Bildungsroman

Now and then I’ll encounter a word that is exactly the word I didn’t know I needed. Previous examples of that phenomenon for me have included anomie and schadenfreude. I’m sure you have some of your own. Today I was reading a post on Facebook and there it was: bildungsroman.

As a writer I’ve been struggling recently to describe the novel I’ve written. As Tolstoy once said in response to a request for a one sentence summary of War and Peace, “Sir, if I could do that, I wouldn’t have written 1400 pages.” I’ve had a similar problem with my story. Weighing in at 680+ pages, my novel covers a lot of ground, and most of my summaries have left me feeling listless, if not dejected outright.

Enter bildungsroman.

While my point here isn’t to discuss my novel or my problem summarizing it, bildungsroman, in a word, does a nice job. McGhee in the Gloaming does exactly this – describe a coming of age story – only the scope of that “age” isn’t simply adulthood as an end point, but covers the entirety of a life. From my experience, human growth and maturation doesn’t stop at 20, or 40, or even 80. I’m sure you’d agree, though if you’re like me, imagining your self at 85 might be a challenge. But that isn’t the point of this essay.

So what is the point?

Well, that’s more difficult to express. Perhaps I’m just marveling at our collective ability to codify even the most inchoate of subjects. Earlier in my life, inchoate was one of those words, too – very meta – describing concepts that are only slightly formed. And to continue the theme, codify is one of those words, too – to give body or shape to something. It’s like making a mudball by scraping together adjacent thoughts, packing them together into something substantial. I simply love that.

Language is an amazing, recombinant tool. And there I go – applying a term from one domain (biology) to something else entirely: thinking itself. It is recombinant at the word level (like bull-dog), and at the root level (like techno-crat). Not that every such combination works, such as the problematic “shelled” when applied to nuts: so which are they, with shell or without? The point is language is an amazing tool, and learning to use it is an infinitely amusing and useful lifelong exercise. Which brings me to the following: idioms.

I’m sure your college instructors warned you against them, and maybe that guidance even stuck. But what is the problem? On their own, they can actually be useful. “Low hanging fruit” has become a widely understood metaphor (and idiom). But left on their own, their gross chunkiness leaves room for misunderstanding. What does “low” mean? And what are “fruit”? Without further clarification the true meaning remains ambiguous. And wasn’t the shorthand of an idiom meant to conserve words rather than necessitate more?

Once again I’ve succeeded in stating the obvious. Just do me a favor: think of one word you’ve found in the past 10 years that created an “Ahaa!” moment for you and post it on this blog. I’d like to collect them, because they might enlighten me, too. For, do we really know something, have it in our grasp, if we don’t have a name for it? Isn’t the act of cognominating the intangible, the nascent, the barely discernible our finest achievement?