A Time to Laugh

How to be a Gadfly:

• Pick a cause that you’re passionate about, and ride that horse for all you’re worth.
• Start small. Your cause may be an item of earth-shaking significance or something utterly obscure, but you’re more likely to get attention, and risk serious consequences, if your views push people’s buttons. So be content with small victories in the beginning and work up from there.
• Share your views. Write letters to the editors of newspapers and to your elected officials. Create a Web site, or visit one of the existing ‘gadfly’ sites to talk with like-minded persons.
• Be prepared to swim against the current.
• Take heart from all the gadflies who have gone before. Know that you’re part of a proud tradition.

Now observe that when that clever harlot, our natural reason (which the pagans followed in trying to be most clever), takes a look at married life, she turns up her nose and says, “Alas, must I rock the baby, wash its diapers, make its bed, smell its stench, stay up nights with it, take care of it when it cries, heal its rashes and sores, and on top of that care for my wife, provide for her, labour at my trade, take care of this and take care of that, do this and do that, endure this and endure that, and whatever else of bitterness and drudgery married life involves? What, should I make such a prisoner of myself? O you poor, wretched fellow, have you taken a wife? Fie, fie upon such wretchedness and bitterness! It is better to remain free and lead a peaceful. carefree life; I will become a priest or a nun and compel my children to do likewise.”

What then does Christian faith say to this? It opens its eyes, looks upon all these insignificant, distasteful, and despised duties in the Spirit, and is aware that they are all adorned with divine approval as with the costliest gold and jewels. It says, “O God, because I am certain that thou hast created me as a man and hast from my body begotten this child, I also know for a certainty that it meets with thy perfect pleasure. I confess to thee that I am not worthy to rock the little babe or wash its diapers. or to be entrusted with the care of the child and its mother. How is it that I, without any merit, have come to this distinction of being certain that I am serving thy creature and thy most precious will? O how gladly will I do so, though the duties should be even more insignificant and despised. Neither frost nor heat, neither drudgery nor labour, will distress or dissuade me, for I am certain that it is thus pleasing in thy sight.”

Martin Luther

A Lite-Brite Cube sits on the counter with a half-way-finished car outline on one of the four sides. Home-made glow-in-the-dark Valentine’s window clings are in view. I’ve become very good at gluing Yoshi shoes and twisting Blendy pens. I cleaned up a big pile of Chic-Fil-A puke yesterday without anyone even noticing since I brought my trusty anti-bacterial wipes with me in my carpetbag of a purse

My purse now looks like my mother’s. Right now, it has:

• My wallet (of course!).
• Spearmint gum (my fav).
• A checkbook.
• 3 sets of keys. Three? How’d I get three? What are they for?
• About-to-expire Wendy’s Frosty coupons from Halloween. I have about 12 of them left.
• A dried-up wipe.
• 11 restaurant crayons.
• Burt’s Bees lip gloss and hand salve
• A Mario, Fire Mario, Fire Luigi, Fire Flower, Kirby, and some turtle.
• A Santa Pez dispenser and 4 packages of Pez.
• 3 Hot wheels.
• A small bottle of Equate-brand Ibuprofen.
• A Real Simple brand magnetic to-do-and-to-buy list.
• 2 Magnetic Storybooks — Disney World and Spiderman.
• A pair of chopsticks.
• A half-eaten orange Pixy Stix.
• Bubble yum wrapper. An Extra gum wrapper.
• 3 Christmas Almond M&Ms.
• 3 pennies.
• A toothpick.
• An expired Mutts coupon.
• A handmade tissue holder from my dear friend with pads in it (perfect size!).
• 2 Bath and Body Works bottles of Anti-Bacterial Hand Gel.
• Zicam.
• Grant’s antihistamine.
• 7 lipsticks.
• A Burger King happy meal toy Wii remote.
• A Bionicle elbow joint.
• A Chic-Fil-A “20 Questions” game.
• A twist tie.
• 4 pens.
• A knitted iPhone.
• A Christian Mommy inspirational/encouragement book that I started yesterday after cleaning up the puke.

Motherhood is like an Extreme Makeover. Oh sure, sure — sometimes it seems like the opposite of an Extreme Makeover — the Extreme Letting-Go that allows you to step to the front of the line for Extreme Makeovers. You know, the antidote for cool. You’ve got more Goldfish crackers on the floor of your van than you ever imagined existed. You can sing all the words to Veggie Tales songs. You’ve cultivated a deep affection for Chowder. You dream in Legos.

