Casual encounters rarely lead to life-long relationships

Casual encounters rarely lead to life-long relationships

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The title of this post is a sentence in a book I don’t seem to be able to finish: Grammar, Vocabulary and Everything in Between (GVEB). It’s a book full of language learning tasks on whose cover I would like to plaster “More fun than Murphy". Better not :-).

But what is holding me up at the moment is the writing of another task book called After IELTS (and e-course), which is for students who have passed the Academic IELTS and will soon start their university studies in English, perhaps in the belief that IELTS prepared them for university level work. This belief was at least partly engendered by the low IELTS score that the university declared adequate for this level of study. I witnessed many hundreds of students in exactly this situation being seriously ill-prepared. So, when I finish writing After IELTS, I will finally finalise the final version of GVEB. Watch this space!
 
In the context of GVEB, "casual encounters rarely lead to life-long relationships” refers to the lack of long-term impact that a meeting with a word whilst reading, listening and watching has. It’s like being in your local shopping mall or at a reception with hundreds of people milling about. They all share the properties of [HUMAN] – walking upright, head, body, four limbs, clothed, a sense of purpose. There will be some outliers – very tall, blue hair, in a wheelchair, atypically dressed, looking lost and confused. Some people look very familiar, some less familiar, and others not at all.  It will be clear that some people are there with another person, and others are functioning in small groups. Some people will be helping others and some people will be performing their roles in their milieu independently.
 
If we don’t stop and get to know someone in a crowd or a word in a text, they are not going to enter into our consciousness or become a part of our understanding of the world. They are just going to be a part of “the general mush of goings on”, to quote J. R. Firth, whom some regard as the founding father of British linguistics. People do stop, even crouch, to pat someone’s dog or goo-gah someone’s child as a coy excuse to talk to the accompanying adult. At a reception, people have the shared context of the event itself to thaw the ice. When I was teacher training for the BC in Tashkent, the British Ambassador held occasional garden parties. At one such event, I walked up to two women nursing wines and announced that I didn’t know anyone there. They said they didn’t either. We got chatting and ended up Sunday lunching together for the next few months till COVID put paid to that. And a few other social niceties and professional MOs. We three have a Telegram group and stay in touch. I’ve met them both once since. They have most definitely become a part of my worldview.
 
If we want new words to become part of our "wordview", a fleeting meeting ain’t gonna cut it. We can read and listen and watch till the cows come home, but if we don’t devote some attention to the desirably unfamiliar, they will remain unfamiliar and the desire will remain unquenched. If you have never seen the word unquenched before, be not surprised. In the 52 billion (sic) word corpus, EnTenTen (Sketch Engine), it occurs a paltry 1,292 times. By comparison, desire occurs 5 million times in said corpus. Even the lemma of quench only occurs 112,342 times. The lemma includes quench, quenched, quenching. Does quench typically keep company with desire? Yes, 821 times. It more typically keeps company with thirst, hunger, craving and curiosity. The words that typically come between quench and one of these objects are my, your, etc., In the chunk, quench the thirst of (3,105 times), thirst is mainly used metaphorically, e.g. the thirst of millions. Quench also collocates with fire, flame, furnace.

​If you encounter quench as a new word in a text, it is unlikely that its meaning would be clear from this single casual encounter, let alone its usage. To befriend it, we need to invoke J. R. Firth’s most famous maxim, You shall know a word by the company it keeps (1957). For a relationship to develop, you need to spend some time together, asking questions, discussing, structuring your understanding and restructuring it as each new tidbit falls into place.
 
It also helps if we have structures in place to slot new findings into. If we know the structure, someone verbed their body part, e.g., he cut his nails, she washed her hair, it is not a great leap for humankind to embrace, he quenched his thirst. If you have been taught not to use a preposition to end a sentence with, then the first sentence in this paragraph may have made you a little antsy. I have often teased my students with, One swallow does not a summer make, since the aberrant word order grates. When we search a corpus for "does not a .* make", it is clear that this is a systematic linguistic exploitation, as the great British lexicography, Patrick Hanks refers to such creative uses of language. When we meet pieces of language several times and then explore them, they become entrenched in our thinking. After all, one swallow does not a summer make. Instead of rejecting them as a one-off creative use of language, or worse, a mistake (yikes!), we find or make a home for them in our thinking about the language. Thus begins our relationship with them.

References

Firth, J.R.  (1957) Papers in Linguistics 1934 – 1951. Oxford University Press.
Hanks, P.  (2013) Lexical Analysis: Norms and Exploitations. MIT.