This oddity of language

Sometimes, one has to stop cringing and lead.

Before I came here, I transcribed 20 interviews with Minnesota cultural leaders: poets, historians, journalists, a major arts administrator. You can say about people at this level: "They know the language." On any imaginable standard, they are competent speakers. And yet, when I actually entered their sentences, I sometimes found rules very different from those I had been taught -- or virtual anarchy in areas I'd regarded as rule governed. It struck me that they were speaking quite different languages and that what we encounter in formal grammars is some kind of compromise among the idiolects.

That experience gave me courage when I came to Vienna, where many novices need to speak. One basically invents a language, puts it out there as a gambit, and hopes that it will be accepted well enough to make one, for one's particular purposes, competent. At the same time, one keeps trying to learn new tricks. My main technology for that is the German  Harry Potter. If I encounter a dragon, I'm prepared. So far, while people may have laughed at my emails or even posted them on the office wall, annotated, they have mostly responded to me in ways that got things done.

One other experience though showed me where the unbridgeable gap might lie. I went to a Gasthof for supper; three slavic guys were there, speaking their own language. As I watched, I was transported back to the supper table at my grandmother's on the farm - everybody talking at once, very fast. Both kinds of conversation seemed to me like dances. There wasn't information to  convey. There were familiar interactions to rehearse, roles to re-establish, prejudices to cement, reassurances to be given that everyone had his accustomed place. This level of stuff a foreigner has trouble with, and also, this level of stuff gets pretty easily squeezed out by people with simpler conceptions of language who can't make space for it. Xenophobia may be wrong, but it's not crazy.

I think there is such a thing as a national treasure. When I am on the subway, most people alone are tired, withdrawn, mildly agitated, sometimes angry. Occasionally, two people are talking and it is like a concerto: a very fast, very happy interchange of a thousand hints. One can actually see where Mozart came from. This interchange is the most valuable thing I've seen here.