The Small Things

On book deadlines, black holes, forgotten words, short pauses, and (all) things that matter

Photo by Frederick Yang for Unsplash. If you know me IRL, you know we are a snail pet family. We currently have one that is so small we keep losing it in the terrarium.

I am a month away from having to send my book manuscript to my editor. Considering it is also Christmas, I am going to call it less than a month or a few weeks. Am I panicking? Of course not. Right. Yes, yes, of course I am.¹ My children keep telling me they never see me anymore. For the record, this is highly exaggerated as I am with them a lot but yes, perhaps not as much as before I started, not panicking, I mean, approaching the deadline. I oscillate between worrying about submitting and everything that goes along with that, including imposter syndrome (yay!), and thinking how in the grand scheme of things, and especially considering the darkness of our world, it really does not matter.

 “How can something so small bother us so much?” I overheard a man at the café the other day saying to his friend as he shook his boot trying to get rid of whatever was irritating his foot. I repeated the phrase to myself a few times silently, “How can something so small bother us so much?” It eventually morphed into, how can something so small matter so much?

A few days ago, astronomers detected the oldest black hole ever observed. And when I say, oldest, apparently it is more than 13 billion years old, “to the dawn of the universe”. In astronomer speak, it is “at the heart of a galaxy 440 million years after the big bang” and a “million times the mass of the sun”. My favourite part about this black hole is how, for a “baby black hole,” it is surprisingly big, “raising the question of how it grew so big so quickly.”

Small things matter because small things can grow to become big things, sometimes very quickly.

I spent most of yesterday researching and reading about language attrition and language revitalization or reclamation. When someone begins to lose a language because they immigrate to a country with a different language, for example, or for whatever other reason, begin to use one language more often than another, language attrition of the first language may occur. This usually begins with the lexical-semantic relationship, or with words and their meanings. If you are multilingual, you may have experienced this in one, or sometimes both, languages where you can’t remember the word for something. Part of me, the part that does not worry about early dementia and perimenopause-related brain fog, loves this because I can then ask my children, “How do you say X, in English/Polish?” inadvertently showing them how cool it is to have multiple linguistic repertoires to draw upon.²

As many linguists have noted, language attrition is, in many ways, simply the other side of language acquisition. We love to talk about a baby’s first words, to celebrate them, to write them down in those beloved but often stress-inducing-to-produce baby books. And yet, when we think about losing³ a language, we push the lost words into the shadows, shake off the frustration and embarrassment and try to move on. But losing a word means you can gain or even, take it back, at least in most cases. Word by word a language is lost, but word by word a language may be (re)gained, (re)claimed or learnt.

Small things, small deeds, small moments, small reminders, small (and big!) protests, and so on, all matter because otherwise, why would anything really matter? Small comforts matter, but so do small reminders that so many people are suffering. I hope you interpret all of this small stuff however you want and need it, especially in the holiday season, a tough time for many people, but especially, especially when it feels like there is no hope.

Take care of one another and I look forward to connecting again in 2024. I am off to listen to some Counting Crows and The Pogues (RIP Shane MacGowan) and to donate to MSF.

1. Thank you for patience and continued support as I have not been here as much as usual because of this reason. I am pausing paid subscriptions for the next month until I send off my manuscript so I can have a bit of breathing room and not feel I am letting anyone down. A huge thank you again for your support this year, whether you are a paid or free subscriber, it all means a lot.

2. To be clear, forgetting a word here and there does not mean someone is losing a language, but I am using this example as when it happens, it always makes me think how language loss begins. Yes, I am dramatic.

3. Language loss is a complicated and multilayered topic and can happen for many reasons including oppression, colonization, persecution, prejudice and discrimination. There can be trauma associated with the loss of a language and often, a lot of sadness and shame. But I do think it is important to consider and talk about loss just as much as we do about acquisition to try to remedy some of that trauma and shame, at least in a small but not insignificant way.