2:01 p.m. - December 07, 2002
You can feel timbre, did you know that?
As a child I was often lexically confused. Examples:
What does mmmph mean? As in the highway signs that say 60 MPH?
Why is there a large sign in Safeway saying Thank you for calling when "to call" is for the telephone?
By far the worst was realizing my language and the language of the greater society was different. For years I thought San Jose (san ho-zay) was different from San Josie; Yo-sem-it-E was not Yoze-mite; the zoo at San Dye-go was not in San Di-eh-go. My spoken language was that of my mother (my father doesn't speak) and my favorite bits of nostalgia occur when I hear her voice.
Utah: You-tah-ah, each vowel enunciated.
Apparently my mother read stories aloud to me before I could read. I wonder what that is like, not hearing one's voice yet pressing on. My parents were pleased to have a deaf child and then the news came: I wasn't deaf. In my culture, deaf parents grieve when their children are born hearing, just like hearing parents grieve when their children are born deaf. It's a matter of perspective, that's all.
My father cannot speak at all, unless you consider baboon. That is the one word he can say, and he said it often enough to his children. Baboon? That one confused me all throughout childhood and well into adolescence; I asked him about it once, inquired why he called us baboons and the look on his face was more than confusion--it was What the hell are you talking about, boy? It wasn't until years later that I made the connection: Baboon is how my father pronounces bad mood. Aaaah. Thus, when I believed he was accusing me or my siblings of being baboons, he was asking why we were in a bad mood.
These things are the mortar between our bricks, aren't they?
