A High Tolerance for Confusion
When I was two years old, I would call a ponytail a “toley hair”. I called chicken pox “pickin’ pox” — specifically my pickin pox as I was very possessive of my blisters. This is all cute toddler speak, but for me, it marks the start of a lifelong journey of saying things wrong. Or should that be wrongly?
My grasp of English is tenuous, even though it is my mother tongue. English is all I have. I love English as I love to read and communicate, but she doesn’t love me.
I say “mother tongue” as opposed to Native tongue because I’m Irish, and English is not native to Ireland. But I don’t speak Irish, although my English is informed by Irish, something I only realised when moving abroad and discovering all the Irishisms in my speech.
I recently learned that Irish is verb-subject-object, whereas English is subject-verb-object which is much more common.
Irish: Eat cows grass
English: Cows eat grass
But I seem to do neither of these things, I tend to put the object first. I would say Grass is eaten by cows, the cake was made by Peter. According to the scholarly journal Wikipedia, less than 1% of languages put the object first, and these include Hizkaryana spoken by 500 people, and Warao, an indigenous language from Suriname.
I have always spoken strangely. I say “us” like “oh-ss” instead of “uh-ss”. You don’t realise how common a word like “us” is until you’re being made fun of for how you say it. I put “R”s where they don’t belong — let’s spend a sunny day at the breach. When I want to say compartmentalise I always say car-park-mentalise because I conceptualise it as putting things in car parking spaces.
I was diagnosed with dyslexia at 16 and allowed to drop languages; Irish and French. I don’t know if this is good, perhaps I could have been given some support rather than an exemption. I don’t know if I show many of the classical signs of dyslexia, but I was happy to have a label and a recognition of my struggle.
I was blessed, as many queers and non-queers alike are, with a fabulous English teacher. She encouraged me to write even though I would regularly use the wrong words; not the correct words spelt wrong just entirely the wrong word. I found it hard to read and understand the material. My mom read to me so I consumed books aurally as a child. This started my lifelong enjoyment of audiobooks. To this day I think reading aloud to someone is one of the purest acts of love.
Everyone began to get mobile phones when I was around 12. Just my luck — I could barely read and the main form of communication switched from phone calls to text messages. My reading comprehension caused me no end of social strife. I would constantly misunderstand the abbreviations, I would show up to the cinema on the wrong day because I had misread the text. I’m showing my age here, but we used to have very limited characters for text messages such that tomorrow and tonight were written as 2MW and 2N8.
I became very used to misunderstanding things. My catchphrase could be a long pause followed by “oh!”. When I watched The Wire I was so lost. Smart people love this show, so it stood to reason that I wouldn’t have a clue what’s going on. It turned out I had been streaming it from a website where the episodes were scrambled. I was watching Episode one season one, followed by episode 5 season four, episode 2 season 3 and so on. I watched like this for 10 episodes. My tolerance for confusion is very high.
In university I helped run the meditation club. I sent a message thanking the meditation teacher for all of the classes he had thought, instead of taught. I then tried to pass this off as a zen phrase, didn’t he really THINK the class? In my first job I once sent 20,000 people an email in which the last sentence read “if you have any hesitations, don’t question me”.
My comprehension has improved through pure grit. I read a lot, and I’ve learned how to read — largely through trial and error. I don’t mean read the words but read the story, the concepts. Now I can read up to 4 books at a time as long as they are sufficiently unique and none of them are fantasy (I will never have a brain that can absorb “lore”).
I did this by reading the books of the movies I had watched; I Am Legend, Hunger Games, American Psycho, because at least I had a leg up on character names and plot lines. Then I tried to figure out which books might suit me best. I would check their goodreads rating and go to the 2 and 3 star reviews. if any of them said the word “complicated” or “meandering” I would not buy the book. And I gave up a lot of books I wasn’t enjoying. A friend told me once; reading is like love, it shouldn’t hurt.
