Allan's Alley

Some years back, my next-door neighbor invited me to come to a meeting of his lodge, the Fair Lawn branch of the Mystic Knights of Beelzebub.  There would be a nice meal (he knew how to get my attention), followed by some information about the Mystic Knights.  It would be a membership recruitment affair, if you catch my drift.

Now, don't get me wrong.  I decided years ago that I'm with Groucho Marx in this respect: any group that would take somebody like me into its membership is not the kind of organization that I would care to join.

But I went, I got the free meal, and I signed my name on the dotted line.  All the guys were nice, pleasant chaps, and they were thrilled that I was jinin' up.  Then there was the little matter of the Initiation Rite.  Oy vay.

Well, it didn't involve anything painful, like circumcision, or dangerous, like contracting MRSA.  It did, however, involve learning stuff like secrret passwords, secret handshakes, and other silly hooha.  Picture Jackie Gleason and his lodge.  What was it?  Mystic Knights of the Racoon?  Something like that.

And there I am, surrounded by these loony guys, without even my wife there to give me moral support, a smile, perhaps even her standard formula: "Allan, be nice."  And these guys take this stuff seriously.  Emes....really.

After the Initiation Rite, which I swore on pain of being hanged, drawn and quartered not to reveal publicly, I managed to schlep out to two or three more meetings.  I met the sergeant-at-arms.  I met the chancellor of the exchequer.  I met the grand chancellor, and the ueber-grand chancellor.  I met the webmaster, and the scoutmaster.  Since there are only about five men left in the lodge, everybody gets to sport a title.  They offerred me chaplain.  I said I'd think about it.

In a nutshell, my advice is: if somebody offers you a free meal, check out all the exits before you sit down and tie on a bib.

 

 

 

 

 

You've heard the one about the guy whose camel was stolen? 

He called the police to report a stolen or misplaced camel.  They asked what was the camel's height?  "He was a camel!  What can I tell you?  He was the height of a regular camel."

What about the color?  Any distinguishing marks or characteristics?  "No," said the man.  "He was just a regular camel."

Can you tell us whether the camel is male or female?  "The camel was most definitely a boy camel," said the man.  "You couldn't tell us anything else, but you're certain about the fact that it's a male," queried the police.  "How can you be so sure?"

The man replied, "Whenever I would be riding him to work in mid-town Manhattan, people would stop and stare and point, and say, 'Look at the schmuck on that camel!'"

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was about thirteen years old when I developed an interest in language and linguistics.  One day, I came across a book by the linguist, Dr.Mario Pei.  The title of the book was, "The Story of Language." Dr. Pei, a professor at Columbia University,  had developed a language-learning system used by the US Army to train interpreters during World War II.  A polyglot, he wrote the book to cover a lot of issues involving language.

There was one chapter which especially piqued my interest.  It was about the problems that arise when people can't understand one another because they don't speak the same language.

Dr. Pei wrote about the many languages in the world, and how useful it would be if one language were selected to serve as a second language for all people.  Everyone would speak his or her national/tribal/ethnic language, and everyone would learn in school to speak a language that would be used between peoples, a "bridge language," so to speak.

The hard part would be getting the various groups and governments to agree on which language would be chosen.  England, the USA, and other English-speaking countries would propose English.  France and others would support French.  The Russian language and the Spanish language, as well as Arabic and Mandarin Chinese would each have their own proponents.  Other people would vote for Latin or Hebrew, Swahili or ancient Greek, to be the world language.

Another possibility would be to adopt a language that would be neutral, not belonging to any ethnic, religious or national group. A language, wrote Dr. Pei, like Esperanto, would be worth considering.

The result of years of language study and hard work, Esperanto was the brain-child of Dr. Ludwig Zamenhof, a Warsaw ophthalmologist. In 1887,  Dr.  Zamenhof published what he called "La Lingvo Internacia" in a book that he signed pseudonymously as "D-ro Esperanto."  Esperanto means "one who hopes" in Dr. Zamenhof's language.

Esperanto has a streamlined grammar, with no exceptions, a verb system without any irregularities, and a vocabulary based on Romance, Germanic and Slavic root words, together with internationally accepted words like kimono and televido deriving from other source languages. 

Try Google to find out more about Esperanto, and take a look at the Wikipedia entry (if you don't know about Wikipedia, go to www.wikipedia.org to find out about it).  The United States Esperanto movement has its web site at www.esperanto-usa.org.

You'll find a ton of information about and in Esperanto on the Internet.  I learned Esperanto from library books when I was thirteen, and time after time I've seen how being able to communicate with others in a neutral, eassy-to-learn language can be a wonderful, life-changing thing.

Esperanto estas facila, bela lingvo por la tuta mondo!