Meditation at the
dentist. The only way for me to bear what feels like some infernal sequence of
torture is letting the mind wildly wander. Take, for example, the phrase “chewing
gum.” A foreigner who had learned what to call the firm, fleshy tissue covering the alveolar parts of either jaw and
enveloping the necks of the teeth might understand it as chewing one’s
gum(s). Even more confusing are the words that are both a verb and a noun such
as “rose” or the Turkish word “yüz” (which means face, hundred, swim and to
skin). As if our imagination hung us all of a sudden out to dry, or maybe was
fed up with inventing a word for each and every thing and so hurriedly huddles
together the remaining things to be named regardless of their relevance. A
strange economy.
Come to think of it, languages’ vocabularies may as well have
been developed in the various dental chairs of the world.
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