Petula, The Catahoula Hound from Jalalabad

From Jacqueline

Eeeek, it’s Friday! I just sat down to work and thought I’d check in with nakedauthors.com first, then it struck me – it’s my day and I should have posted by now!

I’ve been thinking about words this week. Yes, I know, that’s what I should be thinking about, being a writer. But I’ve been thinking about the way words sound, the manner in which they have a lyricism that makes you say a given word to yourself all day, a word you come across that you want to use in a sentence. And it’s likely that same word doesn’t hold any interest for another person – they’ve got their own words.

It started when I was walking my dog along a well-used trail, and a woman came towards me in the opposite direction, her dog close at heel. As we bid each other good morning, I asked her about her dog – he had really interesting blue eyes and a dappled coat. “He’s a Catahoula Hound,” she replied. A Catahoula Hound? We chatted for a while and both went on our way, but I couldn’t get those words out of my head. Catahoula Hound. As soon as I arrived home, I told my husband about the encounter, and added, “I think I’d like one of those, just to be able to say, ‘Here’s Dooley, my Catahoula Hound’ or “Meet Petula, the Catahoula Hound.” So we began a conversation about the words that captivate us, with John admitting to his fascination with the word “Jalalabad” though he admitted, “I don’t want to go there, but I’d like to slip it into a sentence every now and again.” I wondered out loud whether there was a children’s book in this, “Petula, the Catahoula Hound from Jalalabad.” John also confessed to liking the word “Passchendaele.” I was horrified. “Do you know what happened there?” I asked, launching into one of my tirades on military incompetence in the First World War. “Yes, but think of it,” he added, “that if you didn’t know anything about history, or even the spelling of the word, you’d think it was Passion Dale.” When he put it like that, I thought of a small village neighboring Tolkein’s shire, a place where hobbit relatives live in an idyllic peace.

Of course, there are words and phrases that have come and gone and with some I am just glad to see the back of them. Did anyone not have a “paradigm shift” about five years ago? And how about “drilling down”? I was in a meeting a couple of years ago, during which someone said, “Are there new learnings here for us?” New learnings? New learnings? I couldn’t help it, I just chimed in and asked, “Do we mean lessons?” Guess I’m not trendy enough. When I worked in London, I had a boss who made regular trips to the US, to the corporate offices of our company. Every time he came back, it was with a clutch of new hip corporatespeak that he would throw into meetings, letters, memos (remember memos?), etc. We would have such sport, repeating those words back to him at every opportunity. “So, Chris, it looks like we need throughput on this one.” Reckon throughput is dead and gone now.

In the 1950’s there was a comedienne in Britain called Hylda Baker, who had audiences in stitches with her malapropisms. She would take all sorts of words and phrases and use them out of context, and I’ve always thought there was humor there, if it’s done well – and she could do it very well. She said things like, “I went to the doctor, who was stood standing there, his horoscope around his neck.” or “I was so surprised, I fell prostitute on the ground.” She was one of those old music hall (vaudeville) stars who just knew how to deliver the patter. Along those lines, whenever I hear some of the “in” words and phrases, there’s a demon in me that will take them and put them in a completely different context. I can see a car dealer, kicking a tire, opening the hood of a new sports car, and informing the prospective owner that, “What makes all the difference with the V8 is the paradigm shift. One flick with the stick and you are zero to sixty in three seconds.” Myself, I couldn’t do without the throughput in the carburetor.

The sad thing about words is that, in America, we are losing so many of them. A study completed a few years ago (and you know the thing about studies, you can never remember the who, where or why, so you’re going to have to trust me on this one), that over a ten year period, American kids were losing words at a rate of 1000 per year. A couple of years ago they (you know, the people who do the research) found that over six hundred languages - whole languages, note - had been lost since the beginning of the 1900’s. When Simon Winchester was on tour with his book The Philosopher and the Madman, which was essentially about the relationship between the man in charge of compiling the Oxford English Dictionary and his most prolific contributor (a convicted murderer), I went to hear him speak at Black Oak Books in Berkeley. He happened to talk about words being lost in American English, and someone asked if that were also true across the pond. According to Winchester, the opposite was happening, because not only are new words entering the lexicon, but there’s an interest in old words, the resurrection of language, if you will. I thought about the phenomenon of word loss for some time. If words are at the root of understanding between people, whether in a familial relationships, in the classroom, a neighborhood, or a country, then there is much to be worried about, with or without a paradigm shift.

Now, about Petula, the Catahoula Hound from Jalalabad.