But your insides are made-over. You just aren’t your old self anymore. And that’s jarring. Because you thought you liked your old self. She was always on-time everywhere and always read a book all the way through in one sitting and could host smart dinner parties and she dusted every week and she had a place for everything and everything was in that place. Or so you think you remember. You haven’t slept in awhile.

It makes you come face-to-face with that tidier and slimmer (in purse and in person) previous self and ask her, “Who are you? What is wrong with you? Why are you so . . . egocentric? How do you think that you can’t get by without that much sleep? And you only have a wallet and a lipstick in your purse? Who are you?”

And then you wonder if maybe the you you are now is the lame one. Sigh. . . .

I understand that the culture told my mother’s generation a big set of lies. “You have to X-ray your child’s feet to make sure they have the right shoes.” “They must be potty-trained by 12 months!” “Feed ‘em formula. Breastmilk is unsanitary.” “If you work or get too much schooling, your womb will wither.”

Our culture tells us lies too. Big ones. I’m somewhat impervious to the mainstream culture’s lies for whatever reason. Being a separatist for 39 years has its advantages. But instead of giving the truth about mothering, I’m finding that conservative Evangelicalism at large has its own Lie it sells to mothers.

And I’m sick of it. I wanna talk it out. This is ridiculous. It seems that while the Keswidispiecostal soteriology is being dismissed by the cool and heavily marketed charismatic Calvinist sorts, that identical rhetorical form is alive and well in their literature for women. Women are told to empty themselves of themselves in order to truly be saved, in order to show others that they are saved, and in order to get their kids saved. They’ve saved the lousiest theology for the ghetto of the women’s advice books just like the drug companies saved the mercury-laden vaccines for the Third World. This junk’s gotta sell somewhere. . . .

We’ve forgotten what Luther said. We don’t parent to demonstrate the Gospel — to show those around us how beautifully we can do it all. No, we parent because it is the Gospel — because God takes us in as foundlings, lifts us up as His own, loves us even when we stink, puke, and screach, and He dresses us, carries us, and loves us.

It’s not about showing. It’s about loving. It’s not about beauty. It’s about serving the smallest and the littlest in the darkest part of the night when there’s no one is up except us and that wee one and God.

But I need to go bring in the groceries. They are out in the car. The old-me used to love to grocery-shop. The new-me hates it now. It’s so boring and overstimulating and tiring. Besides . . .  the giant generic grape jelly tried to escape and splathered its guts on the driveway. And the pickled beets gave into the peer pressure and followed. Shame. . . . they were both so, so purple.

A — a couple of examples that I can give in the — that I cite there that I might mention. I don’t happen to have the book with me but I can remember that — a — a range of them in there. And that is — that — the — take Veblen’s concept of trained incapacity.

Now — now your natural tendency is training is in one category and incapacity is in another. You think of them as — as mutually exclusive. The whole — the whole trick here was to — was to jump those across. Especially where you could speak of incapacity, as — as training itself as a form of incapacity. And the — and another one I recall that Elliot used in one place where he spoke of decadent athleticism. Where usually you think of athletics in the healthy category and decadence in another category. But by putting those together, you see, across there it gives you what I would call a “perspective by incongruity.” And then you can get — and I think this is, oh the whole essence of the — the whole, surrealist line of — of breaking down your categories in that way.

I had a — among my list of a — of a — modes of lining up vocabulary, the remarkable thing is I completely forgot to put that in my list, but I tend to go back and do it on the basis of — of each statement. And you’ll see that it is — it worked out in quite some length in the — in this whole section on perspective by incongruity.

Kenneth Burke, Lecture at Drew University, 1969, Recently transcribed by Moi and Ed Appel

Can you tell that we and our friends were having a little too much fun with the Roland the other weekend? I should explain. . . . Years and years ago, this nerd’s idea of fun at a party was playing with all Grant’s pre-sets on his Casio keyboard. Having heard the BJU “University Hymn” over and over and over for sooooo many Commencements, the funniest thing I could think of was mangling that tune into a thousand variations — caricatures even. I mean, what would it look like if the regalia-laden BJU “family” bee-bopped into the FMA to scat singing? Or if we line-danced down the aisle to steel guitar? Or if we all slow danced to the same tune?

