Random Musings On Language

A nasty piece of work she was.  My new boss in my early thirties worked hard to establish herself by making sure we all looked bad.  I pushed back when I could, standing up for myself and telling the big boss my side of the story.  As a telecommuting employee physically not present, her face time with the big wigs trumped my version of events.  After a year, I resigned.

One of the most memorable conversations I had with Cathy (her real name) was the way she introduced herself.  More about my lack of knowledge of current English idioms than about her usual bouts of bitchiness, I still remember to this day her words and my reaction.  "I was raised on the street," Cathy told me.  I took her words to mean she had spent her you literally "on the street" homeless.  Fortunate my unstated "that must have been hard" never left my lips, I realized shortly my error.   Once I figured out "street" was actually "Street," as in Wall Street, her aggressive behavior and the way she clawed her way to the top by making sure she rose and we didn't made all the more sense.  Being "raised on the street" and "raised on the Street" are two very different life experiences.  Cutting teeth on Wall Street wasn't something I aspired to.  She did.  Good for her.

All this happened during an era where New York City was referred to as "the City" and Washington, DC "the District."  Had I put some thought into her "Street" comment I would have figured it out sooner.  It took my husband laughing at me months after I recalled this conversation to point out growing up speaking English isn't enough to be truly "with it."

Which took me back to my undergraduate years where my favorite professor one day told us the importance of keeping up with current events.  Specifically telling us there would be a section in our exam testing our knowledge of how well we kept up with the news, the week before finals I trudged to the library combing through headlines from major newspapers.  I aced the current events portion of the test and to this day make it a point to stay up to date.  Watching, reading, listening to news even from those I don't like or agree is important.  Where "I didn't know" isn't a viable excuse anymore, I make it a point to cover as much ground as I can.  Money may lead to power, but information--who has it versus who doesn't--also matters.  I'd rather be informed than sleep on a bed of gold.  The line "Keep your enemies closer" from Sun Tsu's Art of War is a mantra.  In my world, my success is largely determined by what I know.

Keeping up with current events in two languages is a chore.  Keeping up with Japanese idioms and abbreviations throws me off my game, especially when a phrase stumps me.  That's those around me often play "Let's Stump Amya" is fun only until I realize I didn't even know the word for that silly thing.  Jolts in Japanese equivalent to Cathy's "on the Street" remark continue to challenge the breadth of my vocabulary.  I'm amazed and quite bothered by what I don't know, especially when random foreigners I meet in Tokyo say they're fluent after two years here.  Allow me to throw you linguistic curve balls aimed at me, dear friend. 

There's no point I'm trying to make here except to say keeping up with the changes in language is tough. Back to my dictionaries that are television and the internet.  Sigh.