Diw
I swear in Welsh to myself, often, though I have no idea how to
pronounce the words out loud.
I sing Romany songs in my head:
Koshko grai, Romano grai....
though I know neither the tune nor how the
words should sound.
I used to mispronounce words, even though I knew
their meaning well. I do that much less now, just because having lived longer I've
heard more of those words spoken.
I have a reader's mind. I'm not
really a writer; I have more of an urge to absorb words than to bring them forth,
several hundred diary entries to the contrary. I can't be a Common Reader only
because readers are no longer common -- if Tom Sawyer were around now, he wouldn't
be playing King Arthur or Treasure Island, he'd be playing Nintendo. He'd be
priding himself on his ability to maneuver through a virtual landscape rather then
the ability to "talk like a book". For that matter, if he did read, his books
would be much closer to the language he spoke daily.
It's not
necessarily a bad thing, since books are still there for those who want them. In
fact, they're much cheaper and easier to obtain than in Tom Sawyer's day. He might
have owned one or two, if very lucky; I don't even know how many hundreds I have.
More than even Judge Thatcher, I feel certain. I can buy a paperback of anything
from Steinbeck's King Arthur (my favorite modernization of Malory) to Harry Potter
(Tom would have loved that!) for the money I can earn in about 15 minutes (and
that's after taxes). Sounds like a bargain, since it takes me well over 15 minutes
to read even a children's book. Aunt Polly would have had to pay a few dollars
that she likely didn't have for any books of Tom's, unless he'd managed to acquire
one in trade for pins, marbles, kittens, and whatever else he could
scrounge.
I suspect in some ways being a reader is one of the things
that makes marriage easy for me; if I can read undisturbed (except maybe for a few
kitty headbutts) it counts as alone time for me. Rudder doesn't work quite the
same way, and he gets a bit surfeited with people and conversation at work. One
reason he goes down to rowing ten minutes or so before I do is just to get a
little alone time down by the water. Reading certainly makes it easy for to
survive anything boring or uncomfortable; if I'm in a book, I don't notice as much
where my body is. The downside is that I find it difficult to do anything not
requiring my mind without a book in front of my eyes (brushing teeth, changing
clothes, vaccuming, watching TV). This makes it difficult to do anything like
embroidery that doesn't leave my hands free to turn pages. Books on tape are a
godsend for long road trips, since even when I'm not driving I can't read in a
moving car because it makes me a bit queasy. Also, I must confess to having droped
more than one library book into the bathtub before I hit adolescence and began
taking showers. They're never quite the same, somehow. (No, I don't try to read in
the shower.)