Burke would call it “perspective by incongruity” — taking two disparate “terms” (because what is music but another symbol system?) and shoving them together to make something completely new. It’s the “last place” of “freedom,” Burke even says in that 1969 2-hour lecture I just transcribed. It is, at the very least, a source of comedy that keeps us from being too hopelessly ourselves, as Burke would also say.

And so the obsession began way back in . . . oh, 1990, I guess. And now I share it with you this latest one, “Safe Sax at the Bob.”

I played this once yesterday, and now my lil’ guys can’t stop singing it.

Chickens can be taught that only one specific pitch [of a ringing bell] is a food-signal. . . . If one rings the bell next time, not to feed the chickens, but to assemble them for chopping off their heads, they come faithfully running, on the strength of the character which a ringing bell possesses for them. Chickens not so educated would have acted more wisely. Thus it will be seen that the devices by which we arrived at a correct orientation may be quite the same as those involved in an incorrect one.

Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change

Did you hear about the guy in NYC who was so closely following his car’s navigation system that he drove straight down a set of railroad tracks . . . right into an oncoming train? No kidding! He and the passenger barely escaped by jumping out of the car.

Piety can be a bad thing.

Burke called it the difference between motion and action. Breathing is motion; sighing is action. The former is involuntary. The latter is intentional and meaningful. Burke explained further that while evolution described the evolving force as simply moving, creation centered on active, intentional God.

You get the picture.

Burke wanted us to act like humans, not move like chickens. Don’t follow the talking box in your car to your certain demise!

And when it all comes down to it, I’m pretty positive that that’s why Republicans, specifically those on Christian Right, are so ticked right now. We had been going along, following what our pastors, Christian radio personalities, family, teachers were telling us: “Vote Republican. Don’t mess this up. Just vote Republican. They get us. They understand. They are fighting for us. Just do it.”

Don’t act. Just move.

And now we’re face-to-face with the realization that we got PWNED.

John Whitehead from the Rutherford Institute is as blunt and accurate as you can be:

Like moths flickering about a hot flame, the leaders of the Christian Right are eager to get close to political power. But as anyone who has played the game knows, politics is corrupt and manipulative. And the Christian Right was manipulated by the Bush Administration.

And we’re processing the grief. Deep down, nearly every reaction I’ve got to my recent and public less-than-loyal-to-the-GOP comments can be described as denial pure and simple. And to this participant in and student of American religious rhetoric, the reactions cluster around certain topoi, all variations on the red herring fallacy. So I give you:

The Top Ten Campaign 2008 Fallacies from the Religious Right

(Dog Latin gratis)

“What about them?” Formal Name: Tu Quoque.

• Let’s get this one out of the way. Because after my friends on the Religious Right read that header, they’re already muttering “You gonna give equal time to them, aren’t you?” under their breath. Let’s face it: I don’t know “them.” I haven’t spent my life with “them.” I don’t get vituperative reactions from “them” when I disagree with the standard GOP line. So this is all in the family right now.
• Potential Retort: “That’s not my project.” It worked in grad school. Might work here.

“They are all liars!” “They both do it!” Formal Name: also Tu Quoque.

• This is usually the first line of defense, and what it really reveals is severe undertow of cynicism. It’s the Republican version of “Yo Mama!” As an attempt to put the opponent on the defensive, it’s usually general and imprecise so an effective defense is impossible.
• Retort: You can’t respond with some Zen-like “Aren’t we all liars deep down?” No, you have to reflect feelings. “It is easier to be mad than sad.”

“What about Jeremiah Wright?” Formal Name: Religio est Freakium. It’s a combination of Ad Hominem and Guilt by Association with an extra dash of freak-out over weird religions.

