I’m thinking about a lot of things today. First, that it’s Veterans Day and we have troops on the ground in more than one country. That there are many men and women who don’t get to stand as Veterans with us today. That we are without them.
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| Sometimes I marvel that when I look down from the window where I write, I see this. |
I’m also realizing like most everyone else online today, that it’s 11.11.11. I realize that the date is something to marvel at, but I marvel that more people (including esteemed news outlets) are marveling at 11.11.11 more than at what else this day means — every year.
I do get it, as today’s date is a rare palindrome, which comes around once every one hundred years. Not only that, it’s a binary number. And in that clever way the universe works, it’s the only one of its kind we’ll ever have. But that’s of course true of every single grain of sand we get to experience as it passes through the thin neck of the hourglass.
For a recent lesson, I asked my students for a date, place, and person that was important to each of them (so we could practice using our question words, such as “Who is such-and-such?” and”Why is that important to you?” as well as the simple past tense, such as “What happened on 8.12.2002?” and “What did you do in Miami?”)
So what does this day… Veterans Day… 11.11.11… a unique grain of sand… mean to me?
Well, I had a Spanish lesson. Currently, we are learning some of the crucial fundamentals I missed during my sporadic bursts of Spanish instruction, often at too advanced a level for my comprehension. These fundamentals (colors, numbers, asking about things) are only part of what I miss each day when I try to understand the words around me, but learning them gives me a little more surface area (er, life rafts) to meander in what is now a daunting and uncharted lose liquid of language. I have faith that one day I will finally skip along, happily comprehending just like Liesl from The Sound of Music when she’s dancing with Rolfe in the gazebo and leaping from stone bench to stone bench.
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| Ya, ya, ya! |
Brief, tangental peek into my seven-year-old, only-child, self-soothing childhood: I used to rearrange the furniture in the TV room–breaking apart the sections of the sofa, spinning the ottoman just so, and flinging a few cushions to the floor in order to form a perfect ring–and skip and leap in time with Liesl when she’s sixteen going on seventeen. I know, between this and my Anne of Green Gables obsession, you’re probably starting to wonder about how I turned out all right. Well, I haven’t even told you about the games I invented around Mary Poppins (or how old I was before I realized Julie Andrews also played Fraulein Maria), but I’ll save that for another day.
Ya.
The way I say “ya” here means “OK.” I asked my teacher about it, as I hear it everywhere I go: when I’m squeezed close to cell-phone conversations on the metro, when my Spanish teacher gets ready to turn to a new page, when my students are filing into class, when a waitress takes my lunch order.
As my teacher comedically acted out for me today, its meaning is nearly all-encompassing.
There’s the “ya” when you mean “sí.” The “ya” when you mean “ok.” The “ya” when you mean “bueno.” The “ya” when you mean “terminamos” (“the end.”) The “ya” when you mean “already.”
But then! Ah, then! There’s all the emotion you can put behind it:
“Ya!” as in “Cut it out!”
“Ya!” as in “Way to go!”
“Ya!” as in “Ready?”
“Ya!” as in “Ah! Yeah, okay.”
“Ya!” and in “Enough!”
Accordingly to “How to Survive in the Chilean Jungle: An English Lexicon of Chilean Slang and Spanish Sayings,” there’s also “Ya po,” as in “Yes!” or “Yes, let’s do it!”
And then, my favorite, the “ya” that really means “no,” as in “Ya, no,” as in “Sí, pero no más” (“Yes, but no more.”)
You may be thinking of the many ways we use “yeah” in the States, and you’re certainly right. Some of the meanings overlap without leaving much of a margin. After all, we do use “yeah” to express agreement, excitement, and sometimes to be corrected by our mothers who would prefer we enunciate “yes.”
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| And when I look up, I see this. |
But the Chilean “ya” doesn’t have any of that nasally “yEEEAAAhhh” sound we North Americans have mastered, some of us better so than others depending on our geographic location. Sure, “ya” can also pack a whiney punch if you want it to, but most of the time (to my gringa ear anyway) it sounds fluid and firm, definitive and enthusiastic, encouraging and accepting, confident and sure.
Ya.
So, what does this day mean to you?