Trip of the Tongue

For my father

Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON

For words, like Nature, half reveal

And half conceal the Soul within.

—ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

Q: What do you call someone who speaks three languages?

A: Trilingual.

Q: What do you call someone who speaks two languages?

A: Bilingual.

Q: What do you call someone who speaks one language?

A: American.

—TRADITIONAL

Introduction

New York City: American

Although I didn't know it at the time, this story began some five years ago, when I hired a decrepit U-Haul and drove a ragtag collection of books, clothes, and particleboard furniture from a cramped two-bedroom in Brooklyn to a bright and spacious one-bedroom in Queens. Much later, looking back, I realized that at just under eight miles this was by far the shortest leg of my journey. Remarkably, it took me two years to make it.

When I first moved to New York, Queens seemed to me a vast and forbidding land, home to airports, big-box retailers, and
The Nanny
. I'd come to New York to experience the quicksilver tempo of big-city life, and Queens seemed run-of-the-mill. It had neither Manhattan's consequence nor Brooklyn's self-conscious cachet. I didn't know anyone who lived there. I didn't even know anyone who went there. The
New York Times
seemed to admit its existence only begrudgingly. Worst of all, it was home to the Mets. So for the most part I stayed away.

I'd like to say I eventually found my way to Queens because I had some sort of grand epiphany, but the truth is I met a guy, and that guy's apartment happened to be just fifteen minutes from my office. Obviously, I moved in with him.

I made my new home in Sunnyside, a relatively small neighborhood nestled between Long Island City and Woodside, six stops from Grand Central on the 7 train. Sunnyside is unpretentious and friendly, and even its most affluent pockets are unmistakably urban. Its sidewalks are bustling if not crowded, and the muted rattle of the subway is underscored by the ever-present commercial hum of Queens Boulevard. If you look down 43rd Avenue, you can see the Chrysler Building. If you look down Greenpoint, you can see the Empire State Building.

It's also a remarkably diverse neighborhood. My first apartment in Sunnyside was located on a street that boasted a Turkish grocery, a Korean acupuncturist, a Chinese dry cleaner, an Ecuadorian bakery, and a Romanian nightclub (which featured, delightfully, occasional appearances by a DJ named Vlad). I frequently supplemented my meager kitchen skills by taking a short walk to the Lebanese sandwich counter, the Colombian pupuseria, or the Bangladeshi-owned French bistro. After a particularly bad day in front of the computer, I had my pick of half a dozen legitimately Irish bars.

For a language-lover like me, living here was heaven. Each day I'd hear at least six different languages as residents switched between their native tongues and what was far more often than not a very fluent form of English. At the time of the 2000 Census, out of 8,142 respondents in my ZIP code, 29 percent reported speaking English as a first language. The rest were native speakers of more than thirty other languages, including Spanish, Korean, Chinese, Romanian, Arabic, and South Asian languages such as Hindi, Gujarati, and Bengali. There are apparently so many Irish-speakers in Sunnyside that there was at one point a push to convince Chase to include Irish on its ATM menu. I was even given an opportunity to dust off my French when a mentally unhinged downstairs neighbor began sending me handwritten notes complaining about the noise from a nonexistent air conditioner.

Although New York City is unquestionably an enormously diverse city, a little-discussed truth is that it is shockingly easy to avoid that diversity, linguistic and otherwise. For some it can be a conscious decision—a lease in a tony neighborhood, the sort of job that considers a Dartmouth grad a diversity hire—but for many it's an unexpected consequence of institutionalized segregation and technological isolation. I lived in New York for three years before taking much notice of the languages around me. My neighborhood in Brooklyn was largely white and lower-middle class, and my industry was largely white and upper-middle class. In between, I listened to my iPod.

But my move to Sunnyside naturally piqued my curiosity, and so, finally, I started to pay attention. And then I started to explore. I began in small ways, by staying on the train an extra stop or two or maybe even occasionally taking the bus. I quizzed my friends, my husband, the nice Turkish brothers at the grocery store, anyone who knew more about Queens than I did—which, at that point, was basically everybody. Before long, I began to get a sense of the borough beyond my quiet little neighborhood.