• This is the response I get the most. And it irks me. Because it’s like asking a doctor on the sidewalk, “Hey, I’ve got a pain right here. What could that be?” Your doc isn’t gonna tell you without research and observation. And neither am I! I’m trained in studying religious discourse, and a clip shown ad nauseum on Fox News doesn’t cut it. I know enough about American-grown religion in the black community a la the Nation of Islam to know that we white people just don’t get it. And this white woman is not going to attempt to get it quickly.
• Secondly, HELLO? I spent 20 years within what was for all intents and purposes a pretty racist place. And I don’t buy their defense of racism. There was good there. A lot of good. And, like all human institutions, there was a lot of foolishness, even dangerous and hurtful foolishness. People in glass houses . . . .[/rant]
• The Left is doing it about Sarah Palin too. Everybody’s up in arms that she’s a Pentecostal. And yeah, she is. That doesn’t make her evil. It may reveal a part of her, but it doesn’t reveal all of her.
• Retort: “Can we get back to the issues?”

“How could you?” Formal Name: Argumentum ad Betrayalium. It’s the opposite of Argumentum ad Verecundiam. And it’s related Bandwagon.

• This response is more emotionally weighty than the flabbergasted and understandable “Can you explain this one to me?” It communicates that feeling of (unjustified) betrayal that you’re not voting for the Republican candidate instead of the justified betrayal that the GOP has delivered a real loser candidate. It’s a diversion because it’s easier to be mad at an unemployed goof like me than to get mad at someone powerful or out-of-reach. The real problem here is a lack of personal boundaries.
• Retort: “Thanks for your concern. Would you like some bean dip?”

“Terrorist!” Formal Name: Reductio ad Terroristum.

• There’s nothing you can say after that.
• It’s just like Reductio ad Hitlerum with a 21^st-century twist. Or Reductio ad Arabium: “He’s an Arab!” Or Reductio ad Abortum: “He kills babies with a hammer!”
• Retort: We need to update Godwin’s Law with Camille’s Corollary: “As the Religious Right’s candidate falls in the polls, the number of accusations that the opposing candidate is not a Christian will demonstrate an inversely proportional rise.”

“Polemic!” Formal Name: Reductio ad Spinum

• I believe this response is intended to mean “Quit stalling. Get to my point.” But in the grand scheme of things, it is expressing frustration at argumentative creativity. It means, “Quit dancing and stick to the talking points.” Personally, I don’t stick to the talking points. That’s not what I do. If you don’t like it, talk to someone who’ll respond like you want them to.
• Retort: “Huh?”

“How could you fall for all that celebrity/eloquence/schmaltz/rhetoric?” Formal Name: Reductio ad Gorgias

• Okay. I’ll ignore that slam on my academic discipline for now. . . . There has been a ton of schmaltz. No doubt. On all sides. And it is tiring. But who says I am falling for it? Do I buy Dr. Pepper because I like the jingle – even if it is a great jingle? Nope. I like the taste.
• Retort: “I’m not.”

“At least, vote for third party!” “Whatever you do — don’t vote for third party!” Formal Name: Reductio ad Authoritum est Rubberium et Tu est Glueium

• Talk about an argumentative tennis match. “Third party is the least of all evils;” “The third party is the biggest waste of your civic energy.” “At least be consistent with my values and vote for Bob Barr;” “You think Ralph Nader could actually win?” Whatever it is you’re planning to do is wrong and you must do the opposite. Which is also wrong so you must just vote for the GOP: it’s the only possible choice.
• Retort: “Vote your conscience. I’m voting mine. That’s all you have left after this campaign.”

“If you think you’re offended, well, I’m offended more.” Formal Name: Reductio ad Colbertum

• It is an attempt to pirate the usually left-wing trope of “political correctness.” It falls flat. It’s like when a rich friend complains that his boat needs a new whatever-it-is-that-boats-need while your dishwasher is broken, your credit cards are maxed out, and your goofy, incontinent dog is bald from all the obsessive licking.
• Retort: The only way to respond is to imagine the person is channeling Stephen Colbert. Then, with comic irony fully intact, you may move on. WristStrong!

“Either you’re for us or you’re against us.” Formal Name: Reductio ad Absurdum

• This is the most sacrilegious of the fallacies because it takes a Scriptural phrase and imposes that formal either-or bifurcation on anything and everything. “You’re either for McCain or you’re a communist.” “You either love America or you’re voting for Obama.” “You either are smart and agree with me or you’re an argula-eating, Huffington-reading loser.”
• Retort: “Says who?”

The Christian Right has been so painfully loyal to the GOP since the 1980s, and now we’re hearing the warning whistles and seeing the light coming closer and closer. And we’re bickering amongst ourselves about who jumped off the tracks first. Just ACT!

