A Man of Few Words

Articles

A Man of Few Words

By David Jenneson
June 22, 2004

The farewell warmth of the autumn sun fades. Wood smoke rises from chimneys, giving the North Shore night a down homey edge. Readers obey an unbidden instinct to curl up with a good book in front of a cracking good fire.

And North Shore residents are big readers indeed. Some time ago the West Vancouver library was able to brag that we borrowed more books than anywhere else in Canada.

As literate and caring readers of the English language we know there less fortunate around the world. They are actually endangered, and threaten to splutter and die at any moment. But what can we do as individuals?

The less asked but equally important question is, are there new languages being created to take their place? Is there a natural regeneration like mushrooms rising from the leaf litter? To this I can answer yes. There are fonts of speech spewing up new lexicon like smoking sea floor volcanoes. And I am lucky enough to know one personally. His name is Rish. His real name is Ritch. He is called Rish because he mispronounced his own name in Grade 9 Latin Class and it stuck.

I first became aware of his language regenerating powers in our early teens. A group of us walked the streets one winter night near Ridgeway School in North Vancouver, just hanging out. I had recently been studying the star maps and was anxious to show off my new knowledge. I picked out a well known constellation in the sky and pointed up.

“Look, there’s Orion,” I announced.

Everyone looked up, and gave assenting nods to my superior knowledge of the heavens.

“O’Ryan, O’Ryan, you dirty old Scotsman!” Rish shook his fist at a dimly lit upstairs window slightly below the great constellation. It was a defining moment. He clearly had a unique slant not only on the night sky, but on the comprehension and rebirth of meaning and language. At the time we were too young to appreciate it. Didn’t matter. What followed was much better.

Soon he got his driver’s license. He was a nervous driver but his father lent him have the family car anyway, a huge copper colored 1964 Merc land yacht. On his first trip into the city he rounded a tight cloverleaf turn onto Lions Gate Bridge. We shouted encouragement. With a cry of long tried patience he yelled, “Hey! Don’t bug me. I’m IN THE STEER!”

This silenced even us. It was new stuff and we had better listen. We did.

It was encouraging to see how easily he kept ahead of the linguistic curve. It was the late 1960’s, the time of anti-war protests and the genesis of the environmental movement. He bewailed how General Morewestland botched the Vietnam War. He became environmentally aware. Early one winter morning he viewed The Hecate Straight, a body of supposedly pristine water that separates the Queen Charlotte Island from the mainland. In the bright winter sunlight the Hecate was filled with floating logs, bits of debris and polluting crud. He waved an arm at it and lamented, “Ach, look at The Hectic Straights. Full of derbis.”

In the 1970’s everyone got married and bought houses. One of our friends bought a grand old craftsman house, full of small passages and little rooms. Rish particularly admired it. Especially the knookways.

He was accumulating a body of work. In summertime he was bothered by bellbottom flies and he once ordered Quickie Lorraine for brunch at a French restaurant in West Vancouver.

In the meantime we pursued our careers. He moved away and rose to a job as manager of an industrial tool outlet. It was demanding. No question. All that inventory. All those names and parts to remember. God knows what new linguistic shorthand he had to invent for his customers, mainly loggers, fishermen and millwrights. It took its toll. We went to visit him. His wife made oysters Florentine, and we waited for Rish to get home from work so we could eat. He’d had a few drinks already, but deservedly so considering the odium of his job. In fact he was so beat he sat down in his suit and tie, drank a couple of glasses of wine, ate his oysters and promptly fell asleep. This wouldn’t cut it in most households, but in this case his wife let it pass.

“You’ll have to pardon Rish,” she said after he’d dozed for a few minutes. “He’s exhausted. He’s been working every hour of the day, he’s had no sleep and he’s just worn out. But I’m so proud of him. Everyone says he’s doing a fantastic job.” We looked at his little slumped form with its necktie. Then he stirred.