With only 110 square miles and a population of almost 2.3 million—roughly half of whom are foreign-born—Queens is one of the most densely populated areas in the United States and one of the most ethnically diverse areas in the world. Each of its individual neighborhoods offers a glimpse into the world's language and cultures. Take Astoria, for instance, a sprawling neighborhood along the East River that's known for its large Greek population. In 1927, when sixteen Greek families settled in Astoria, they wanted to construct a Greek Orthodox Church, but they were able to raise only enough money to build the basement. So that's where they worshiped—for thirteen years. Despite such humble beginnings, by the mid-1990s nearly half of Astoria's population was Greek, making it the largest Greek city outside Greece.

Today Astoria is home to an even wider range of nationalities, from Brazilians to Bulgarians. There is in particular a strong Arab presence, and if you walk up Steinway Street toward Astoria Boulevard and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway you'll find yourself, as I did, surrounded by cafés, hookahs, and Arabic script. This part of Astoria, with at least ten mosques and several thousand Arabic-speakers, is known as Little Egypt. Here I found a tiny Egyptian restaurant—hard to miss thanks to the conspicuous Wedjat eye over the entrance—and dined on clay-pot stew while the owner talked my ear off about his homeland.

Northwest of Little Egypt, on 24th Street just past Astoria Boulevard, is the Bohemian Citizens' Benevolent Society (known more familiarly as the Bohemian Beer Garden), the one place I'd visited before moving to Queens. The Bohemian Citizens' Benevolent Society was first formed when large numbers of Czech and Slovak immigrants began arriving in Astoria in the late nineteenth century. Though the society completed construction on the beer garden in 1919, Prohibition went into effect in early 1920, and so it took a few years for the beer garden to properly come into its own. But it is today kept in booming business on balmy days by throngs of twentysomething city-dwellers.

Astoria is just one corner of the borough. Back to the east, past Sunnyside and Woodside, is Jackson Heights, a neighborhood with one of the largest percentages of foreign-born residents anywhere in New York City. Here you will find not only Latin American immigrants—Colombians and Uruguayans and more Argentineans than anywhere else in the city—but also New York's largest South Asian shopping district. With more than one hundred nationalities living in Jackson Heights, it's hard to imagine that Queensboro Realty, the company that originally developed much of the housing stock in the area, initially did its best to keep Jews, Catholics, and blacks from moving in.

Farther east still is Flushing, once hometown of Fran Drescher, Marvin Hamlisch, and the Weinstein brothers and now a part of the city that looks more like Chinatown than Chinatown itself. Here you'll find 50 percent of the borough's Chinese population and, if hypercompetitive foodies are to be believed, 100 percent of the city's “authentic” Chinese food. You'll also find the busiest branch of the busiest library in the country. The Flushing community library, which includes materials in Bengali, Chinese, English, French, Gujarati, Hindi, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Spanish, and Urdu, holds more than 50,000 books in 76,000 square feet. In this bustling neighborhood, new arrivals use the library not only as a resource for language learning and job training, but also as a community center. According to library statistics, more than 5,000 people use the library each day, with circulation hovering around 200,000 items a month, a testament to the vitality and initiative of immigrant life.

Then there's Rego Park, a Jewish neighborhood probably unlike any you've ever seen. Located south of Elmhurst and Corona in eastern Queens, Rego Park is, along with nearby Forest Hills and Kew Gardens, home to tens of thousands of Bukharian Jews. The Bukharians are descendants of an isolated group of Central Asian Jews who, incredibly, managed to survive centuries of oppression before eventually finding their way to more hospitable lands such as Israel and Queens. Along 108th Street—known as “Bukharian Broadway”—a variety of Bukharian shops and synagogues stand alongside Uzbek and Tajik restaurants. It was here that I first learned about Bukharic (or Bukhori), a language that shares a number of similarities with Tajiki and Farsi but has over the years absorbed a large number of Hebrew words and is traditionally even written with the Hebrew alphabet.

You could spend a lifetime in Queens and still find ways to be amazed each day by all the little pieces of the world it contains. Before I moved to Sunnyside I had the idea that ethnic neighborhoods tended to be concentrated and homogenous, that there were Chinatowns and Little Italys, but that they were always separated by some kind of Canal Street. In Queens, however, the realities of size and population preclude hard-and-fast geographical divisions. Sometimes within a single block you can circumnavigate the globe.

