A few days ago I posted a blog on bagel holes (“Everybody keep a tight bagel hole, now.”>)The idea for this post came from Norman Mailer's Naked and the Dead, which I read as a boy, maybe 14 years old. No one in my home knew who Mailer was far as I know; I certainly didn't, until I got to college and realized I had read someone famous. I just thought it would be a enjoyable followup to Alistair MaClean's Where Eagles Dare.
(One of my English professors at Calvin College, Professor Oppewal, thought Mailer was too prolific, and he didn’t care for the book he’d just done on Marilyn Monroe. I must say, if you add up Marilyn and Mailer's The Executioner’s Song, you get the feeling someone’s trying awfully hard to be Truman Capote).
If you see any sexual imagery in the bagel story, it’s entirely what you brought with you. There is nothing explicitly there.
However, it is there, isn’t it? Because you read it, which demonstrates nicely the genius of language (a very old phrase that has meant different things over the years, but by which I mean “language is what language does.”)
Most of our understanding of words is what we bring to them, not what they bring to us.
Ask anyone learning English why the Sunday Funnies are funny. They're not, not to them. Because they arise out of a context they don’t have.
[2014-04-08]
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