The World’s Greatest Imposter
A true but sordid tale
Enter the Pig’s Nose for a Dead Language
I had taken the long path. The coastal route. It twitched and snaked around the shore like a bewitched goat clinging to an escarpment. I thought of Hildegard of Bingen1 and her hidden language — an obscure make-belief compendium of words whose translation died upon her lips. I imagined being the sole person in the world who understood the dying language of a saintly nun. Hildegard would smile and say, “It was always so.”
Was it better to have a make-believe language than to make-believe your entire existence? Social platforms have given us the grace of God. We can become anyone. We can be anything. We are super-charged and restricted ONLY by our imagination. I want to be George Psalmanazar2, the first native of Formosa. How shallow must your life be to imagine a new world as your origin story? “I’m pale,” George would say, “because I have lived my entire life underground.”
Psalmanazar is my hero. A misunderstood genius. He would recklessly bend the truth to anyone who would listen. A man who needed no more education after the age of sixteen. Psalmanazar, the prodigal wordsmith, was fluent in Latin and had a knack for deception. Accents were his forte.
