Part One
It's been said that the Eskimo people have hundreds of words for "snow." It sounds logical, given that they supposedly live around the frozen precipitation their whole lives, but it's not true. The Eskimo people don't even have a single language. In addition, if you look at all of the Eskimo languages--Siberian Yupik, Qawiarak, Labrador Inuttut, just to name a few--the word for snowflake is pretty much the same. You don't have to speak any of the Eskimo languages to see that.
There are words for "niece" and "nephew," but there's not a generic word for both. There are words for "cousin," but there's not a specific word for a girl cousin or a boy cousin.
If you're a child who has lost both of your parents, you're an orphan. If you're a person who has lost their spouse, you're a widow or a widower.
But there's no word for me. There's no one single word in the English language for what I am.
The first time I met Liz, she was having a pretty intense conversation with our comparative linguistics professor about the history of the word "agrestic," and I was waiting to talk to him about why my paper on experimental phonetics hadn't earned an A. I'd seen Liz around campus, but we had never talked. She and her friends seemed silly and childish, more interested in social events and boys than their actual education. Admittedly, I found her attractive, but I'd made a serious commitment to my studies and hadn't found much need for a romantic relationship as part of that commitment.
She turned from her conversation and her eyes fell upon me. Gesturing towards me, she asked the professor, "Would you find him agrestic? I mean, doesn't it all depend on your perspective? Someone from, say, New York City or Paris certainly would, don't you agree?"
"But that's only if you're adhering to the original meaning of the word, Liz. The meaning has morphed since then. Calling him 'agrestic' would be insulting to him, really."
"Well, I don't argue that," Liz conceded, "but in this case, maybe he fits all meanings of the word. No offense...um..."
"Larry. It's Larry. And none taken."
I waited a minute longer, but the conversation didn't seem to be slowing down, so I decided to postpone my conversation and headed back to my dorm where I looked up the word "agrestic." Had I been any kind of a real comparative linguistics major, I'd definitely have been offended.
I didn't meet Liz again until the linguistics club hosted a Halloween dance party at The Pizza Loft the Autumn of our junior year. She was Isaac Newton in his younger days, with a prism in one hand and a Bible in the other, when he was more attractive and hadn't yet become a bi-polar jerk. I was Jean Francois Champollion, the French scholar who deciphered the Rosetta Stone. I dressed in Egyptian garb and carried a Styrofoam stele carved with hieroglyphics. A couple of them were real, but mostly it was scribbles that my suitemates had etched into the foam with the end of an ink pen, the ballpoint retracted.
I'm not a dancer. I'll just say that right now. It was completely against my will that I participated in the dancing aspect of the evening, but the numbers were uneven, and some young lady would have ended up without a dance partner, which, in retrospect, may have been for the best. Nevertheless, I approached the circle, reached for a ribbon from the mass of brightly colored strips and held on. I chose the green one, the one with the frayed edge, a thread hanging from it brushing against my wrist like spider's silk. On the count of three, we all pulled back, and Liz was on the other side of the circle, her eyes rolled ceilingward, holding her own frayed end of the green ribbon.
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