22
AN ASIDE, on the Babbington dialect. When we got to the theater, Margot and Martha sent me to wait on line, while they hung out at the curb, talking with their friends.
I did not learn until years later that not everyone waits “on” line, that some people wait “in” line. When I did, my first reaction upon learning that the rest of the world said something different from what I had learned to say was to think that the locution of my youth, like so much of the rest of what I had learned in Babbington, must be wrong, but then I began to wonder whether there wasn’t a difference between waiting on line and waiting in line. When I posed the question to my friend Mark Dorset, who in addition to being a sociologist is an amateur psycholinguist, he said that he wondered whether, if there was such a difference, it might not have something to say about the milieu in which I had spent my youth and, therefore, something to say about myself, that is the self that was formed in and partly by that milieu and its linguistic conventions.
“Wasn’t it Robert Musil,” he said, “who said that ‘no one in the world can free his thinking from the manner in which his time wears the cloak of language. Thus no man can know to what extent he actually means what he writes, and in writing it is far less that people twist words than it is that words twist people’?”
From the satisfied grin he was wearing, I could tell that Mark knew perfectly well that it was Robert Musil who had said—or written—that, and I was at first determined not to give him the further satisfaction of saying that I didn’t know, so I sat there for a while like the tar baby, saying nothing, but his grin began to sag and my resolve wilted.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Was it?”
The grin returned. “I think so,” he said. “I think it was in ‘The Paintspreader,’ one of the pieces in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author.” He paused, then added, with the assurance of one who knows he’s right, “I could be wrong.”
Mark volunteered to investigate the difference between on line and in line, and shortly I will report what he found out, but first, a note on the methods. Linguistic researchers generally try to establish whether or not a distinction is significant by asking informants about “minimal pairs.” That is, they ask whether there is a difference between, say, love and live if they’re interested in the vowels or between “I love life here in Babbington” and “I live life here in Babbington” if they’re looking for a difference between the meanings of the words. So, Mark asked some of the survivors of his youth (well, our youth) to explain to him the difference between waiting on line and waiting in line. A typical response went like this: “Well, I feel that when one is in line one has surrendered a great deal of oneself to the line. You know what I’m saying? It’s like you’re less of an individual and more, like, just a person in a line, just one of many, and maybe not even a person, just a marker, you know, a placeholder. You could be a cipher, a zero, just something occupying a place in a line. And it could also be that you’re not even in this line of your own free will, but that you’ve been forced to line up, you know, like ‘Get in line!’ But if you’re on line, then you’re just there for a short time. You get me? I mean, being on line is not going to define you for any extended period of time. What do you think? Does that sound right? Do I win anything?”
[to be continued]
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