Naming the World- Language as a Tool

The other afternoon my three children and I brought my young niece to the seashore to celebrate the first decent warmth and sunshine we’ve had in weeks.

We played a short while on the playground equipment before making our way down to the south shore beach. The tide was high and there were cumbersome banks of seaweed which meant that there was very little beach exposed. This made walking difficult so my niece and I decided to sit a moment or two on a fallen tree, the sun bleached trunk of which had been positioned by some previous visitor as a bench of sorts.

Sitting there as my three children aged 13, 10 and 8 years old all beach combed, enthused by the first visit warm enough to beckon thoughts of summer nearing, my little niece, not yet two years old, looked out upon the wide expanse of sparkling blue sea in front of us. She then thoughtfully cocked her little head to one side peeking up at me from under the brim of her pink ball cap and said:

“I don’t know what that is Aunt Jill-ah?”

I sat for an instant, caught in the moment of innocent wonder. Without my really noticing, so many years have passed since my own children were new to the naming of their world. We’ve long since moved on to different sets of questions with more complicated answers such as the one our youngest recently asked regarding whether “you can get a baby without a man being involved?”

To be quite honest, although endlessly inquisitive and earnest acquirers of language skills, I do not recall any of our three breaking the world down into the sum of its parts in quite the same manner as my niece does.

“It is water Lily”, I meekly answered, “you know the ocean, the sea.” I furthered hoping to satisfy her need to name.  Seemingly settled with my response she sat and gazed out to sea while I was left wondering if I did justice to the vastness, the beauty and utter import of both her question and what we were looking at.

Perhaps language is only a mediocre tool for chopping up the grandeur of life so that it is more easily digestible, ponderable. Maybe the best way to drink in the largeness of such moments is one sip, one simple, incomplete answer at a time?

As we left the shoreline to head back to the car my niece turned around and waved goodbye.

“Bye ocean!” I said. She turned, smiled and chirped “Bye blue water” making the farewell her own.

When our oldest child was my niece’s age, instead of asking us when she didn’t know what something was, she simply made up the names of things. Thanks to her unusual naming practice we had a list of words as long as my arm which made sense only to her immediate family. Tookashish meant cookie, hackashish was water  and so on. We thought it was cute and creative at the time, but didn’t really take much pass of the fact that she was actively naming her world as she saw fit.

Still an avid lover of words and now a brand new teenager, she often struggles with the inadequacy of language to describe the emotional roller coaster she’s recently been hit with. We are hoping that she will continue to tap into that creative resource she has mined so many times in her young life thus far, applying imagination to the gap when words fail.

My young niece has no qualms about asking when she needs help naming her world, at those times when her repository of words doesn’t match what she sees or experiences. Teenagers on the other hand have more difficulty asking for help.  Our thirteen year old has mountains of words, but the terrain she is trekking is so unfamiliar, is such uncharted territory for her that most words feel awkward, trite and render themselves ineffectual at communicating a depth of feeling or experience of confusion which is so deeply personal. Probably this is where words such as “whatever and “this sucks” enter our vocabulary and become so widely used by certain age groups.

So at the moment I have two young gals in my life who are actively trying to name a strange and beautiful world, a world which for different reasons feels foreign much of the time. Each girl bound by the constricts that language presents us with at various stages of childhood development.

Yet, as my oldest said to me just the other day, words used well can give us the perspective we need sometimes. What she actually said was:

 “You know mom, I know why I appreciate a really good book so much- it just gives you perspective.”

 I couldn’t have said it better myself…what that perspective is and what constitutes a really good book are of course, purely subjective but I totally get what she means. Another perspective is very grounding for us when the vantage point we most often peer from wears thin, or when we ourselves don’t seem to have the words that match our experience.  Language applied well can both transport and tether us, granting us both oars and gills with which to navigate the often tumultuous sea that we call life.

Happy Sailing!!

Jill