My article on what American English will sound like in 2050, which led to my being on a radio show in Los Angeles, has since gotten me interviewed on two more radio shows – like the first one, on National Public Radio, which seems to be the only kind of radio station that cares about this kind of thing. You can listen to the interviews:
New Hampshire Public Radio, May 11 (11 minutes)
Georgia Public Broadcasting, June 4 (5½ minutes)
Posted in The Week
Tagged interview, language change, National Public Radio, NPR, The Week
My undergraduate alma mater (well, my first one, when I got my BFA in drama) is the University of Calgary. The campus was built in the mid-late 1960s, as were the neighbourhoods next to it, standard curvy-street suburban developments utterly typical of that sprawling hilly city (and many others). To the south is University Heights. To the north are Varsity Acres, Varsity Village, and Varsity Estates.
Those neighbourhoods were my first encounter with the word varsity. (I knew of them in my childhood, well before I went to university – a mall we often shopped at was right there too.) At first I didn’t know what it meant; I just took it as a name, like James or Calgary or Dalhousie (another neighbourhood in the area, and one we lived in for a year). Once I grew enough to learn that names came from somewhere and meant something, I knew that varsity referred to scholastic things, higher education – or rather the air and milieu of higher education, especially the sports.
Varsity, to me, is a word like a V-neck sweater with an athletic team name or letter or logo sewn onto it. (And this from a Canadian – you have to understand, collegiate sport means nothing to Canadians, and we are always at least a little nonplussed at the mania Americans have for it.) Its most common collocations are with sport things: junior varsity, varsity team, varsity athletes, and various specific sports such as varsity football. It can also be found in terms such as varsity cheer.
Athletics in higher education serve – or at least used to serve – a social function, an opportunity for group solidarity and boosterism. Places of education have an unavoidable social function, after all, and I think that’s good. As the saying goes, a university is a fountain of knowledge where students gather to drink. Perhaps varsity is a fountain of sports.
The words likewise have different flavours. University may be a place where you go to learn the classics and unlock the knowledge of the universe, a noble city of learning, with that cold but embracing U at its head and that unifying air of uni, even as it embraces diversity; varsity is more vibrant and aggressive, more rah-rah, more party, but also more class-conscious. It could be a word for varmints who just like team sports, but it could more readily be a word for the louche rich who go to Darby.
Sorry, I mean to Derby. Funny, that, how Derby came to be said as Darby. Well, not so funny, really; we may associate that sort of shift with a specific moneyed class in England, but it was common enough at one time. Person became parson (though we also kept the former); clerk became Clark (and those same upper-class types say clerk as “clark”); vermin became varmint (and then got taken up by certain people in the US); at one time mercy was said as “marcy” and certain as “sartain,” though those have not lasted generally. If this shift seems odd, then you haven’t been listening to many younger people (females even more than males) lately, especially among the university-educated set: a similar lowering is audible in many cases, making test sound like “tast,” for instance. It’s a quite unexceptional kind of sound shift.
It just happens to have become associated with a sartain, I mean certain, set in the case of varsity. Undoubtedly this has something to do with who would even be talking of varsity: those who could manage to go to one of the great universities of England, notably Cambridge and Oxford. It is they who have done the most to preserve this word, this aphetic and vowel-shifted variant of university, by having an annual extramural slaughter: the Varsity Match, a rugby game between Ox’ and ’Bridge. This casual, group-solidarity colloquial version of university persisted with the sports and spread to North America, while the precise and attentive university retained its reign over the institutions as a whole. In England, they shorten university to uni as they shorten television to telly; one might imagine that uni is where they learn and varsity where they play.
So in the classrooms and libraries we learn how university came to be varsity, while on the field they play varsity and chant and sing and drink and all that and care not a whit about the provenance of the word. But really they are the two sides of the university – north and south, if you will.
The world is my cloister.
That isn’t to say that I would want to be clustered too closely with monastics. That could induce some closet-like claustrophobia. But outside of such cloying, there is much to be said for cloisters, the oysters of the academic and spiritual worlds: enclosed shells within which may be found great pearls. Shells, moreover, that are open on one side, often to a beautiful, peaceful little space. A place to walk, and think, and breathe, where the clutter of the world is occluded. A warm heart made of cool stone: all that cloisters is not cold.
There are many famous cloisters in the world. One of my favourites is a museum in New York City, an outpost of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the far north of Manhattan, in Fort Tryon Park. The building is a bricolage of medieval stonework, a modern monastery of centuries-old aesthetics. If you wish to try on this overcoat of stone and art, just take the A Train past where Duke Ellington got off, walk through the park, and meander in the enclosure taking in some of the best works of six, seven, and eight centuries ago.
The Met is not the only museum to have cloisters. We were in another one such in Madrid recently: the Prado (pray do not confuse that with Prada). Enter at the Jerónimos entrance and, instead of going to the right towards the main building, go to the left, up the escalators, up and up; follow the signs that say Claustro and you will find yourself in an old cloister, the Jerónimos building. (Does Jerónimos look like Geronimo or Hieronymus? Yes.) It features sculpture, sublime statuary frozen in poses of passion and devotion for all time, like Lot’s wife but not subject to dissolution in tears or rain.
We saw some other cloisters on the trip, too. We stayed in a hotel that was a converted (and substantially reconstructed) 12th-century monastery. It is now named Le Domaine. It has a lovely central garden surrounded by a quadrangle of cloistered walks. It remains a place for serene and rarefied pursuits, but now those pursuits are, while sublime, not metaphysical; the devotion is to the epicurean, and the pearls are of pecuniary price. It is surrounded by vineyards, and we drank sparkling wine in our finery where monks had once chanted. One may say we brought in some of what they had been closing out – but we still left behind what we had to face most every day.
When we were in Porto, we passed by cloisters on our visit to their cathedral. I won’t say we visited the cloisters; they required time, and an entrance fee, and we hadn’t enough of the first to justify the second. I satisfied myself with a photo through the door, a glimpse, past the sign that says Claustro, past the guard. Click.
As one gets: a glimpse of what one could have if one had the time and the money. But of course that was our whole vacation – what we had because we had the time and the money. A step through a half-open door into a closed world, inward-looking, peaceful. A place for contemplation and appreciation. If you are not claustrophobic.
Yes, cloister is related to claustrophobic. And to close, and closet, and occluded. They all trace back to the Latin root claus- and claud-, having to do with closing, shutting, locking. Cloister came altered by Old French (Latin claustrum, clostrum > Old French clostre, cloistre). At first it was just a closed and enclosed place; then a place of religious seclusion; then a structure often found in those, an inward-looking arcade.
Arcade? This sounds like a place of amusement. Ah, but there are so many kinds of amusement. We have an arcade on the ground level of the building I live in; in fact, it is 27 floors directly down from my feet and butt now as I sit near my window. It is open to the city, though; my personal cloister is more likely my library. But oh, et in Arcadia ego. The world is still my cloister.
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Sesquiotica 