idom attic

Call it the windmill of the mind.

While petting our cat, which was lying purring on her other human in the bed, floated through my mind the phrase "take care of." As in, you are a lucky cat, because you have two humans who love you and take care of you.

Then I wondered why we use the word take. Why not the word have. The Spanish find this a perfectly serviceable word to describe someone's age. It is not I AM 6 years old, but I HAVE six years. Like a possession. I also HAVE hunger, as if I had acquired that state, but might be dispossessed of it shortly.  Different languages put together different combinations of little words to try to get at things that are hard to reach linguistically. Particularly when it comes to prepositional phrases, where words like to and of might nearly get at the same thing, if from slightly different directions.

But to "take" care. Shouldn't we be giving it? Are we taking it away?

Maybe the care(s) of which we speak are the cares of life, the things that cause worry lines on the face. Negative things. therefore, taking them away, or taking them on, is a sign that we are in fact showing love.

It might also be that the thing we are taking is "care OF" as in, I am sending this postcard "care of" the person who owns the house the other person is living in.

This makes the taking a positive thing. I am not taking cares away, I am taking (having) "care of."

You can see where this sort of thing can really start to hurt your brain. And the more of these little phrases you think of, the more you realize what an illusion language is. Just like the stuff we are made of which consists of more nothing than something--little electrons swirling around nuclei--the sum of the words doesn't quite add up to what they are supposed to signify. You just have to "know what they mean." Which helps if you grew up using the language. Otherwise, you discover in short order that all of these idioms are strange ways to arrive at what they are trying to convey. In your own language, you might not have thought about it.

This is the odd thing about communication. Most of us do not think about it regularly, or at all. But it is one of the things that makes it so hard. This is try of any form of communication. It includes music. What does it all add up to anyway? (Ives queried.) "The voice of God" (he offered)-- but "The voice of the Devil, says the man in the front row." With a disagreement of that size, it is no wonder we can't communicate!

If you were wondering why more people are not authors and composers, or at least good ones, it is because most of us get our thoughts, our opinions, our ideas, at the retail level. We seldom examine them, put them together. Our minds are not little IKEAS--not most of us. But if you felt this post to be a little weird, understand it to be a pre-requisite. If you really have something to say, and you want to say it...

welcome to our strange little world. And good luck.