Gavagai

Not terribly long ago, I read something disturbing on Twitter, and couldn't believe it was right.

"Hey," I called out to TH, "if I said, 'I'm quite happy,' does that mean I'm somewhat happy, or I'm really especially happy?"

"Somewhat happy," he called back, without hesitation.

It was the quite unhappy end of certainty, for me. As at least half of my two regular readers don't appear to be American, let me explain: in American, it means really, especially happy.

For those of us using English 2.0, "quite" is a simple intensifier: it always means "very much so." Someone who is quite pretty is prettier than someone who is merely pretty. If I'm quite full, I'm stuffed.

In English 1.0? It's complicated. Apparently, a man who is pretty gets more dates than one who is quite pretty, and if you're quite full, there's room for ice cream. But, wait! Something that's already "at max" ("like what?" "Um, I don't know; 'gorgeous'?") behaves more like English 2.0 -- quite gorgeous is more luminescent than gorgeous. It's quite tricky.

What makes me lose sleep is the thought: I never would have known. I mean, we're mutually intelligible enough, that a nuance like this might have permanently eluded us, while yet keeping us at slightly cross-purposes. Insomniac thought #1: Review all past mental tapes of relationship conversations. Was he "quite" happy? Insomniac thought #2: What other unexploded linguistic mines are out there?

My old undergraduate friend Willard Van O. postulated that translation was fundamentally undetermined. If you were an anthropologist among a remote tribe, and your interlocutor pointed to a rabbit and said "Gavagai," would that mean rabbit? Maybe. It also might mean "rabbithood," or "the name of Lucy's pet," or "eww, don't eat that." Reference is inscrutable, lacking an omniscient external dictionary. We can take our best guess, but we'll never really, truly know.

This sort of thing actually comes up more often than you'd expect in our relationship. English 1.0 and 2.0, often presumed to be coextensive, are probably not in fact more than about 85% overlapping, in my experience. Ambiguity is common enough that I often just try to get it from context rather than tiresomely ask for clarification and definitions (though I now do random spot checks far more often than I used to, post-"quite": "So, when you say 'x,' you mean...'"). We talk often enough, and at enough length, that I'm generally pretty certain that I'm able to fill in any gaps with gleaned background. How certain? Quite confident, let's say.

One expression TH is fond of using in speech is "painting the fourth bridge." I didn't know it, but, yeah, got it. Rather cute. Sure, let's say you have three bridges, Each one needs to be painted in turn, so that by the time you finish painting the third, the first needs painting again. It's the fourth bridge. So, you paint the first, but now the second of the three has its turn to be re-painted -- in essence, it's become the fourth. Try as you might, you can never, ever paint the fourth bridge. Quaint, but wise.

I'm listening to a good audiobook at the moment, a series of lectures on Victorian England. They're not deeply scholarly, but brimming with interesting connections and little facts I didn't know. The one on architecture, for example, talks about the River Forth, in Scotland. Bridges over it kept falling down, until the Victorians put up a really over-built one. It's hugely big, apparently. Hard to paint.