For all his paranoid etymologizing, there was at least one word the roots of which Grainger never seemed to have worried about: the compound mother tongue itself. Some words, maybe, were too holy to suspect. (In 1926 Grainger commissioned the Tasmanian linguist Robert Atkinson to produce a massive counterhistory of English to be titled Our Mothertongue.) But what if mother tongue turned out to be French- or Latin-begotten—the mere translation of langue maternelle or lingua materna? Could Grainger’s English do without it? While the composer combed his brain for dark-eyed words deep within a small mansion in upstate New York, in Germany, in a circle of devoutly German-loving linguists, the German equivalent of exactly this problem was arising. What if the ancient German term of endearment for German—die Muttersprache (“mother tongue,” more or less)—was not originally German?
Of course, we don’t usually question why a language has words for some things and not others. We don’t really imagine we have much choice in the matter, because the words we use to build our lives were mostly handed to us in the crib or picked up on the playground. They function as a kind of psychological programming that helps shape our relationships, our memory, even our perception of reality. As Wittgenstein wrote, “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”
But therein lies a problem. Language is so fundamental to our perception, we’re unable to perceive the flaws built into language itself. It would be difficult to tell, for example, if our vocabulary had fallen badly out of date, and no longer described the world in which we live. We would feel only a strange hollowness in our conversations, never really sure if we’re being understood.
If you had to devise a single object to capture the twitchy fear and uncertainty that defined the early stage of the pandemic, you could do worse than the “no-touch door opener.” Available for delivery from Amazon for just a few bucks, this key-size piece of metal, curved into multiple prongs, looks like an artifact of some lost civilization. It purports to help you operate elevator buttons and open latches and poke your phone without touching any of them. This item was, at best, a silly response to what turned out to be an airborne virus. And yet at the same time it reflects something fundamental to the human experience: the urge to tinker and design and adapt in the face of crises large and small.
One recent afternoon in Morocco, a fifty-nine-year-old former Royal Marine Commando named Phil Asher walked me into a desolate valley in the Atlas Mountains, shook my hand, and abandoned me. Asher, whom I had met only the previous evening, has a gray beard, a piercing gaze, and a bone-dry sense of humor. He teaches survival skills to people who have never fast-roped from a helicopter or killed their dinner. That morning, he had spent several hours educating me on the rudiments of living in the wilderness, alone. Now I was in the wilderness, alone.
The travel firm that organized my trip, Black Tomato, calls this experience Get Lost—a playful misnomer, since the idea is to do the opposite. A client is dropped somewhere spectacular and scantly populated, and challenged to find his or her way out within a given time period. From the moment that Asher left me in the valley, I was allotted two days to walk to a rendezvous point eighteen miles away, over and around mountains.
Today only a few farmers plant kernels from those heirloom lines. But cornmeal — usually ground from another hard maize called dent corn — is one of a handful of main ingredients found on Thanksgiving tables across the continental United States, baked into loaves, muffins and sticks; crumbled into stuffings and dressings; and steamed with molasses and eggs in a custard that has been known as Indian pudding since the era when the colonists referred to ground corn as Indian meal.
In that corn — written, in a sense, into its genetic code — is the story of the people who lived in Plymouth and throughout the Western Hemisphere before Europeans arrived.
The publication of Harrow, Joy Williams’s first novel in 20 years, is a literary event. Her work glows with cruelty and humor; her sentences showcase the dread at the foundation of our lives. Not much happens in a Williams novel, but that doesn’t matter when you feel the trembling that her characters go through on every page.
There’s enough animosity, jealousy, score-settling and killing gossip in “Tinderbox,” James Andrew Miller’s mountainous new oral history of HBO, to fill an Elizabethan drama. Yet the book’s tone is largely fond.
The creditors whom Kevin Birmingham relied on to write “The Sinner and the Saint” — a dexterous biblio-biography about how “Crime and Punishment” came to be born — include a formidable array of scholars as well as Dostoevsky himself. Yet the biographer betrays no sign of panic. The tale he tells is rich, complex and convoluted, and though he must have struggled in constructing it, Birmingham writes with the poise and precision his subject sometimes lacked. (Though it worked out all right for him.)