Use more verbs

“Life is a verb.” – Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I learned to read by painstakingly pronouncing the rambunctious adventures of two knee-socked, slightly irritating, good-as-gold, simple-minded, very white, and really downright boring children named Dick and Jane.

The text for one of those primers begins “See Dick. See Dick run. See Dick play. See Dick run and play.” Dick seems mighty lonely—or at the very least unimaginative and the tiniest bit anal, what with the pristine play outfit complete with clean shoes and his shirt always tucked in.

As psychologist Richard Nisbett reminds us, Dick and Jane and their dog, Spot, were quite the active individualists. They each run and play and kick balls independent of one another and sometimes tease each other and appear to gloat in their superior set of belongings—see Jane buy a new Mercedes. See Dick cringe and plot her downfall.

But in China, the reading primers are different. The first page shows a little boy on the shoulders of a bigger boy. “Big brother takes care of little brother. Big brother loves little brother. Little brother loves big brother.”  It’s all about the verb, the linking part, the relationship, the connective action.

As Nisbett explains, in China it’s “not individual action but relationships between people that seem important to convey in a child’s first encounter with the printed word.”  While we tend to say “I am who I am,” our Asian friends may more likely make reference to social roles—“I am Lori’s friend.” We say “See Dick run;” they say “Dick loves Jane” (the Truth about Dick and Jane, at long last).

We track the development of our 2.5 year-old daughter, Tess, by the things that she knows. When we play, I ask her the names of objects: moon, star, fire truck, apple, couch, shoe, Cheerio-crushed-into-carpet, and then we move seamlessly into the category of Choking Hazards—button, quarter, marbles, Kibbles, peppermint candy.

Unconsciously noun-obsessed, I teach her about things—and that she is separate from them, apart—that she is her own self and they are out there, things to be named. Sometimes we branch off happily into proper nouns: Johnny Cash, Santa Claus (who, according to her, says “Ho, Ho, Ho Chih Minh” and no, I’m not kidding and yes, I know therapy will be in her future), Spongebob Squarepants, and Dora the Explorer (my lord, does she have to incessantly repeat herself, that Dora, incessantly repeat herself, that Dora, that map, that map, that irritating backpack, backpack, backpack wedged into every synapse?)

Studies have shown that in the U.S., children learn nouns much more rapidly than they learn verbs. (Nouns are easier to learn—they belong to categories, they’re unambiguous). Not so in East Asian countries where children learn verbs at a faster rate. Japanese mothers are more likely to ask about feelings, using feeling-related words when their children act up: “The toy is crying because you threw it.” “The wall says ouch,” Nisbett reports. By focusing on feelings, children are taught to anticipate reactions of other people… it’s all about the relationship, not the thing.

You can see this play out, like most things, in sentence structure: verbs in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean tend to come either at the start or finish of sentences while in English, verbs are usually buried in the middle. 

From Nisbett’s Geography of Thought:

“Developmental psychologists Anne Fernald and Hiromi Morikawa went into the homes of Japanese and Americans having infants either six, twelve, or nineteen months old. They asked the mothers to clear away the toys from a play area and then they introduced several that they had brought with them—a stuffed dog and pig and a car and a truck. They asked the mothers to play with the toys with their babies as they normally would…American mothers used twice as many object labels as Japanese mothers (“piggie,” “doggie”) and Japanese mothers engaged in twice as many social routines of teaching politeness norms (empathy and greetings, for example). An American mother’s patter might go like this: ‘That’s a car. See the car? You like it? It’s got nice wheels.’ A Japanese mother might say: ‘Here! It’s a vroom vroom. I give it to you. Now give this to me. Yes! Thank you.’ American children are learning that the world is mostly a place with objects, Japanese children that the world is mostly about relationships.”

How early our patterns begin, the way in which we see the world—no, I think it’s even deeper than that—it’s not just seeing the world differently, it is actually a matter of seeing a different world altogether.

Which one is my world? The one made up primarily of nouns or of verbs? Of Self with Thing or Self with Other?

