言葉遊び

I've been thinking about too much recently to be able to write about any of it. My third years have graduated and time seems to be tumbling downhill toward the end of July. I have the messages from 4組 which I will post one of these days. I'm 23 years old now, despite what I wrote on the little form at the capsule hotel on Friday night out of habit. My house is a mess again, and right now it's gorgeous outside and there's some sort of big concert event at the community center across the street, but I'm too exhausted to even want to take a walk by myself, let alone try to socialize with Japanese strangers. I'm exhausted because I was out until six thirty last night at karaoke, singing through every single Japanese song I know and some I don't. I'm bouncing around a strange mess of mental states, homesick for New Jersey, intensely nostalgic for Swarthmore and specifically last spring...eating outside behind Sharples, dinner in Media, RACK-O in the math lounge, frisbee, and just the physical setting of campus as it burst into spring and the feeling of belonging there. And at the same time already nostalgic for Japan, already missing Kobe and my own little town and mostly my students. And completely unsure and suspended about next year. There's pretty much not a single question about the next couple years of my life that I know the answer to. Perhaps "Do you want to learn to be a good English teacher and then teach people English?" The answer to that is Yes. That might be about it for definite answers. And it feels like there's nothing I can do but wait.

So I don't really know how to write about any of that. Instead, I will try to write about something rather unrelated: word games. I was musing recently about why exactly I find Adam's patternfilling-type word games so compelling and interesting. There are obvious answers to that, mainly social: participating communally in word games like this is an excellent way to, say, take a study break from math and just relax and think of silly words and joke around and work towards a common goal of finishing the list. And right now, they can serve as a good way to pass the extra time at school, something to keep my mind engaged but that doesn't really require a whole lot of energy or productivity. I'm not talking about those reasons. What I'm talking about is more...neurological? Or something. Now, I don't know neurology. At all. So the following discussion is not technical or rigorous, just my idle musings.

I think there's something intensely satisfying about forging extra little connections in our minds. This is one of my theories about poetry and song lyrics, and the function of things like rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, parallelism, etc. I think it pleases us to have the extra structure, so that in some vague, subconscious way, along with the meanings and images conjured up by the words themselves, we have this added structure, added connections that make us connect sounds and words and hence images in a way that we might not have otherwise. Even (especially?) if we can't pinpoint exactly what that extra connection signifies or adds, I believe it enhances the experience in some powerful way, and that is what makes something poetry.

That idea overlaps with what I was thinking about the word games. Who ever would have noticed that ORPHANAGE and NIGHTMARE both have the form ???H??A?E ? And who cares? you might be wondering, and sure, that observation is unlikely ever to have any practical application. Nor does it contain any deep poetic meaning (or does it...?), or teach us anything insightful about the meaning of the universe. But not everything has to. It makes little sparks shoot off in our brain that wouldn't have gotten a chance to otherwise. And I find that experience pleasing. I enjoy noticing that the ending ~SOME, while usually a suffix that creates an adjective (awesome, worrisome, wholesome, etc.), also shows up at the end of bio words like chromosome, but pronounced /zom/. It's not some earth shattering discovery. But it's interesting to take words and think of them in this way that's related to their structure and not their meaning, and to observe what new connections pop up between words that previously had no links between them in my brain.

I also just enjoy exploiting the tremendous database of words that's accumulated in my mind. By and large we retrieve words from our memories when we want to express something related to their meaning. In other words, when something in our environment or thoughts needs linguistic expression, and then we search the store of words for one with approximately the right meaning. Right, that's generally what language should do. But a lot of meanings just rarely come up in my life. I know a lot of words that I'll probably actually need to use somewhere from zero to ten times in my entire life. But they're there. Thousands and thousands of them. Just sitting there. And I love having a reason to sift through that database and find things that barely ever get to surface. And a reason to be noticing patterns and connections and how different letter patterns show up in different roots and prefixes and suffixes and what letters can combine with other letters. And I love the experience of feeling like I've searched the entire database and found nothing at all that fits a certain pattern, and just staring at it in frustration, and then suddenly the right word magically floats up into my consciousness. Often with a realization like "oh of course, I was forgetting that OU could go between L and S" or "ack, EA isn't always pronounced /i/, it can also be /eh/." (Uh, forgive my inability to type in IPA...) And there's something very mentally satisfying about that.

So I think I've babbled about this long enough now. But hopefully it made at least some sense. (As mentioned, I'm running on under three hours of sleep right now.)

Now, we'll see if I still claim to enjoy word games after attempting next week's fiveplustwos.... *terrible at anagramming* ^_^;;

Hmmmm lyrics. Okay I'm too tired not to be lazy, so how about the only lyrics I know that contain the title of this post:

Ah　どーでもいい事並べて　Happyな言葉遊び
Ah　どーでもいい歌、　Junkなセリフ

Hi-ho,　スキだらけの　そんな君の歌で踊る
Hi-ho,　空回りでも　混ざらない君の魅力の勝ち
Hi-ho,　ムダだらけの　そんな君の世界が好き
Hi-ho,　もし良ければ　くだらない僕らと踊りましょう。。。
Hi-ho!