The Words Made Flesh

I like strolling through a good museum and I never seem to do it enough. Well, almost never…

It was the spring of 2008 when a friend and I flew down to Virginia to visit another friend, a retired Army officer who lives in Williamsburg. We landed on a warm, sunny April afternoon, which slowly turned overcast and then devolved into two days of heavy, steady rain. Our plans to spend most of the time either drinking around her pool or taking our potent potables to Virginia Beach were washed out, so we ended up touring every museum in the area, including Yorktown and Jamestown. As much as I enjoy imagining what life was like before modern conveniences made human existence both easier and more problematic, even I have a limit as to how many shards of pottery or whale bone buttons I can peruse in a 48-hour period.

At least we have objects like tools, apparel and even full-sized fossils of our forerunners to demonstrate how we evolved from apes in trees to cretins with cars. What scientists can’t tell us, and probably never will, is how and when we chattering primates became linguistic lords of the manor.

Oh, they have theories. Scientists always have theories. Here are four of them, in no particular order:

Animal Farm

Language is a behavior, not a physical attribute, so there’s no one part of our grey matter that governs it. Instead, it’s sparked by different circuits also shared by other species. My neighbors have a parrot named Nickie who can verbalize his burning desire for “carrots, carrots!” Our cousins the monkeys have different warning calls to distinguish between leopards, snakes, raptors or other voracious beasties. And check out the hanged dog look on Fido’s face the next time you berate him for pooping in your new shoes. Take all these verbal and non-verbal odds and ends and you have the makings for language. Of course, these furry and feathered critters don’t have the complex brains that would allow Nickie to tell Fido, “Yo! Fide! I saw your bitch smelling another dawg’s butt.”

Put Your Hands Where I Can See ‘Em

Once our ancestors stopped walking around on their knuckles, their hands quickly evolved into the mitts we know, love and use today, while it took many, many more moons before our vocal chords developed. It’s a possibility that the earliest form of human language was hand signals and those would have suited primitive hunters like their own fur coats. The first rule of stalking prey is “keep your big trap shut” so signing instead of saying, “The mastodon went that a-way,” would have put more meat on the communal rock slab. Once our throats got longer and our mouths smaller, signing may have became sounds, which would have made it much easier to gab while fashioning a flint knife or telling scary saber-toothed tiger stories in a dark cave.

Rock-a-Bye, Baby

Personally, I find baby talk annoying as hell (which is probably why I speak to infants as if they were college grads) but that lilting rhythm is an innate part of our behavior and may have been the antecedent to language. Not only is music and speech processed in the same part of the brain and used by species like birds to communicate, even the Big Kahuna of evolution, Charles Darwin, talked about early romantics singing love songs to each other before there was language. Who knows? Maybe there was a way early version of Zep’s “Immigrant Song.”

Mammal Babble

If singing or signing doesn’t do it for you, maybe this will. Killer whales in the same pod have a distinct dialect, which enables them to tell if another big bruiser is part of their tribe. Our ancestors also lived in small groups, so developing a distinctive sound for their own clan would have cut down on pesky visitors who tried to muscle in on their watering hole.

This last theory is the one that makes the most sense to me. In a year that’s seen vicious arguments over the building of a mosque near Ground Zero and stricter immigration laws in Arizona, the millennia-old motto, “Us vs. Them," still seems to be our favorite.

The "N" Words

From the halls of Congress to a town hall near you, it’s damned near impossible to go a week without hearing about a public official being brought up on ethics charges. Sometimes the accusation is as clear-cut as getting caught with their hand in the communal cookie jar but, more often, it’s a slyer form of chicanery, like giving high-paying government posts to family and friends or taking kick backs for maneuvering lucrative contracts into the waiting arms of a campaign contributor.

This is called nepotism and is considered a bad thing.

When listening to the advice of the many “career consultants” whose numbers have swelled along with the unemployment figures, it’s equally impossible not to hear them extol the virtue of tapping into your sources to land a job or build your business. This entails putting the arm on everyone from work associates to Grandma Nettie to get that all-important “foot in the door,” or linking into various forms of social media sites including Facebook, Twitter and, yes, LinkedIn.

This is called networking and is considered a good thing.

Or is it?

Looking back on my long years with my old employer, I can think of three instances when a chit was called in and a person or company was forced into our department’s ranks. The first was a young woman whose step uncle, a big shot in the company, had us create a junior designer position just for her. She was funny, sweet, kind and couldn’t design her way out of a brown paper bag. The second was also a designer, this one a certifiable psycho, who was in danger of being laid off until her boss hoodwinked my boss into taking her on. I had to spend a year sharing an office with this crazy bitch and held my breath every morning, convinced she was coming to work packing heat instead of lunch. The last was a printing company whose president was the friend of yet another of our corporate higher-ups. My boss and our print production manager were called into a meeting and not-so-subtly told to give this printer “special consideration” when bidding out jobs. I can’t say for sure what, if any, back door dealings were involved with this “arrangement,” but I can state unequivocally that the quality of our print materials sucked for years to come.

All of this begs the question: Why is “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” accepted in the private sector but condemned in the public sector? Isn’t it just as duplicitous to use a position of power, no matter how that power was attained, to give jobs to people and companies who are unqualified? Some might argue that, in the public sector, it’s our tax dollars that are being put to criminal use but, if you own stock in any corporation (and chances are, you do), your investment dollars are being used to employ equally incompetent nincompoops and hurting the bottom line.

An accountant in California recently posted an ad on craigslist, offering to pay three grand to anyone who could land him a job. The money would be handed over as soon as he signed the employment contract.

Would this be considered networking, nepotism or simply the nadir of merit?

Diving Into Dystopia

There is no word in the Russian language for “privacy.” That’s not surprising, considering Mother Russia gave birth to Big Brother.

What is jarring is that some tinpot dictator in a little Long Island town named Riverhead has no concept of the word, either.

Riverhead’s Chief Building Inspector decided to use Google Earth to take a satellite stroll through homeowners’ backyards and nail the folks who had pools but didn’t have the required permits. While the Chief Spy, er, Inspector admitted, “a lot of people don’t like the idea of an eye in the sky,” he also tried to put an altruistic face on this highly-suspect practice by adding that the fear of someone drowning outweighed the concern over privacy.

This guy must think we’re all wet.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, legislation was passed fast and fearfully in the name of keeping us safe from terrorism. The USA Patriot Act, which arguably did more to chip away at civil liberties than any bill passed before or since, enjoyed broad bi-partisan support and became law on October 26, 2001. The terrorists had, indeed, won.

Fact is, you cannot legislate against life, which is messy, chaotic and dangerous. Try as we mere mortals might to keep ourselves wrapped in a cozy cocoon, nature is a wild child and no manic Mary Poppins act is going to keep the cosmic kid from raising holy hell when the mood strikes.

What I find even more insidious is how politicians are now using the “fear factor” as an excuse to raise money for community chests ravaged by the current economic meltdown. If you want to pick my pocket just say so, but don’t hand me a line about protecting my health and welfare while levying a tax against tanning salons or using espionage to root out recalcitrant pool owners. (Note: Riverhead has already garnered a cool $75,000 in fines and permit fees.)

I’d love to lay this knee-jerk reactivism at the feet of our feckless leaders, but it seems we only have ourselves to blame. In an age when we rely on too many conveniences, take in too many calories and live too many years, we’re more than happy to leave our existence to elected court jesters who profess to really care about us. Too bad I don’t feel the same way about them.

We have a pool here at my co-op and, the other morning, a rat was found doing the backstroke in its well-maintained water. I wonder if he was just hot or on a reconnaissance mission.