January 23, 2024

We have one movie, "Chatterbox"(1936) starring the beautiful Anne Shirley. If you've never seen her, you are in for a treat. She often played self-possessed girls (girly girls, my favorite kind), girls with self-knowledge, and in this movie she is a talkative girl who wants to become an actress, so that she can play the same role her mother once played in a now-forbidden show. As the movie opens she appears to be in a locked-in state of performance. She's a chatterbox, thinking out loud, reciting every single thing that's on her mind. She tries out for a play, and desperately wants the local theater boy to take her with him to New York. When he refuses, she stows away in his closed-up rumble seat. Once in NYC, because of her verbal acuity she is chosen for a role in an ironic comedy, in which - without her knowledge - she will be made a fool of for her sincerity. The director even tells the lead actor how to tone his performance. "I want you to play it straight and let her be the clown. The audience will love it." And indeed, the audience laughs in all the wrong places.

This movie is genius, it's ahead of the time we are living in, but perhaps it was apt commentary of the time it was released. It depicts the mocking of sincerity by the ironic of the world, who - in the plot - aren't in theater for money, per se, or even for stardom (fame, attention) but because they do not understand what it means to be human. They are searching for meaning the way an emotionless Space Alien might study love and wonder what it is, or the beauty of nature, or the world. Not finding what they are searching for, or being able to attain it, they mock it. In the movie, these people are called "theater people" and they reside in New York. In "L.A." (as opposed to Los Angeles) they might be known as swingers or porno people. People without legitimate emotion. Ironic people.

Question: do you know what a subhuman is? Not as an epithet, but as a term of classification? You may have heard of the old, and now out of use, Five Classifications of Subnormal Intelligence: moron, imbecile, cretin, and idiot. Those are only four; I'm not sure of the fifth, and on a side note, they were appropriated in the '20s by a eugenics movement, a subject we haven't time for at the moment. But the important point is that the terms in question were clinical. They were not epithets. I know this because my great aunt Margy was a teacher of subnormal children in the 1920s and '30s, perhaps as far back as 1910 when she was 23 and the term "moron" was coined. But we've only mentioned four classifications. What was the fifth? is it possible that it was "subhuman"? Remember, that is not an epithet either, but a term of classification. Just because it is archaic, or has been banned or hush-hushed, doesn't take away the fact that it meant something specific.

To repeat, the use of these terms was not name-calling. They were not terms of ridicule. They were classifications, determined by doctors or those who studied the field of subnormal intelligence. Now, if the prefix "sub" means "below", i.e. submarine means "below the ocean", subnormal "below normal intelligence", then subhuman would be something below a human.

It is also worth noting the possibility that there may be a difference between humans and human beings. I mention this because I think a lot of history is hidden, and that the hidden parts are covered by a publicity sham. As another side note, you hear the word "authenticity" bandied about nowadays. "Show your authenticity!" Have you got your REAL I.D. card yet? You'll soon need one to board a plane. I am a student of the articulation and presentation of the English language, which I believe is by far the most varied and descriptive in all the human race. And there's another phrase for you. What is the human race? What is a race? As far as skin color goes, we can list Caucasians and the Black or African-American race, and others. A particular race, in other words, is a differentiation from another race.  So the human race must be a differentiation also, must it not? Otherwise, why call it a race, if not to underscore a difference from or with another race. But what is the other generalized race that humans are differentiated from? Since there is a human race, is there a human being race? Or something other than a generalized human race?

Just asking.

Because I believe in a high standard of articulation (not always, but when it is called for), and because I believe the archaic has been hidden for a reason.

Has anybody ever done anything without a reason? And there you have another interesting word: "anybody".

As a new author, a field I am hoping to enter soon, I have found myself in the editing process trying to choose between the words "anybody" and "anyone". Depending on the sentence, I go with whatever fits the rhythm. But shouldn't I be choosing between "body" and "one"? Shouldn't I consider the second syllables in those two variations of what seems to be the same word? Or are they the same word? Could they be two different words with two different, and very specific, meanings? Just wondering, because I think the English language is brilliantly constructed, and when I wonder how and why language came into being in the first place, I think it may have had an extremely specific purpose at one time, and that words that seem the same perhaps meant different things. Like any "body" versus any "one".

How (or why) did those differentiations come into being? 

Does the English language mean anything besides just jabbering away? Let me rephrase that. Does the English language have a purpose besides talk? Or in it's written form?

I think it does, and I think that in it's highest form, even above William Shakespeare, that it may be a sort of Magic Key. I am interested in word origins, and I am suspicious and distrustful and concerned about the motives of people, especially academics (a word we need to examine), who want to ban what they term archaic words or classifications. I'll bet my aunt Margy knew one heck of a lot about teaching. She really helped my Dad and his family. My Dad was brought up by three women. and my aunt Margy, whom I never met because she died long before I was ever born, ended up living with my Dad and Mom after they were married. Mom accompanied the ambulance to the hospital on the day aunt Margy died. Mom used to talk about aunt Margy more than Dad did, and I am glad to think of her today, even though I never knew her, because good people should be remembered, and never forgotten, and words should never be forgotten, be they new, archaic, or otherwise.

But back to subnormal intelligence as the possible fifth classification of "subhuman", I am not saying that it was the fifth classification, because I don't know. My Dad used to drive me past the Sunkist lemon factory on the way to San Fernando. I can still see the building near the Mission. All I know today is that I'm sure Dad said there were five classifications, not four. And we've only mentioned four. So it's worth considering whether subhuman is the fifth one.

My Dad did not b.s. about things. Blowhards took advantage of my Dad, because he drank and could be obnoxious, and worse, but - though blowhards tried hard to co-opt him, and draw him out (to learn secrets), and though Dad, due to a diminished capacity due to stress and hard drinking, succumbed in ways that let secret information get into the hands of bad people, he still kept his rock-solid bedrock core. My Dad was Air Force all the way, he was always the top of the top, a champion of all the things I am talking about in this blog, especially scholarship. Remember that one of three main women in his life, the ladies who raised him, was aunt Margy, a teacher. And my Mom, who Dad loved and married, was super smart and strong and they were both the highest of the high. Mom knew stuff that even my Dad didn't know, she was a brainiac, yet had to play dumb for most of her life. Well, not dumb, but she was not allowed to show her true level of intelligence, or chose not to show it, I don't know. She did say she was Dean's List and National Honor Society. Me? I had a 2.1 GPA when I left high school and was 60 credits short of graduating, so I took the Proficiency Exam and got out. I would've never had the discipline or the inclination to make Dean's List or National Honors Society, but Mom did. And yet she never talked about things like mathematics, or chemistry, or robotics or nuclear physics. Those were all subjects I became interested in, later in my life, long after I was out of high school.

I loved my parents beyond measure. And in their human-ness as my parents. Despite hardships, I loved them in ways that only an infant or a small boy would know. And my love for them not only never diminished, despite hardships, but grew over time until it became, as I like to say, "too big for even God to measure". I love you, Mom and Dad. And I love you, Aunt Margy. I feel you today in this writing.