I was a serious student of Chinese for a few years a hundred years ago. I look now at the notebooks jammed full of thousands of Chinese characters, written in a sure hand, the order of those strokes impeccable, their uniformity reminiscent of rows of tightly trained soldiers or upstanding members of a marching band. Every character in the sentence the same distance apart, the sense created out of the context, that soup in which they float, not out of the words themselves—meaning made from placement, not linguistic marker.

Words in Chinese have multiple meanings—horse and mother separated only by tone and placement—so it’s only possible to know them through context, their place in the world. In English, we demand a subject, an order; we’re subject-prominent—it is a Self who acts: “He dropped it.” For Easterners, action is undertaken in concert with others—often without an agent: “It fell from him” or just “fell.” Hello in Chinese is often “good, not good?” “Eat, not eat?”

In Japan there are sixteen ways to say no—without saying no.

Thirty years ago, my friend Jack was a faculty advisor for an undergraduate thesis, “Sixteen Waysto Avoid Saying ‘No’ in Japanese" by Keiko Ueda. Jack explained it to me recently in an email when I asked about being stood up for dinner in Tokyo:

“The gist of it is that Japanese hesitate (less so these days) to say a clear ‘no’ for concerns of maintaining good relationships (face issues) and that the more  experienced or sophisticated the person, the broader the repertoire (college students then had a few ways; their businessmen fathers had up to sixteen ways, including ‘yes.’) It’s not that Japanese will say ‘yes’ and then do ‘no’ but that one sends signals of ‘no’ without saying so—at least sixteen ways.  So there are set expressions like the equivalent of ‘hmmm, that might be difficult’ which pretty much means ‘no.’ If the person didn’t show up for dinner he (probably), she (less likely), they (?) may have thought that their reluctance, inability for diplomatic reasons, etc., was already signaled. The Japanese are perfectly capable of saying ‘no.’ I would be interested in learning more about a culture where people couldn’t.  It’s a relational thing, not a ‘content’ thing.”

A relational thing, not a content thing.

Westerners grow up in a world of objects while Easterners grow up in a world of relationships. We own objects—like little Mary Ann and Junior with their roller skates or Jane with that fancy Mercedes—but maybe it’s not the words, the nouns, the things that matter. What if Mary Ann had helped Junior learn to roller skate, rather than just concentrate on her own skates? Would we spend so much time fighting over ownership—of skates, of oil, of countries—in this vast world of ours if we focused on verbs, not things?

Mary Ann is playing store. Junior is playing store. But we’re not told that Mary Ann and Junior are playing store together, now are we? Would the word “with” have been too great a leap for the young reader?

Words, words, words. What do they really mean?

The reigning World Scrabble Champion is a 21-year-old Thai university student who doesn’t even speak English. Panupol Sujjayakorn knows an enormous number of English words, but he doesn’t know what they mean—he just memorized 100,000 patterns of letters—the entire Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, without regard to meaning or context.

Most of us think of Scrabble as a point game laid out on a board, writes reporter Martha Ann Overland in her story about Mr. Panupol. He doesn’t. “He thinks along an axis, where point values occupy a place in space.” The story intrigues me: The rest of us play by knowing the language—the meaning behind the words. But, then again, we’re not Scrabble champions, are we? Mr. Panupol doesn’t know the meaning of any word he uses on the Scrabble board; rather, for him it’s a spatial game, like Tess learning the name for “button” or "choke" or “ambulance,” without knowing what that means.

A spatial game. A relationship game. 

~*~ 37 Days: Do it Now Challenge ~*~

See Dick run! See Jane conquer! (I couldn’t resist this image of Dick and Jane amidst the Romans).

In an interview, poet Welton Smith talks about verbs: “Music tells a lot about verbs. In music every note is a verb. In the beat poems, every word is a verb, because every verb will be structured to test your capacity as a reader for action or response.” Or as poet Steve Kowit wrote more simply: “A noun’s a thing. A verb’s the thing it does.”

Be the thing that does.

Focus on the verbs, the connectors, the actions between people.  Test your capacity for action or response or relationship or Scrabble championships.