At this point I did something uncharacteristic. If you've read my first book, you know I'm kind of a serial dater when it comes to learning languages. I take great pleasure in idly flipping through the grammars, dictionaries, and phrasebooks for dozens of languages. Japanese, Tibetan, Arabic, Portuguese, Hungarian, Norwegian, Sanskrit, Old Norse—you name it, I've leisurely investigated it. Over the years I've spent thousands of dollars on tapes and CDs, on group classes and private instruction, on adding ever more volumes to my sprawling, eclectic, and deeply impractical library. I typically need only the flimsiest of pretexts to embark upon a casual affair with a foreign language. It is both my virtue and my vice.

Much to my surprise, however, I didn't start a course in Korean or Punjabi or even Irish when I moved to Queens. Instead, I found myself thinking more and more about English, the language I knew best and that had heretofore interested me least. See, I've always liked to think of language as the box of baking soda in the back of the refrigerator of humanity. In its words, sounds, and structure, language keeps track of our history and our culture, our troubles and our triumphs, and so forth. But, fairly or not, I had also decided English was the largely humdrum result of a bunch of old white dudes hanging out with another bunch of old white dudes. I'd never considered the implications of linguistic contact in the New World—it hadn't occurred to me that English had something to teach me about my own country.

That's when I read about syphilis.

A chronic systemic infection by the bacteria
Treponema pallidum
, syphilis is a primarily sexually transmitted disease that has afflicted such varied and prominent figures as Franz Schubert, Leo Tolstoy, Paul Gauguin, and George on
Grey's Anatomy
. The disease first became widely known throughout Europe in the late fifteenth century when Charles VIII, then king of France, laid siege to Naples as part of the First Italian War. Although epidemiologists are not entirely agreed on the origins of the disease, what is certain is that in 1495 soldiers and camp followers on both sides of the dispute began to suffer from a particularly gruesome illness that was, depending on which country you asked, known variously as the French disease, the English disease, the Spanish disease, or the Italian disease. From Naples, it spread throughout Europe and then around the world.

Physicians and patients alike were eager for therapies and potential cures, and one treatment that particularly caught the fancy of the public relied on the use of a New World ingredient. In 1519 the poet, scholar, and syphilitic Ulrich von Hutten published an account in which he claimed to have been cured by a decoction prepared with the gum of a tree found in tropical and subtropical regions of the Americas. This treatment was soon the therapy of choice throughout the continent, its popularity bolstered by the marketing efforts of the family that held the monopoly on the importation of the tree in question.

Given its purported medical value, the tree was frequently referred to as
lignum sanctum
or
lignum vitae
—Latin for “holy wood” or “wood of life.” But its everyday name is guaiacum, a word borrowed from the Taíno language of the Bahamian island where the tree was first found. And just as the names of popular pharmaceuticals such as Prozac, Valium, and Viagra have become part of vernacular English, so too did guaiacum insert itself into the languages of Europe. By 1553 guaiacum had made its way into the written English record, by way of a translation of Sebastian Münster's
A Treatyse of the Newe India
.

Of course, von Hutten was wrong about guaiacum. He succumbed to syphilis in 1523, only four years after the publication of his “cure.” Had he been right, we might still use the word
guaiacum
in our everyday speech—not to mention in our everyday health care. But with the advent of new treatments, the vogue for guaiacum faded away, and so too did the pressing need to know its name.

English may be an Old World language, but for the past four hundred years it has made the New World its home, and its words reflect that history. In the word
guaiacum
alone there is the story of the spread of a horrible disease, the scientific naïveté of those who longed for a cure, and the ruthlessness of a merchant family that controlled Atlantic trade. There is also the story of contact between Taíno, the indigenous language of an island in the Bahamas; Spanish, the language of those who would rule that island; and English, the language of those who wanted to buy pieces of that island.

In English and the other languages of the New World there are so many stories like this to be found, linguistic keepsakes of years and peoples past. Just look at the languages of New York City. Before the arrival of European fishermen, traders, and explorers, the area in and around Manhattan was inhabited by a people who called themselves Lenape.
*
The Lenape primarily spoke a language known as Munsee, an Eastern Algonquin language related to Mohegan, Powhatan, and Mi'kmaq. Although I would hazard that few Americans would know the names Lenape or Munsee off the tops of their heads, they might be surprised to discover that Munsee has given American English two extremely common words.