{"id":595,"date":"2009-12-18T08:45:52","date_gmt":"2009-12-18T13:45:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=595"},"modified":"2009-12-18T08:45:52","modified_gmt":"2009-12-18T13:45:52","slug":"weekly-prompt-private-vocabularies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2009\/12\/18\/weekly-prompt-private-vocabularies\/","title":{"rendered":"Weekly Prompt: Private Vocabularies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Everyone has a\u00a0private vocabulary\u00a0(or vocabularies)\u00a0to which only they and those that they know are privvy.\u00a0 Some of these “private” terms are particular to an individual person’s worldview or imagination (I have a friend who refers to internet\u00a0survey memes\u00a0as “salsa”), while others\u00a0develop\u00a0in the context of relationships with a\u00a0particular group of people (whenever our 12th grade calculus teacher told us to “put away the Martian,” my classmates and I knew that he meant for us to stop doing other classes’ homework while his back was turned).\u00a0 A private vocabulary can be deeply personal, and can link us to the awkward\u00a0idiosyncracies of our families (as Paul Muldoon has\u00a0reflected in his poem “Quoof”), or it can serve as a fruitful\u00a0site\u00a0from which creative production can bloom into\u00a0entire alternate\u00a0worlds\u00a0(as in Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Man-Moth,” <\/a>or Lewis Carroll’s “The Jabberwocky”).\u00a0 Private vocabularies can be nonsense-based, or they can be based in mistranslations, in grammatical inconsistencies, or in\u00a0innovation born of the need to fill\u00a0linguistic gaps.\u00a0 This, I think, can be especially poignant for those of us from immigrant families in which\u00a0a language other than English,\u00a0a mixture of English and other language(s), or a non-standard version of English, was commonly spoken in the home.<\/p>\n

Exercise:
\nWrite a poem that draws on\u00a0a word or set of words particular to a private vocabulary of your own.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Here’s an excerpt from my attempt,\u00a0which draws upon\u00a0the first time that\u00a0my younger brother (who\u00a0grew up calling me\u00a0Jaibo<\/em>, his variant of the Chinese word for older sister),\u00a0addressed me by my “real” (legal) name.<\/p>\n

Losing the Nickname<\/strong><\/p>\n

My real name
\nfell from your mouth
\nso stiffly I thought
\nperhaps you\u2019d coughed.
\n\u201cAh-ris,\u201d the sound
\nof it seemed to stick
\nin your gullet, balled up
\nbehind your gums.\u00a0
\nThe word clattered
\nfrom your tongue,
\nscratchy, a stale clump
\nof bread bumping along
\nthrough uncombed carpet . . .<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As always – if you attempt this –\u00a0we’d be flattered if you shared an excerpt of your results in the comments.\u00a0 Happy writing!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Everyone has a\u00a0private vocabulary\u00a0(or vocabularies)\u00a0to which only they and those that they know are privvy.\u00a0 Some of these “private” terms are particular to an individual person’s worldview or imagination (I have a friend who refers to internet\u00a0survey memes\u00a0as “salsa”), while others\u00a0develop\u00a0in the context of relationships with a\u00a0particular group of people (whenever our 12th grade calculus […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[13],"tags":[153,154,72,152],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=595"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":599,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595\/revisions\/599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}