Scrabble’s Two Letter Words – Te, Ti, To, Uh, Um & Un

Te

Te — An alternative name for the seventh note, ti, in the solfège system. See also: Do.

Ti

Ti — An alternative name for the seventh note, te, in the solfège system. See also: Do.

To

To — Indicating the direction or destination of. That’s a reasonable enough distillation of the thirty-two definitions in Merriam Webster. But what I want to talk about are the weird colons we learned in grade school that, if you want a good score on your SATs, are crucial to understanding and can determine the entire direction your life might take starting at a formative age. An example would be:

Desert : Sand :: Lake : Water

When said out loud, we would say, “Desert is to Sand, as Lake is to Water.” Word structures like these are called analogies, and they can help educators determine how critical and creative a thinker you may be.

It’s curious that adults insist on teaching children how to be creative through strict adherence to minimalist rules. But colon notation analogies teach many other lessons too: attention to detail, vocabulary, logic, deductive reasoning, and a more thorough understanding of the rules of grammar or mathematical principles. With a set of rules in place, each analogy can be a fun puzzle to be solved. Let’s try a few! (You can find the answers at the bottom of this word entry.)

Timon & Pumba : Hakuna Matata :: Baloo : ___________
Rick Blaine : “Play it again, Sam.” :: Darth Vader : ______________
Lip balm : Chapstick :: liquid motion lamp : _______________
& : 7 :: $ : ____________

~

Gasoline is cars, as analogies are to critical thinking. Our brains are not filing cabinets. They do not store folders of information to be opened and fanned out when a drawer is popped open. Our brains are instead glomming machines, connecting and reinforcing neurons in sometimes predictable and sometimes surprising ways based upon whatever circumstance presents itself. Or, as Dr. Douglas Hofstadtr, Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science puts it, “Our minds are constructed with an unlimited quality for ‘chunking’ primordial concepts, which then become larger concepts.” “We build concepts by putting several concepts together and putting a membrane around them, and kind of miraculously these [interior] concepts disappear.” Developing brains grow like a city with loose zoning laws for central planning. Individual neurons create networks with others they communicate and work with, and these relationships are stretched to distant and sometimes odd neighborhoods of thought. The word banana has nothing to do with an actual yellow, fragrant, oblong banana. And neither do the words yellow, fragrant, or oblong have anything to do with those abstract concepts. Yet the words and ideas are inextricably linked together so that when someone says the word banana, we think banana.

In an otherwise dry 1931 treatise about mapmaking in Science and Sanity, Alfred Korzybski wrote that “the map is not the territory.” Anybody who followed their GPS too closely and drove off-road, or hit a massive pothole, learned this experience the hard way. Maps are analogies for the reality of the terrain through simplification and abstraction. The idea of a map that’s so perfect that it can replace the terrain is an absurdity. Lewis Carroll understood that. In his book Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, a fictional map is presented with a scale of one mile to one mile, and even in a book of nonsense the map is decidedly useless.

“It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”

Likewise, the words you are reading are composed of twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks and is so much light on a screen without a greater understanding that these symbols make words. These words make sentences, and these sentences propose ideas within a larger framework, which is this article on a web page. Even if this article becomes a chapter in an audiobook one day, all you will hear is the scrambled juxtaposition of the forty-four phonemes in the English language.

It’s all utterly meaningless without the ability to form analogies. Every word you speak and thought you think is an analogy for the object itself. Life, as we know it, is an endless string of analogues formed by brain nodes firing a gyre of messages to one another, which is the way it must be. Because if our thoughts were an actual simulation of our lives, then we would need to have our thoughts about our thoughts within our thoughts, which must have our thoughts within our thoughts, ad infinitum. Our minds will always be the map, and never the territory.

~

*Answers to analogy puzzles:

Timon & Pumba sing ‘Hakuna Matata’ to a young Simba in The Lion King. Baloo sings ‘Bear Necessities‘ to a young Mowgli in The Jungle Book.

“Play it again, Sam” is a famous misattribution in Casablanca. When Ilsa tells Sam to play the signature song of the movie, When Time Goes By, she says “Play it, Sam.” Later in the movie, Rick says “If she can stand it, I can! Play it!” No one ever says “Play it again, Sam.” Similarly, Darth Vader never says the common misattribution “Luke, I am your father.” When Luke accuses Vader of killing his father, Vader’s response is “No, I am your father.” In both cases, the misquote is understandable. Both lines aren’t interesting in themselves but are memorable because of their impact on the plot. When re-telling these scene, moviegoers mentally added the person being talked to in the quote, because the context is lost otherwise.

