Con Air, and why we write
Consider the 1997 box office hit Con Air. What is the film actually about? Moviegoers could reasonably have expected to spend two perfectly decent summer hours thrilling at the aeronautical high crimes of a motley gang of murderous convicts and criminal geniuses as they evaded Johnny Law and fled extradition treaties, only to have the spectacular denouement of their escapades come, as it so often does, in a fiery wreck on the Vegas Strip.
Forget that awhile. Forget Nicholas Cage’s “Alabama” drawl. Forget, if only for a moment, a roster of prison yard nicknames that includes “The Marietta Mangler,” “Cyrus the Virus,” and “Billy Bedlam.” Forget all that, and what is left? What is Con Air about, really?
Everything that made the film a $224 million success is window dressing. It is the spoonful of sugar used to administer a tender story about a father and his love for his wife and daughter, separated by eight years of time served for manslaughter. Stretched taught over the frame of that narrative, everything that comes to mind when we think about Con Air is merely what happens. Without the pyrotechnics, the film is about a man’s love for his family.
This is a journal dedicated to the love of language. Arabic is what happens on these digital pages, but this is a blog about language and history and words and how they are used. That the blog should dress itself in Arabic rather than Japanese or Swahili is the result of an accident that is more personal than historical. It will be of little interest to the reader, and it has very little at all to do with the meat of the thing.
Owing its longevity in part to deep roots in the explicative needs of religious law and scholarship, Arabic has a long history of granular analysis. Its first dictionaries in a recognizably modern sense predate their English-language counterparts by many hundreds of years. In fact, an authoritative OED-style gloss of word histories is found at least as early as 1290 in Ibn Manẓūr’s Lisān al-ʿArab, a dictionary that predates an intelligible English language altogether.
The history of Arabic lexical disputation may make for interesting scholarship, but it is a matter with which this blog does not concern itself. In the strict religious context, whether a wayward diacritic has bearing on the co-eternal, supra/omni/extra-temporal nature of the Qur’an, for instance, is likewise beyond the metes and bounds of expertise asserted here, and it is, frankly, somewhat pedantic. No party was ever improved by the introduction of a wet blanket. This journal means instead to chart with abundant fondness the life and times, the thoughts and ideas, that find expression in and around the Arabic language.
As a language of scripture, Arabic comprises both the Word co-eternal with the creator and the many profane words that pad out with flesh and sinew the wireframe of lived experience. The latter give something to hang on to – to sense without exactly feeling – that which is scarcely perceptible, and only by the senses acting in concert. The purpose here is to dwell in that space.
At times, this journal may bear down on a thing no more edifying or diverting than a double entendre, or a definition made ridiculous by literal exactitude. At other times, it may flay a word in search of an antique tertiary meaning capable of inspiring awe or sensual delight. And of course, one cannot neglect the cheer of rhymed verse or the light joy of the plosive consonant or the satisfying fixity of the guttural. History, too, is to be considered, and vast cultural and religious influences may warrant attention from time to time.
This journal is a light thing, sustained by the sheer joy found in pulling at the wispy threads of a language. There is neither a master plan for the nest they will make up, nor a shortage of threads with which to do the building.
