Words enfleshed
Man prides himself on his abstractive ability, on his detachment from earth, on his noetic flight—until his bowels growl.
We are fleshly beings; as the old quip has it, we’re half-way between angels and beasts. To revel in mere bestiality is to deny our spiritual half, but to be an angelist, to ignore the flesh, is to deny man’s other half, and to render worthless the Son’s Incarnation (or, better, Enfleshment).
This principle applies to all areas of human life, including words. Words in themselves are a fleshy thing: the written word is, at base, a guide for speech, a script for a spoken performance, as a musical score is to a played or sung one. To pronounce a word is a thing of flesh: the tongue hitting the teeth or the palate, the trembling of the vocal cords, the squeezing of breath through rounded lips. The trembling of the air from a strong-voiced orator is palpable. Spoken words are a fleshy thing, and written words are a guide for fleshly deeds.
Yet fleshy man is also intelligent man, noetic man, spiritual man, ghostly man. So man can abstract; man can distill a thing, a phrase, from flesh to ghost: the bloodless birth of metaphor. A fleshy thing becomes pregnant with thought and gives birth to a metaphor, a brood of teeming meanings. Light is fleshy, as science shows: photons—physical particles—bouncing around and striking the retinas of our eyes. But when science enlightens us to this fact, the fleshy reality is burned away, leaving the ghostly essence, and the structure of the world becomes a bit more illuminated for us.
Metaphors and idioms quickly become solely abstraction, solely ghostly; it is only when encountering an unfamiliar idiom—from another language, another dialect, another region, another culture—that the fleshiness strikes us oddly. In America, there is a trope of the “oddball Southerner” or “oddball Midwesterner,” partly due to such unknown idioms. It can certainly knock the out-of-towner over the head to hear a stingy man described as someone who can pinch a nickel so hard the Indian’s riding the buffalo (a more graphic version of “penny-pinching”). A fleshy and quite muscularly impressive task: anyone who can get their hands on an old 1930s nickel can try (and fail) to do it. Another example: to say that God “dwells within your heart” is blasé, while to say that He is “closer to you than your jugular vein”—in the Qu’ranic phrase—is palpably bloody.
At least metaphors and idioms made of common words, everyday fleshy words, can be refleshed with a little grease and muscle; even words typically used only as abstractions—like understanding, “what stands beneath, what supports, something”—can be refleshed too. Yet the history of the English language throws veils over many of its abstractive words and phrases, cutting the lingual corpus callosum between its fleshy terms and its intellectual terms.
The English language is—as many have said in the same general terms—really three languages stacked up in a trenchcoat who go about mugging other languages for new words. At the bottom, we have Anglo-Saxon, that Low German oddball, whose closet current cousin is Frisian; next, the Old Norse of the Viking invaders, who helped make our tongue strangely similar to Danish; finally, the flood of French unleashed by the Norman invasion, a French that carried along a copious Latin current. The Catholic Church and academia poured in more and more Latin and Greek; then full-formed English donned its trenchcoat and went on the prowl, snatching up chocolate (Nahuatl via Spanish), teepee (Lakota), schadenfreude (German), karate (Japanese), ketchup (Chinese via Malay), alcohol (Arabic via Latin), and countless more.
But what is particularly interesting about English is less the mugged words—a process also seen in, for instance, Japanese, with its zeal for English-stealing—than the fundamental layers. Though linguists can distinguish more precisely, it is easier to lump the layers into two factions: the Germanic/Nordic party and the French/Latin party. The former is the old core of the language, the common, everyday words, oft monosyllabic, the language of the folk; the latter is the language of the rich and powerful, the language of conquerors, of academics. (A similar distinction, interestingly enough, can be found in Maltese, where everyday Arabic is garnished with academic Italian.)
This English bifurcation appears in the high amount of doublets, two different words for the same object. Thus the farmer’s swine or pig becomes the rich man’s pork, while his cow becomes the other’s beef; the smart smith becomes an intelligent scholar; the meter-maid’s bright moon becomes luminous to the poet; the midwife’s birth becomes the physician’s parturition. Some of these—like parturition—are specifically intellectual terms, technical or academic jargon; others, though, are simply the language of the victors (intelligent) versus the tongue of the lost (smart).
