Resignation to resonation

Letting the playfulness of language flow

Happy Friday friends,

Wading through continued heaviness in the world over here so I’m keepin’ it light with some riffing.

Anne Helen Petersen

wrote a stellar piece this week about a grammatically incorrect turn of phrase that’s caught fire and irked her for some time: “I resonate with that”. The piece is about the things that inexplicably (or understandably) get under our skin, but also about the mutable nature of language (that’s why we love her so!!), and ultimately, about the human proclivity toward shiftiness and shimmeriness.

If YOU resonate with something, she suggests, you retain the power to shift and at some point no longer resonate with that thing. It’s part CYA (cover your ass), and maybe part self-awareness of the impermanence of life? If something resonates with YOU, there you are, stuck, stagnant, a stake in the ground waiting for resonation. Egoic and accountable.

She writes:

“To resonate, then, is to declare less, to soften a stance, to think it over, to sit back and watch what happens when your bell clangs alongside someone — or something — else. Maybe they become dissonant with time, and you move away, and the clanging becomes yours alone. Maybe you hear a new bell in the distance, maybe you don’t. Maybe, at that point, you’ve resonated with enough things that other things begin to resonate with you. The gravity transforms.”

I do think there’s something deliciously Buddhist about this awkward turn of phrase, revealing our deep, if unconscious, knowledge that our self is but an illusion. We are merely a shimmer for a short period of time.

The concept of resonation is inherently relational and a perfect “neither this nor that, but both this *and* that.” Resonation is reverberation: the relationship between materials, the expression of sound waves (including troughs and peaks) through space.

We resonate because we are, ultimately, just a bunch of ding-a-lings :) A collection of atoms, whose components might be here or there (can’t be sure), moving through space and time. Entering the world with a cry and leaving it with a gurgle. In between, bellowing, singing, groaning, screaming, laughing, and learning lots and lots of words.

Yet we are also hollow vessels receiving, transmuting, and giving out. We are like a cavernous, holy cathedral. Whether we share it or not, much resonates within us.

The comments section of a very gratifying dive into all that bothers people which is to say a lot. But language is a product of culture and history, along with peoples’ pain, wishes, and joy. I have always loved words precisely because of their shiftiness. It’s not and shouldn’t be chaos — as in you can’t just use words in whatever way you want. BUT. it’s also not orderly, either. And therein lies the most powerful playfulness.

As a toddler, hardwood floors were cardboard floors to me. I remember my sister admitting that for a very long time, she thought misled and misled (yes, spelled the same…) were two different words. The former being pronounced MY-suhld, and being more nefarious than the latter, pronounced miss-LEHD, which meant led astray.

My niece, up until she turned six, used to state her middle name, Louise, as Wuhleeze. My other niece, who is five, speaks with a slight speech impediment that can only be described as a strong Boston accent. These are just a few of hundreds of examples of reminders in my own life that language, and our relationship with it, is ever-changing, endearing, and hilarious. Word play, in my view, is the highest form of language use. I’m sure you have hundreds of examples of your own.

Then you have typos, which I have written about as gurus, misspellings and misspeaks, which are, of course, brilliant and often mortifying. I deeply appreciate

Jessica Valenti

, who had a most unfortunate typo in yesterday’s newsletter subheading (which I of course didn’t even notice) and followed it up with a very funny and frank call out. I still remember when Holly Mann, reading aloud from a text book in Mr. Slutsky’s 7th grade science class, said “orgasm” instead of “organism,” and we gasped (though we didn’t really know why). I remember exactly where I was standing in my parents’ driveway when I reviewed a red marked spelling test that blew my mind: “raisin” is not spelled “raisEn. But why?? And why not?

My favorite thing about having friends in different generations (if you don’t, consider trying that!) is catching up to new turns of phrases and being initiated into past ones. My parents still call weed “grass” and I’m not sure what the kids call it now. I have a few friends in their twenties (humble brag) and they help me understand new acronyms which are a whole other subset of language trickery… IYKYK.

Anyway, that’s about it.

Some recent favorite words / phrases of late: nugget, swish, trinket, Spuyten Duyvil, Toad the Wet Sprocket. You?