Rock & Bach

The first English word I ever learned was cat. Later when I came across the word city for the first time, I pronounced it kitty. This sort of orthographic ambiguity is a real pain for native Korean speakers learning English: there’s a very dirty Korean joke that revolves around a certain doofus politician’s inability to master the distinction between the soft G and the hard G.

I was a pretty serious logophile as a kid and spent a lot of time reading dictionaries and trying out words. I went through a phase in fourth grade when I was enamored with wonderful and stuck it anywhere I could, like “French fry is wonderful” or “Homeworks are not wonderful” and so forth. I always had teachers who would say that you shouldn’t use a word unless you’re sure of the meaning, but is this really practicable? I once heard Aidan, Mathematician Will and Noodletown Shannon parse the distinction between dickpants and cheesedick. I still don’t really know how to define dickpants, but I like it as a word.

An early attempt at application:

School is bitches. Daily I see the North American Dickpants in his natural habitat.

Aidan’s response:

In Boston too we enjoy the splendor of the North American Dickpants, of the especial Northeast variety; though, here at UMass, I am more privy to intimate glances of the South Shore Retard and the Feathered New England Ball Washer.

Are we communicating? Music is often like this - you just sort of have to assume a basic level of shared experience and trust that something will get across. I’ve always been suspicious of claims of universality in music; to me it just seems like thinly veiled chauvinism. You never hear claims of universality made for West African drumming or Chinese opera. I like Paul Celan’s more modest view - that a poem (or a piece of music) is like a message in a bottle that you float in the hopes it will reach shore sometime somewhere. Odds are it’ll simply break or sink, but it’s good to be hopeful.