Pursued by the agents of formalized cliche, and in pursuit of the roots of true language, we ducked into a speakeasy - such places had sprouted like organic slang since the passing of the latest municipal syntax. After knocking twice and correctly identifying the true author of shakespeare's sonnets, the door opened and a boggy irishman ushered us in with a soggy nod of his head. "Say what you will, gennelmen", said he, "but parse not lest ye be parsed. Um's the word, y'know."
He beat a peaty retreat towards the bar and we entered, in Finnegan's wake.
The heat was off . This was cool. All about us came the hubbub of mother tongues, from sanskrit to gallic to y'all, all rising to a haze of thick glossolalia stirred into meaning by the lone ceiling fan. Verbal gumbo. We looked at each other and smiled wide as our prefrontal lobes ignited in phonetic sympathy. "Ah, the sweet elixir", said one of us, "Neural drool", said the other, laughing. "I think something stout is calling my name", said one more - and we eased into the din of antiquity, heading for the taps.
Edging, shouldering, sidestepping past poets, griots and stern-looking umlauts, we arrived at the bar and asked for pints of the local dialect. The irishman fixed us with a brassy glare and boomed "In the beginning was the Word!" "One word!" came the sudden chorus from from the room. "BUT", roared the son of Erin, "One word cannot be said without a second to give it meaning." "Two words!" shouted back the crowd. "And so", said Finnegan softly, "this one Word, unspoken, breathes life into all you say and hear." All grew silent as the ceiling fan creaked to a stop and the irishman leaned forward expectantly, looking at us each in turn. We drew straws on a napkin and the shortest sketcher frowed his burrow, shrugged and cried, "Yo! What's the Word?!". The room exploded in laughter and high-pitched doggerel and the ceiling fan stirred anew. "Congrats lads", said the barkeep, "Yu'v just recapitulated the ontogeny of yer own vocabulary!"
We didn't know if this was good or bad and a little greek guy with a sticker on his chest that read Hi, my name is Homer leapt onto a table and yelled, "And here's another history lesson: In a land where words were few and stark, no synonyms abounded. Each word described an equal portion of reality, and their relationship to other words was a succinct grammar in itself. This natural tongue, though noble, could not help but grow incestuous to preserve itself. Some words began to have more than one meaning; others survived only in reference to other words. As time went on, this fateful trend continued, from burble to babble to riot. And just when every word seemed to mean anything, everything, nothing, a very strange thing occured..."
The doors to the speakeasy suddenly flew open, dark figures silhouetted in the streetlight pouring in. "Shadduuuuuup!!" screamed a hooded voice, and then menacing, "Stow yer tongues and nobody gets... hurt." The figures began to advance, reciting lines from cheesy gangster flicks in a low liturgical litany. "It's a raid!" yelled Homer, scrambling off the table, and all was bedlam. "Thought police" hissed Finnegan, pulling open a trap door behind the bar, "this way to clarity. Hurry."
We hustled down the chute, recognizing the dark figures as our pursuers, centuries of articulation receding as we sped, chasing the word, and being chased by its constraints...
