Look It Up

Hey, it's Sunday Morning.

Back before the pandemic, when daily office life revolved around cubicles, ringing phones, and food deliveries, an esteemed colleague took a call from a client I thought I knew well. As had happened before, the client said something insensitive that required me to step in and address it directly.

As we strategized how to handle it, I said: "He's so phlegmatic it's hard to know where he stands."

My English colleague looked at me.

"Phle-woat? Is that even a word?"

Her reaction was so strong I doubted myself for a moment. And then it hit me. No. I know this word.

"Look it up," I said.

She did. And to her apparent astonishment, it existed. I didn't say it out loud, but I thought it: "I fucking learned that word in science class. Fourth grade."

That day I learned I had words others didn't.

Not because I was smarter. She's definitely smarter than I am. But because I'd lived in a language that gave me access to concepts she'd never had to name:

Phlegmatic, like the unemotional client.

Ephemeral, like the flight of the butterfly.

Chimera, like an impossible wish.

Ineffable, like what we feel but cannot say.

Words I didn't learn through translation. Words I lived in. Spanish handed me classical vocabulary that exists in English, but native speakers think of them as 'big words'. I use those words because I already held their full meaning.

I'd spent my adult life being corrected in English. Always performing, always proving. My syntax questioned. My 'big words' diminished.

But here? I could see something she couldn't. Because I had a word for what I was looking at.

The Inuit have dozens of words for snow because they live in it. They don't see more snow than we do. They see what it's doing. Because they can name it: wet snow, powder snow, snow that falls, snow that's fallen, snow you can walk on, snow that will kill you.

I wonder how many things I've walked past because I didn't have a word for them.

I see it now in the executives I coach. They'll describe a problem for twenty minutes, circling it, poking at it, trying to find the edges. And then I'll offer a word.

"That sounds like resentment." "That might be grief." "What you're describing is burnout."

And they stop. Because now they too can see it.

The problem didn't change. But the word gave them permission to acknowledge what was already there. And maybe that's what language really does. It gives us permission to see.

We can only see what we can name.

English was, for a long time, the language of correction. But it was also the language where I had access to words others didn't. Where I could name what they were feeling before they could.

Not because I was wiser.

Because I'd lived in two worlds and carried words between them.

That's not failure. That's fluency.