Riallaro: The Archipelago of Exiles — Background and Themes

n, the shoe-tie, the garter; the slightest motion of each of these was pregnant with meaning, and a mistake in their use might lead to serious consequences; for almost every word contained in germ senses that were often contradictory. The word for “good” also meant “feeble” or “silly,” that for “vice” also meant “pleasure.” The same word stood for “heaven” and “the purgatory of fools,” another for “well-born” and “idiot,” another for “gentlemanly” and “inconsiderate,” another for “well-mannered” and “apish,” and still another for “genius” and “lunatic.” So love and lust, fashion and gas, insult and courage, fornication and marriage, harlot and messenger of the deity, deception and artistic power, impudence and prayer, bankruptcy and good luck, illegitimacy and the legal profession, beautiful woman and hag, sage and pedant, murder and nobility, candour and credulity, sword and stigma, infallible utterance and absurd error, wise saying and despicable thing, universal religion and bigotry, worship and play the hypocrite, to please and to conjure, to knock down and to co-operate, wit and vanity, to prepare food and to embezzle, courtier and pimp, sacred rite and vexation—each of these pairs had but one expression for both.

I characterised the language that could be so double in its meaning as insincere and barbarous. My school-master argued that the two meanings were in each case naturally connected and that nothing so subtle or refined had ever existed; he hesitated and added, “except Thribbaty and Slapyak. It is the highest stage of social development to have a language so ambiguous and difficult that it takes the greatest wits to manage it. Look at the common people; they have but one meaning, the more concrete and physical, for each word; and the result is boorish and superficial.” I called his attention to the simple and direct signification of the words in the admired rotten tongues. He assured me that I was mistaken; great scholars had shown how there were depths beyond depths of reflected and refracted meaning in every word of the great Thribs and Slaps. “And was it natural that two peoples such as these, ignoring, as they did, nay despising, truthfulness as a virtue, should leave their language so unrefined, superficial, and straightforward as they seemed to untrained eyes? To tell the truth in clear and unambiguous language is the mark of barbarity. It is their very example that has led us to hide truth like a precious treasure in wrappings of subtlety. We shrink from exhibiting her to vulgar eyes. It would be but sacrilege. And our greatest investigators have shown _a priori_ that nations like the Thribs and Slaps could not have existed without overspeech like ours to express the subtle shades of emotion and thought.”

There still lingered in me grave doubts whether, if this were the contribution of the rotten tongues, they had been of any great service to the nation. It had already puzzled me to think that a people who glorified truth (calling their land Aleofane, as they often explained to me, “the gem of truth”) should take as their model two ancient nations that held this virtue but lightly, that it should almost deify purity of life and modesty, and yet bring up its youth on two literatures that laughed at these. The moral ideals of this people had been the scorn of the Thribs and Slaps.

But I had not command enough of the language to express these thoughts, and I had to accept his apology for the rotten tongues. I was soon able to adorn my conversation with fragments of them and roll Thribbaty and Slapyak words and phrases off with unctuous gusto, as if they settled every question. It was a great satisfaction to feel that without intellectual effort one could knock down his opponent in argument by a quotation, however little one understood it. And it gave one a blessed sense of superiority to rattle off a long word or phrase that others could not understand.