Be pious to the Gospel! Don’t be pious to the Party.

We went to Indiana University. Grant wanted a terminal degree in Voice Performance, and I wanted one in Rhetorical Studies. We needed to go to a place that had both, and that narrows it down to the Midwest pretty quickly. There’s Northwestern (too expensive!) and Louisiana (too conservative!!). IU was an easy choice then.

But I did not get accepted into the Ph.D. program. I was told that the reason was that BJU wasn’t accredited and that my recommendation letters were “a little strange.”

They were. I read them. Ugh! The line that got me was: “. . . and when we were hiring her husband (a fine lyric tenor) to teach, we decided to hire her as well.” Wow. I mean, he is a fine, lyric tenor, but I thought I brought something to the table. ::shrug:: I wouldn’t have accepted me after that either.

That Spring we visited Bloomington for Grant to audition, and I met with the Speech-Comm Graduate Officer to explain that I still wanted to take classes “to get my foot in the door.” He said, “Don’t bother. Even if you do well, that’s no guarantee you’ll get in.”

I cried all the way home to South Carolina. My brother and another dear friend reassured me that he had to say that for legal reasons. The whole thing was very humbling and scary and lonely. I decided to still attend classes with several academic strikes against me as a “professional non-degree student.” Alone.

I worked like a dog. I read every assignment two and three times. Sure, sure — I had read a lot of the texts before, but everything seemed so new.

For instance, Plato’s Phaedrus, that exemplar of the best rhetoric in my previous world, is talking about that? Why didn’t anyone ever tell me that before? It’s so obvious if you read the entire original dialogue. Plato, I had been taught in my sophomore philosophy class at BJU, was “the closest a pagan can come to being a Christian without converting.” Whuh?

Plato was actually the biggest and most satisfying target in those initial classes. Rhetoricians like to dismantle him because he was so pivotal in relegating us and our study to “mere” status. But countering his ideas had moral import because, to my peers and my profs, Plato was just a hop, skip and a goose-step away from fascism. They, too, often tied Plato to Christianity, and I knew that was not right even if my fundamentalist education taught me as much. Christ was different from all that, and I was determined to figure out how to express it.

Now my dear brother was several steps ahead of me in the dissing-Plato department and in the foregrounding-Christ mission. His dissertation at Ohio State was about ancient near-Eastern wisdom literature (think Solomon’s Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Book of Job with a side of its Egyptian and Babylonian counterparts) and its similarity to ancient Greek rhetoric texts. In other words, he proved, Solomon sounded a lot more like Protagoras than Plato. And the evidence is astounding. I was very slowly becoming less of just a giddy little-sister admirer to my brother’s persona and more of a giddy junior scholar to his ideas. That alone was a pretty cool transition.

So for me, Plato’s standing was crumbling. He was no longer the philosophical embodiment of Christianity like I’d been taught but, in fact, a rhetorical and religious nemesis.

And who’s the biggest contemporary advocate for a Platonic view of rhetoric? ::drumroll:: Richard Weaver. I admit that it startled me when my professor made fun of Weaver in class. This was the guy I knew the most about. Now my brother had already informed me of some of Weaver’s goofiest quirks — like he would only ride a train and never a plane because it was more connected to the earth and that he would still plow his fields up in Weaverville (!!), NC with a horse because it was more organic and that the only way anyone knew he was dead up at the U of Chicago was because he wasn’t sitting on the same bench at the same time eating his lunch like he had been every day for years previously. Talk about Aspergers!

But my prof’s anti-Weaver quip was something different, and I wanted to understand it. Our final exam for that class was to “intersect” three rhetoricians from our reading that semester to compare and contrast their ideas. I chose Gorgias (because he was a stinker), Richard Whately (because he was another fav from my previous life), and my old buddy Richard Weaver. I had real-life people in mind as I wrote that trialogue — Richard Weaver was best personified by his favorite advocate in my life, DeWitt Jones; Whately reminded me of my terribly practical, business-minded, self-made-man father-in-law; and Gorgias was my brother. To be honest, I think Gorgias gets the long end of that deal because I don’t like the guy that much, but Steve ranks pretty high on my admiration meter.