Reading is not a skill I take for granted. For a long time, I thought there were readers (of books) and watchers (of TV) — I was a watcher. I thought of this as a quality one possessed, not an action one performed. I did not realise that the difference between me and the readers was simply in the very act of reading.
I became comfortable with the mistakes I made in English because I thought of myself now as a reader.
Then two years ago I moved to Belgium. I was determined not to be one of those anglophones who moves and never learns the local language. It is not wasted on me that my language struggles are far less limiting to my life because my mother tongue happens to be English. The world is catered to me. Should I have grown up in say Lithuania or Greece things would be different. I probably wouldn’t have an international job which regularly requires public speaking. But then again, other countries seem to be better at language education, so maybe Lithuanian Bella would be bilingual.
Here I am, two years in, with no better french than “je ne parle pas francaise. Desole”. And I have tried, lord knows I have tried. I tried with Duo, with Babbel and with classes. But it is so hard. My English is so delicate that French short circuits my brain like water in an electrical system.
I was trying to learn the verb to be (etre) and my better half said to me that it is like Am, Is, Was and Were. But to me “am” and “was” are just two separate words. It never occurred to me that they exist as the same verb on a timeline. I don’t think I even knew what a verb was. I’m not sure I do now.
I can tell when non-native English speakers make a small mistake, but only because it hits my ear wrong. Perhaps I don’t know how to speak really, and I have just memorised a bunch of sentences. I know people “do” research, we don’t “make” research. I know it sounds better to say “can you give me the stapler” instead of “can you give to me the stapler”. But I don’t know why. And I also really don’t care. I know what you mean and that’s all that matters. The volume of non-native English speakers working in Brussels has created a dialect of English — EU English. Here, we make the research; here that is correct.
My colleagues all know 2, 3, 4+ languages. They all downplay their language skills. They say they know “a little Italian” but if I knew the amount of Italian they do I would be like “Mamma Mia I am-a-fluent” in a likely offensive Mario-esque accent.
I am happy for my multilingual friends, I guess. But it’s like with the readers/watchers dichotomy: I think I lack a quality that these people have, and that quality is a brain that is good with languages. I have tried and failed to learn. I cannot say I’m not embarrassed when my English is corrected by someone for whom it’s their 4th language.
I saw a quote that said a native speaker cannot make a mistake. But I am corrected regularly. I say “renumeration” instead of remuneration because I consider it to be about numbers. I say “ractify” as a smashup between ratify and rectify. I have a dialect of one. And sometimes I don’t even know what I’m talking about.
I may struggle with language but I’m also obsessed with it. When my friends gossip I will want to know the exact words that were used, if they tell me about a snotty email from their boss I will want to know the exact grammar — was it “ok” or “ok.” — my world can change on the curve of a fullstop. I have wasted an hour contemplating the meaning of a comma. I fill words with incredible meaning, and therefore I am offended easily, flattered easily, and in general just feeling a lot at all times.
When I’m stressed I experience poverty of speech. This will surprise people who know me as a good public speaker. A paralysis comes over me and I literally cannot form a sentence. As someone who generally never shuts the fuck up this is distressing, to say the least. Writing about my experience with poverty of speech is very daunting: it’s like addressing your fear of heights on top of a skyscraper. The more I try to describe the experience of it the more I can feel it creeping in.
My relationship with language is like the one I have with my right knee. Mostly I creak along fine, sometimes it buckles beneath me, often it aches. But I need it to get around.
It took until my mid-thirties to even bring this difficulty I have with language to the forefront of my mind. Before then it existed as a wordless cloud of evidence that I am just a bit stupid. But putting words to something makes it so much easier to deal with. And therein lies the problem; often putting words to something is not within my ability.
I realise I have chosen to communicate this through an essay. I promise I’m not one of those people who claims they cannot sing a note and then nails Hopelessly Devoted to you at Karaoke night. I feel compelled to write about this for the very reason that I find it hard to put words together. I guess I could have done an interpretive dance instead, but then again, there is the knee.
Language is both my stormy sea and my life raft. I just have to ride the waves as best as I can.