We watched. Slowly his head rose up; due to hearing praise on a subconcious level I suppose. Finally he had got his due. At that moment he resembled some rising Captain of Commerce, master of his domain, about to impart knowledge to his acolytes with a few well chosen words. He scanned us all with crafty look.

“I don’t want to blow my own goat, BUT …”

Then, satisfied, he collapsed back into sleep. For that he got a t-shirt, emblazoned with same. Finally he was in print.

He continued to blaze a path, but always ahead of the curve. Like many people his age he went through the spin cycle of marriage and got divorced. Like most men he went into denial about his finances afterward. He carried all his earthly documents from place to place in an antique leather lawyer’s briefcase, the accordion type, and he would try and sort his bills out from time to time. It was a bewildering disarray of long distance phone bills, credit card receipts and shoe repair invoices. There were also were seven years of accumulated tax bills. He moved around so much no bill collector could find him. He once spilled the whole works out in the Arizona desert by mistake but picked them up again. Later he left them behind in Maryland for two whole months, but they were returned, briefcase and all. They followed him through the world like a bug. When he finally returned from his odyssey it was to a remote cabin on one of the Gulf Islands. I was happy he’d returned. I wouldn’t have to wait for his unsent letters or incomprehensible long distance calls. I was among the first to reach him at his new hide out. I expected him to be happy, but he was moody when we spoke.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Revenue Canada phoned.”

“Good God, you’ve been on the move for seven years. Now you’re living on some uncharted spot on an island fifty miles from the nearest city. How on earth did they get your number?”

“You know how the government works these days,” he muttered darkly.

“Huh?”

“They’re using that electronic eavestroughing.”. I had to agree. “If the tax department’s on your roof, you’re in trouble.”

The thing about Rish is that he knows when he’s created a new word and when you catch him on it, he silently kicks himself. Busted again. You can hear him do it, even over the phone. A noiseless thub. He frets over adding to his own lifelong body of work for which he’s still not sure he wishes to be recognized. To me there’s no question. I greatly admire his efforts as a linguistic rejuvenator. I will tell him this once I think his great works are complete, but I in the meantime I don’t want to stop the flow in mid-sentence.

I spoke to him a few days ago. He is still at the same cabin on the remote island, but now has work as a housepainter and home improvement contractor. A lot of wealthy people have moved there. He complained about the high end demographics of his clients. “It’s getting too upscale,” he said. “I don’t fit in. My clients are rich. They all wear blue polo shirts and those expensive white Docksteader pants.”

I wanted confirmation. “Docksteader pants you say?” “Yeah, those goddam white Docksteaders,” he confirmed ruefully.

Just so you know, Docksteader is the name of a big well established Vancouver car dealer, as opposed to Docker, which is a big, well established, legitimate maker of expensive casual pants. It is troubling to think that a big Vancouver car dealership is now manufacturing pants for upscale island residents. It casts up an alarming picture - wealthy yuppies walking around in loud checked pants like hundreds of Herb Tarlics. This time I didn’t say anything to Rish. I just enjoyed the image.

Rish forges on. His new language is loved by all, and indeed, eagerly anticipated. His linguistic jewels shine up through the mud of the argot. For his lifelong friends his words have become part of our own lexicon. I think his a wonderful contribution to the renewal of English. It’s more than I can say for myself, and I’m a writer. His friends and associates happily use derbis and electronic eavestroughing and nookways as part of their regular vocabulary because they still work as communication and are more fun than regular words. And everyone knows what they mean. Instantly. I believe the long dead masters of endangered languages would approve. The Cheyenne chiefs would smile. The Celtic Irish give a Gaelic wink. The Romani and Aramic and Tagalog and Maori would get a belly laugh, as would the whole sociolinguistic bunch of them.

But God help spell check.

------------

About the author: David Jenneson is a writer and noveliest who lives in Vancouver, Canada. You may reach him at his website www.davidjenneson.com email: dmail@telus.net

Tell a friend about this site!

------------