So what happens when a Platonist, an Aristotelian, and an Isocratean/Ciceronian talk? The Platonist keeps tripping over his own feet because he’s too busy looking for the meaning of life in the stars, the Aristotelian keeps insisting that we need to maintain the status quo because we’ll lose jobs, and Ciceronian jabs and pokes and laughs at the humanity in all of us while he tries to make new and better worlds with his words. At least, that’s what I tried to say in that final exam. Go read it for yourself.

It’s weird to read that final exam now. I was beginning to find what I wanted to find in higher education. The neat and tidy package my paleo-neo-theo-con curriculum delivered to me was too distilled and too naive. And I knew that the Left qua Left (that’s one of the things you learn to do in the Academy — throw in random Latin phrases to put your reader/listener off-kilter) didn’t have all the answers either. But the antagonism I was taught in Theoconsville was misplaced.  My Left-leaning profs criticized Bill Clinton as much as I did. They were heavily critical of Modernity, and if I remember my fundamentalist history accurately enough, so was I. They weren’t the rank relativists I was told they were either. They believed there were moral hierarchies and admitted it. Their main criticism was focused on hubris, that self-serving pride that propped up foolish fictions which sends all of us to our doom.

It’s not the Right is completely wrong nor is the Left evil. Here’s what I said back then in response to a mind-blowing chapter by Richard Lanham:

Having spent the last ten years at a conservative Christian liberal arts university, I have experienced the Weak Defense firsthand. That subculture has grown out of both the humanist education and the current religious fundamentalism that Lanham describes (161). Outside of Scripture, what is considered good comes from what is privileged. Plato, that bastion of Western culture, is described as drawing as close to conservative Christian doctrine as a pagan can. Shakespeare is equally virtuous and considered a supporter of religious fundamentalism. These arguments are not made to justify Shakespeare or Plato, but to justify the subculture itself. The reasoning is, “if these pillars of our culture are essentially moral and if we are like them, then we must be good too.” When students question the curriculum (“Why should I study Shakespeare?”), the characteristic response is the Weak Defense (“Because he’s part of your liberal arts education.”). The winners that we study, whether Greek philosophers or English playwrights, dictate an absolute, objective reality.

By juxtaposing the Strong and the Weak Defenses of rhetoric, Lanham is defining his preference in terms of the other. The Weak Defense is from the likes of Plato and [Allan] Bloom who view truth as absolute, received, and stable. The Strong Defenders view truth as referential, human, and compliant. Offering no justification for this simplistic truth dichotomy, Lanham just assumes that it exists. Plato set the terms for our present view of the world and controls how Lanham sees reality. To Lanham, the Weak Defenders view truth as absolute and rhetoric as castrated; the Strong Defenders view truth as contingent and rhetoric as powerful. He assumes that the divine and the human are separate with neither influencing the other, just like the separation he criticizes in his opponents.

Perhaps there are other choices that see rhetoric as vital, subjective, and human, and truth as contingent yet divine. Truth is not then “handed down by God” (188) and flashed on the back of the cave for only a select few. Truth is with us and available within our perceptions, our culture, our rhetoric and is still divine. My Defense for rhetoric is obviously neither of Lanham’s Defenses. Strongly defending rhetoric within a conservative Christian subculture is not impossible. Language, as a human creation, is inherently subjective. Rhetoric and philosophy are intertwined and equal since both are human. Good can be multiple and divine with rhetoric as prominent and active. Appropriateness or wisdom becomes a conspicuous theme. Plato and Shakespeare are still important but not merely as a self-conscious justification for personal views. The Great Books and the not-so-Great Books are necessary to understand humanity and the constructing of a culture. Such a Defense addresses and celebrates rhetoric as a human creation and the divine as the Image in which we are made. Both are inextricably intertwined and symbiotic. This defense is as uncomfortable as the Strong Defense since it demands rhetorical scholars to reconsider the validity of Plato’s dichotomy and people to discern what is appropriate and good rather than assuming goodness from privilege. This Defense allows me to meld my scholarship with my culture; but, and perhaps more importantly, it requires a more creative and inclusive treatment of the many defenses to rhetoric.

Funny. This is no different than most of the stuff I taught at BJU from 2000-2007, and my students who are reading this know that.

But this is what I was looking for, what was missing in my paleo-neo-theo-con life. It’s not that the Left is completely right and wholly good. Not at all. It’s more that I needed to learn a second (cultural) language to help me understand my own native tongue.