Reflecting on my Relationship with the English Language
I adore the English Language, for despite studying Japanese, Latin, Spanish, German and Italian at different points in my life, they've faded out of need and atrophy at the back of my tongue. I adore the English language because it is *the* structure by which I perceive and process the world. I adore that my thoughts are always in words and that English words grant me the blueprint to make tangible these thoughts. I adore that English can be a brush for my art and philosophy. I adore that it has 100 synonyms to portray the same basic concepts. I adore it's Germanic roots allowing a skilled user to craft their own words from prefixes and suffixes while still being understood. I adore that it has given me the capacity to string together complex and original ideas and framings through trained usage. I adore how, just when you feel you know enough words, a new one arises; an infinite sprawl. I adore how poets and prose writers put this tangled beast under their reins to articulate things through the most beautiful metaphorical connection or bits of imagery writing. I adore that the world is pieced together through our words and it allows it to graft it to our own will. I adore that each and every writer and speaker has the capacity to contribute their own dialect or vocabulary to English where traction and need to communicate arise. I adore that my narrative arc of growth can be tracked through how I used the English language at different points in my life. I adore that my greatest accomplishments and capacity to succeed have been granted by English being intuitive to me.
I despise the English language for how it's laws are mandated and graded on. I despise the language of MEAL paragraphs, of advertising, of politicians. I despise the colonial project of America, where melting pot means melting away your culture and identity and submit to the Anglo-American dream. I despise how we seem to have so many words, just not for the ways we've been wronged. I despise the irony-poisoned, the forked tongues, the fake-it-til-you make it, and how those with the greatest resources to use the English language abuse it. I despise that everything said to me now feels transactional or performative, that I can't trust potential friends because of the trickle-down nature of deceptive Rhetoric, especially how it's been permeated and normalized by the anonymity of the internet. I despise that those who don't speak English are the subjects of binary oppositions, that they are seen as less than by nature of not being understood and the vicious cycle of schooling to punch them "back where they came from" or into poverty. I despise the sweet nothings of the great machine. I despise how I am mandated to prescribe labels to myself to be understood, and justify a lifetime lived in 2-3 sentences, not so I'm cared about, but my labour potential or how "political" I am is. I despise that some words have negative connotations, that buzzwords and soundbites trigger an animalistic disdain or zealotry based on Pavlovian news cycles are all it takes for one to trust or spittingly despise. I despise the lovelessness of modern English, how all is systematized and already determined, how it is a grand machine in service of the grander machine. I despise how nobody actually learns how to use English in twelve years of primary school, only how to write academic essays and resume's, because that's all the funders want to see. I despise that I was deemed falling behind and removed from my class during English blocks for 2 years because I thought I could make my points better without a five-paragraph essay, but creative uses of language weren't acceptable despite how much employers *love* a self-described "thinker-outside-the-box", "critical thinker" and "creative". I despise that I only know English because everything else was deemed lesser, that English men for the past 500 years view our wide spread of languages as a free market competition for the best product. I despise how a single word can ruin one's day, particularly of a marginalized identity, to depress those with no strength left to sink deeper.
Let's just say it's complicated between me and her :)