"Frenemies" by David Schairer

Since my retirement, I’ve found myself with a surfeit of spare time and little but my books to keep me company.  Books – especially those who have been my companions for decades – can be both friends and enemies – succor to memory, but also demonic vessels of a challenging and hostile past.  

Today I was musing on the natural contradictions in our language – words can also be friends and enemies, even of themselves.  I can sanction an event, making it acceptable and recommended, while the government can sanction it, making it illicit and unavailable.  Our language itself betrays us and our contradictions.

  *Gʰóstis is one of my favorite words in Proto-Indo-European – the hypothetical reconstructed ancestor of almost all the historically related languages in an arc from Ireland to the Ganges.  Without going all Sapir-Whorf on you – that’s not cool these days, I’m told by people outside – I always believed that the words you use drive the way you think, and the way you think, and the constraints thereupon, make you who you are.  It explains a lot.

So, gʰóstis – the ultimate root for host, and for guest, and for ghost, a kind of guest, and also potentially an enemy, since gʰóstis also comes down to us as Latin hostis, a foe, and our word ‘hostile’.  A word fundamentally contradictory of itself, perhaps reflecting the ultimate sin of humanity, that the Other, the unknown, is always an enemy first and foremost, even when the Other is ourself.  

As often happens, that’s when Ted wandered in.  Ted, too, was both a friend and an enemy – he tended to show up just when I needed someone to argue with, an advocatus diaboli against whatever clever thought I was trying to develop.  Ted never liked Sapir-Whorf – he favored an orthodox Chomskyism although he once admitted that such an approach, too, was falling out of fashion.  

Ted was in fine fettle today.  “We can’t blame our troubles on our words,” he argued. 

“Words are only as good as the ideas behind them, and the ideas are what make us.”  

“And yet, in some weird Jungian sense,” I argued, “these unified meanings of words power the subconscious that itself builds the ideas.  There’s no other absolute truth beneath them.”

“Piffle,” said Ted, choosing a word with such onomatopoetic force that it either strengthened or undercut his whole premise.  “You can’t possibly think your own mind works that way.”

We went on like this for some time, but since these core principles were articles of faith, not fact, we made little progress, until finally I pointed out that the very capability of maintaining disparate core models in one’s head at once disproved his unyielding universalism, which finally gave Ted pause.

At this point my door unlocked itself as it does at 4pm.  An hour to go before nightly meds, so I let Ted vanish and went down to the common room to join the others. 

After degrees in Greek, Latin, and archaeology from the University of Michigan, David spent thirty years in Silicon Valley building everything from dial-up networks to game platforms and AI assistants.  He lives in San Jose, California, and collects books, dead languages, and antique writing implements.