Metaphors begin as fleshy phrases before they are stripped and spiritualized; likewise, many abstract terms are abstracted from fleshy ones. The problem of English, though, is that the fleshy and the abstract are bifurcated: the abstract terms have been imported from the conquerors’ languages, while the fleshy words are still in the conquered’s tongue.
Consider the poet’s luminous moon. Luminous, luminosity: these are Latinate words, intellectual words, thus, here, poetical words. They are not the everyday words; the luminous moon has no moonlight; it’s not bright like the coin of a worker’s wage. The luminous moon is the aesthete’s alone.
So it is in English: but is it so in Latin? Not at all. The Roman’s daily light was lux or lumen; it was no stretch, no abstraction, for him to see something as luminosus, to consider its luminositas. The Englishman would likewise feel no such split if he spoke of the lightful moon and its lightfulness. To the Roman, as to the speakers of most tongues, the fleshy words smoothly run into the abstract: the links to the flesh remain. But the speaker of English has a two-tiered tongue, and rarely the twain shall meet.
There will always be a hurdle to intellectual, abstract thought for the non-intellectual: it takes effort to learn to handle the scarcely-flesh. But English takes this further than many languages, for, here, the new thinker will have to learn a second vocabulary, just as the doctor or nurse does, a vocabulary barely connected to his daily speech. For some who live in the academic realm, even their daily speech might become rarified and fleshless, rewriting daily deeds in abstract, Latinate terms, like a snooty stereotype of a British gentleman announcing, “I am departing for a perambulation,” instead of the simpler, “I’m going for a walk.”
Yet our fleshless terms can be refleshed, if we are willing to bear the coarseness and the newness; in this way, even the abstract terms can be fleshy, for they will have their lingual links to our daily words of flesh, our daily, simple words. Even philosophy—that rarefied field—could be brought closer to the common man. As an example, take this sentence from Josef Pieper’s Muße und Kult (Leisure and Cult or Leisure and Worship):
Muße lebt aus der Bejahung.
Alexander Dru’s well-known translation (retitled Leisure: The Basis of Culture) renders this line:
“Leisure draws its vitality from affirmation.”
Vitality and affirmation: two abstract, Latinate terms. What if, instead, we render the same German sentence this way:
“Leisure lives from yessing.”
Draws its vitality has been refleshed into live, a common word; the weirder, coarser translation, though, is yessing. We have gone back to one of our most basic words, yes, and built it into a more abstract term, just as the German Bejahung builds upon ja, “yes.”
Refleshing our abstract terms brings in a whole herd of connotations, lost through bifurcation. We saw the broken chain between light and luminous; how could one ever know that candid means, at its root, shining white, as when Church sings to Mary: “Your vestment is shining-white like snow” (Vestimentum tuum candidum quasi nix)? And, as I already mentioned at the beginning, Enfleshment is a much starker, much fleshier term than Incarnation, unless one ponders the meaning of carnivore often enough.
The Enfleshment of Christ made the God-Who-Is-Spirit become the God-Who-Is-Flesh, and the God-Who-Will-Ever-Be-Flesh. Jesus will be enfleshed forever, and, though men might “shuffle off their mortal coil” at death, their flesh will return—glorified, recrafted, but flesh all the same. All language is needfully fleshy, in its speaking or in its writing: even pixels are fleshy things, since the photons they shoot out strike the blooded backs of our eyes. Not all terms can be directly fleshy; abstraction is also needful, as we are, by nature, spiritual as well as fleshy. But too much abstraction, abstraction completely unlinked from the flesh, distorts and divides our language and life. So we should reflesh our terms, either by candidly explaining the shining-white links between terms, or by recrafting our abstract terms wholesale, so that we might grasp what before we merely comprehended. By this, we can help keep our language and life linked, in all its arenas; by this, we can lower the barrier that abstract language poses to the non-academic; by this, we can—as through a glass darkly—reflect the Enfleshment of Christ.
In honor of the Word Enfleshed, may our words, too, be fleshy.
"moon" by PHOTOPHANATIC1 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
