Across the Pond, Through the Net

Words by Olivia Jasper

Illustration by Stefania Semerik

“What does that word mean?” is a question that has been peppered into what feels like every other conversation I have with my friends online. Most recently, it’s come up in a group commiseration about the unbearable summer heat in urban places. “Concrete absorbs heat like billy-o, and glass refracts the sun,” my friend says, only to add, “I’m surprised no one made fun of me for using billy-o unironically.” They got away with it simply because no one else quite understood what they meant. Thus, they had to double back. It’s a (slightly old-fashioned) phrase that hails from the United Kingdom, meaning to do something with notable intensity; it can rain cats and dogs, or it can be raining like billy-o. Either way, you’ll be soaked through.

Most of my friends are American, given the simple limitation of my inability to leave the country. Over the years, however, I have slowly rectified the restrictions of geography by finding community online. My primary circle of online friends expands across the UK, Indonesia, Croatia, Poland, etc., and when they send screenshots to share something they found funny or

interesting, the text of their system languages varies from Hebrew to Spanish to Tagalog. Several of them only speak English as a second language, which has created confusion, yet has equally scratched a linguistic itch in the back of my mind the rabid urge to dig into the history of emerging words and phrases, to find the ancestors of modern words, and decipher why it is that we speak the way we do. Not helping the matter is that multiple others in this group are linguistic majors, and our shared passions feed into each other like a strange, babbling ouroboros.

Oftentimes, after stumbling into the familiar situation of using a word my friends have no hope of deciphering, I realize that I have no idea what it means myself. Why does it rain cats and dogs? What is a shebang, and why is it always whole, and never in parts? You accept these things when you’ve been immersed in them for all of your life. Only an outside perspective will make you look at them for what they are: strange little fossils of times long past, languages stacked on

top of each other until the layers at the bottom are flattened out and lost.

It requires a fresh pair of eyes to recognize the gaps previously unconsidered. I’ve

observed this in how my Polish friend struggles to articulate her relationship with many of us. What Americans refer to in English as our “friends,” she could call “koledzy,” or “przyjaciele.” Each word communicates a different degree of closeness. To call someone her “friend” feels strange to her; the single word encompasses everything from lifelong companions to mere classmates. How does she convey the difference between her casual friend and her best friend?

A “znajomy,” literally translated as “someone I know,” is distant, but are they also a “friend”? She speaks about this often, revealing a degree of nuance English has never forced me to consider in my own relationships; those I know are either friends or strangers, occasionally an acquaintance, but very little else.

Our conversations about etymology are rarely this philosophical, consisting of little apart from researching articles online, but they remain enlightening, giving us answers to questions we never thought to ask ourselves until someone brought them to our attention. Now, ferrying that information back to share it is nearly ritualistic. With each question, we understand each other a little better. Each query reveals more about places we will never be able to see, worlds we will never have the opportunity to explore. After every conversation, I feel as though

I understand myself and the words I speak more intimately than I could have imagined. Every language is a door waiting to be opened, with endless, sprawling hallways to explore. All that lies between ourselves and a new world is our willingness to ask for a tour of the streets.