discussion was 'which/who'
And that got me thinking.
I suspect that DH may well expound upon similar lines, although he'll do it for 90 pages not one, but it is quite clear what the difference is. 'Who' relates to people and 'which' relates to everything else. Yes? You use 'who' when there is an 'I' or 'You' to refer to in there somewhere.
However it's not quite as clear cut as the 'usage' gurus would have you believe, is it? Often contained in MG's little emails are progress reports on 'Mugwump'. 'Mugwump' was a beaten up, stray moggie that his friend needed help with getting to the animal hospital a few months back and which, following a rush of blood to the head, he agreed to foster until a proper home could be found. The cat's still there. :) Whenever he writes about the cat, he uses 'who' as in 'Mugwump who lives with the fluff under the bed' or 'I have one of those cats who talks to you'. Now this, to me, clearly indicates that as far as MG is concerned, there is an 'I' inside the cat's head which is distinct. Whenever he talks about me, it's always 'the penguin who writes the blog', although there is perhaps a better case for the penguin 'I' than there is for a cat 'I'. When was the last time you picked up 'Of mice and men' by A Cat?
However, he would no more say "The cow who was in the field was eating grass' than you or I would. Now it would very easy to put this all down to that bane of anyone who wants to discuss animals sensibly, anthropomorphism. However, I don't think that it holds here, I think it goes an awful lot deeper than that.
Over the last couple of million years, humans have had to bond very tightly with their own kind for their own protection. The young are too weak and defenceless, the old too infirm, and with no tools, or only crude ones, adult humans don't deal very well with marauding large predators, whether terrestrial or marine. So they bond into groups with their own kind because there's safety in numbers. Either you reduce your chances of being picked for the lion's light snack or, as a group, you can beat the lion off if you all work together.
But there's a price to pay for that protection. It means that humans come with a highly developed emotional sense. The bonding has to be (a) instinctive, at least in so far as when you bond it is not a conscious thought, otherwise you'd never get around to it, :) and (b) you don't really have another mechanism for bonding with anything other than humans. So when you do bond, what you bond with is 'human', an 'I', whether the object is a cat, a dog, a child's dolly, you can't do it any other way. You just didn't get the mental equipment delivered at the right time and it comes out in your language.
Now, to some extent, the usage for 'who'/'which' also applies to 'who'/'that', when 'that' is used as a pronoun, but it's far more common for 'that' to serve as the 'who' pronoun, eg 'The person that I spoke to had brown hair' despite the fact that 'that' is just as impersonal as 'which'. However, I doubt anyone would say 'My partner, that has just come back from the shops, wants to talk to you.' No you'd use 'who'. But you would say ' the cat, that's just came out from under the bed, wants to go out' even when there is the same level on bonding going on as above. Interesting, no? It's almost as if there is a grading system going on and you are demonstrating the depth of the bond by the construction you use. Those very close to you are always 'who' but those a little more distant, but still close, could be either 'who' or 'that'.
You see why I find DH endlessly fascinating :) Four brief lines of dialogue = 1 blog post!
And Mugwump? Named after a hallucination of the central character in Burrough's 'The Naked Lunch'. Seemed appropriate at the time :) After all, he wasn't going to be around for long :) And he does talk. Not miaows, but he sits by the side of the bed and makes little chirruping noises, little squeaks when he's hungry, to wake MG up in the morning. Ah bless, Moko writ large once more!
I have a comment, but do not have the time right now.
ReplyDeletePenguin
ReplyDeleteIn your example it may be that 'who' is avoided and replaced by 'that' because you don't need to toy around with 'who/whom' (it would be 'to whom I spoke'). 'That' does not change in the same way when the case changes. Have a wee think about it :)
M
Mugwump is a word my grandmother (the only one who dared to visit us on the compound I grew up in) used. I think Mugwump was a cat or something.
ReplyDeleteBut this entire post, following the one of Santa made me think about grandfathers.. my grandfather. But I wasn't thinking it was my grandfather.
I was imagining a neighbor sitting on his back porch without his shirt on, beer belly hanging out and a pipe in his mouth. Not the kind of person you'd normally think highly of letting your kid wander into his yard and hop up into his lap.
But then the picture of a 1950's man dressed in a suit with a briefcase in his hand, perfectly combed and cologne so methodically applied you can, 55 years later, still smell it on the photograph.
This is the kind of grandfather that reads the paper every morning over his coffee before he catches the 7:15 train to work. He's the grandfather that you tug on his shirt and he says "Oh, very nice dear. You hop down and be a nice girl and Santa will bring you something extra special for Christmas."
I think that is what Santa meant to me. He was jolly, he was out of shape, he was, for all purposes a slob, but he was there and you could, for 1 dollar, sit on his lap and tell him what you'd tell grandfather who (in my case) was scared off by the cult (though actually, it was probably that he was entreanched in his Physics studies and whatever else he had going on.)
When you say Mugwump, my grandmother, with all of her eclectism, weirdness, and sometimes distance comes back and we are in the living room using our mock British accents while we put a crazy-quilt puzzle together on our living room floor.
You cannot replace not having been there. And even though Grandpa and I now have a friendship, I missed him all those years, behind the mystery of a perfectly shot photograph of a handsome young man dressed in professional attire.
That was more or less an essay. Sorry.
Didn't catch the "bit of piss" line. You'll have to explain your context.
I never knew my maternal grandfather, he died more than 10 years before I was born. My paternal grandfather (and grandmother) died when I was around 7 or 8. My maternal grandmother, after years of crippling arthritis and dementia, died when I was 18. It is good that there remains an opportunity for your grandfather to, at least, try to make amends.
ReplyDelete'Piss' I cannot find in this post but if it was 'piece of piss', that's Brit slang for something that's easy to do, 'piss-easy' is another.