Lingua Familia

Every family language is a mosaic of voiceprints.

Even the names of childhood pets tell. My brother and I called our cats Fluffy and Boots, the dogs Prince, Snoopy, and Rascal. My partner, R, and her brother named their cats Doodlezack Dodecahedron and Springerle Parallelopiped. Then came Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the one I knew as a wizened tomcat, Anthony B. Susan.

Every family language is a collage of utterances, each utterance a coming out.

My grandparents, German immigrants, learned English gradually through their children, who picked it up at school. Because Grandma and Grandpa continued to misspell words and misconstrue idioms, queer clichés made their way into the family argot. Chief among them: You’ve got to take the bitter with the sweat. Coming from our mouths, it shushed whiners and defused self-pity, hinting also at the sunbright-shadow helix of our household: all optimists or pessimists, nothing in between, coexisting.

Each family tongue bridges birthright family and chosen one, class-of-origin and class-of-aspiration, occupational roots and vocational branches, native cultural nexus and whatever context comes next. Echoing in it: ethnicity, education, place, and personality. Each family patois is a living thing, always evolving, always in flux, surprising even us—divided tongues like fire.

Because my father was a navy man, we spoke a kind of port language. From years on Oahu, finished was pau; after a stint on Guam, underbrush became tangantangan. Nautical confusions twisted our tongue. Dad said stowage instead of storage (then again, we were perpetually moving, at sea even on land, our storage more like stowage). The mottos of Admiral Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear navy, echoed in our household. Get with the program. Today is another day in which to excel.

Lingua franca, another port tongue, was spoken along the eastern Mediterranean for centuries. Mostly Italian, with some French and Greek, Spanish and Turkish, Portuguese and Arabic mixed in, it eased trade and diplomacy, the get and the give of society. Lingua franca has a more general meaning as well: any mixed jargon bridging peoples. It’s a common tongue—polyglot, shared, everyday—like the family tongue: lingua familia.

R’s family recorded their sayings on a sheet of notebook paper, now yellowed and bespattered after years on the kitchen bulletin board. Some of these locutions emerged out of shared travels and adventures. Others were playful responses to the ambient tension felt in any household of imperfect spouses, childish children, mischievous pets. R’s father, in youth a halting student, claimed that he graduated from college “vix et aegri” (barely and with difficulty): a family mantra repeated in the face of many a trial.

On Friday nights, after handing over car keys and money for a movie, my father would stand at the door and call after my brother and me, “Drive careful!”

“Ly! Drive carefully!” we'd cry back, half smart-alecky, half-ashamed of Dad’s residual twang, and his failure to master the adverb. Our cover blown, despite fine schools—our origins made known.

Soon after I turned 15, we moved to Scotland, where my teachers and schoolmates spoke with an accent so thick it seemed a different language. That brogue, that burr, more music than speech, rolled in my ears, left me at sea. I couldn’t understand it much of the time, grew weary of asking “What?” and lost the ability to speak in class. My words careened off cinderblock; my voice turned too many right angles; my otherness resounded: an outsider who couldn’t pass, an American, a military kid linked to the town’s controversial base. (On the streets, protestors blared: “Tell the Yanks! To shove it down the stanks! We didnae want Polaris!”) Maybe also my body knew, deep down where will begets sound, that other things about me were askew. I couldnae spaek.

In every family, what you don’t-ask-don’t-tell. Keep stowed away. A heavy hollow to carry. A lowering cloud of white space, hovering.

Throughout my childhood, I read the feature in my mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal called “Can...