11th
верно (verno)
The word “verno” sunk its piles into my brain long before I knew its meaning. Was it me, or did people’s voices drop ever so slightly when this word crossed their lips (emphasis on the first syllable, the vowel is somewhere between ier in ‘tier’ and ear from ‘to tear’). I sensed in verno something that predated my attempts to learn a second tongue, there was something about it that went back to my first attempts to mimic the sounds of my surroundings. As a word, verno seemed a kind of incontrovertible truth, a verdict whose usage seemed preordained by time and fate. I hesitated to even look it up. The time would come, I thought, and I would know to use it. Words like faithful; true; right; correct; accurate; exact; safe; sure; reliable; and certain had their places, but they were so subordinate to context, so papery and lifeless compared to this venerable Russian modifier. After twelve years of studying Russian, it was just the other day that I realized why my reverence for this word ran so deep. There is a sort of Belfastian peace wall that keeps proper nouns and (improper?) nouns from hurling paving stones at one another. I’ve always wondered about this division, and how it affects our attempts to learn another language. Proper nouns, like the names of brands, cities and family members, are in a sense common linguistic property. We don’t normally ‘try’ to remember them because we don’t need to, they’re sticky as hell, and often lead to disputes with serious political/economic consequences that are very boring. As a way to break the extended tedium of studying a foreign language, however, it’s kind of nice when somebody hands you a swag bag of proper nouns that translate themselves effortlessly. What happened in my case, with verno, was just the opposite. I had nothing to go on, no leads. Like a beat cop trying to solve an international conspiracy, I faced the problem of jurisdiction, but enjoyed the luxury of anonymity. What good could tracking a word back to its roots do when those roots were not my own? I went gumshoeing through the whole of the Russian language only to discover that this word is really pretty common, in fact it’s a little dull, and my reverence for it was more self-induced than anything else. A dead end. It was only the other day, when I was drunk enough to clamber up the wall separating the titled classes from their common brethren that I realized what this word meant for me. I started thinking, “If verno was a brand of deodorant, would I buy it?” (yes, definitely, I’m in Japan now on another linguistic journey and could go for a stick of Sure) [CS - I looked this up, it’s marketed as Rexona in Russia/CIS]. Then, “If verno was an English word, what would it remind me of? Of course, my dad, Vernon!” I realized. All I had to do was reject the distinction between proper and common, noun and modifier, and as these distinctions vanished I realized why this word was so significant. A bridge formed between what I had hitherto considered the Russian English parts of my brain. How soon do people learn their parents’ names? I don’t know, but it’s got to be pretty deep down in the primordial muck of linguistic development, strange that I didn’t group these in with the other propers. I guess there are proper nouns and proper nouns.