Chapstick is made by GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare and is a name brand for the generic term ‘lip balm’. Likewise, Lava Lamp is a name brand, and was originally the property of Lava Manufacturing Inc., but is now owned by the Schylling toy company. The generic term for what Schylling makes are liquid motion lamps.

On most American English qwerty keyboard layouts, the ampersand symbol hovers over the number 7. Over the number 4 is the dollar sign. My apologies if you’re familiar with a layout designed for use with another language. Consider yourself right if you got it right for your keyboard.

Uh

Uh — A filler word. See also: Er.

Um

Um — A filler word. See also: Er.

Un

Un — The number one. Un often appears when a person’s dialect and speech pattern is written out. I find it interesting that ‘un’ is the French and Spanish word for ‘one’, even if that’s not the word’s origin. We get the word ‘one’ from the Germanic word family. In Old English, it’s ān. In Dutch, een, and in German, ein. Maybe given a few more centuries, all the European languages will converge on the word ‘un’ for ‘one’.

In the present, however, we’re more likely to hear ‘un’ on television when used by a person of low class, either as an indictment or with knowing pride. Cletus, from The Simpsons, uses it to pepper his slack-jawed yokel patter. This is how he introduces Lisa Simpson to his kids:

“Young ‘uns? This here girl is come from Fairy Land to school y’all. Now you need me, I’ll be on the porch drinking Thomson’s WaterSeal.”

Meanwhile, Al Bundy’s magazine of choice on Married… with Children is Big ‘Uns, a gentleman’s periodical that specializes in illustrations of bazoongas. And if you think it’s terrible that Fox would showcase Al mooning over a soft porn mag, then you’re the snooty, middle-class Marcy D’Arcy that Married… with Children is lampooning.

These examples are stereotypes. I’m pointing at caricatures to show how the media portrays people who use words like ‘un’. But having a dialect doesn’t mean you’re stupid or low class. It only highlights the shallowness of people who would think you’re stupid or low class for talking the way your family, friends, workmates, and/or community speak.

That said, many of us code-switch to avoid the stigma—a process in which the speaker changes their dialect and word choices depending on who they’re addressing. They aren’t no how no country boy talk t’his pop same way’d talk ta teacher. Many of us code-switch without giving it much thought. If I left my local Panera Bread and walked across the parking lot to Heav’nly Donuts, my language and intonation might change without me noticing. Panera is a national upscale bakery/cafe chain that sells a single cookie for $4.29. Heav’nly Donuts is a regional coffee shop round about the Massachusetts and New Hampshire border that attracts blue-collar workers with a $2.50 cuppa coffee. And it’d be wicked nawt smaht of me to stawt tahkin like I was bettern anybudy else in theyah. Admittedly, my accent isn’t that thick when I code switch, and neither are most of the regular contractors kibitzing in Heav’nlys. But it might thicken, depending on who I was trying to blend with and why.

For myself, this sort of code-switching is a casual concession. Not everyone has that privilege. For many people, it can be vital to not sound like the minority community you were raised in. The Harvard Business Review cites a number of reasons why code-switching might be a necessity and reasons why that can hurt:

• Code-switching can increase perceptions of professionalism and the likelihood of being hired.
• It can avoid common negative stereotypes about minority populations (for example, incompetence or laziness) and instead reinforce the idea that the speaker is a model citizen with leadership capabilities.
• It helps convince others in a position of power that you belong to their group, which increases the chance of promotion.

But…

• Code-switching can cause your friends, family, and neighbors to become hostile toward you for turning your back on your community.
• It can drain your cognitive resources and hinder performance.
• It can reduce self-expression and cause emotional burnout.
• And it can come off as inauthentic and cause people to think of you as untrustworthy.

Code-switching in this instance isn’t just a tool to mingle with people you don’t normally talk to. It’s a high stakes game where your soul unhitches so you can float a couple rungs up the corporate ladder. It sacrifices what makes you special in exchange for the right to call yourself ‘acceptable’. Code-switching, used in this way, is giving up. It can feel terrible and do serious harm.

And that harm is commonly under-recognized. In corporate culture, the happier you look, the better results you get. Squeaky wheels may sometimes get the oil, but they’re often cheaper to replace. If you are marginalizing yourself by changing the way you dress, cutting your hair, or talking in a certain manner, then the burden is yours to carry. The company suffers because you suffer, but the cost is unseen.

James Baldwin once wrote that when educators forced black children to code switch, those children entered a limbo in which they can no longer be black, but in which they know they could never be white. And that is a reality that happens maybe a hundred thousand times each year, every time a child is told that it’s wrong to ‘ax’ a question, or that the number ‘one’ should be pronounced with a ‘w’. Like won… won…. not like un. That’s bad English. It doesn’t matter that that’s how your parents pronounce it. Your parents speak bad English. That’s what lazy people do. We’re going to make you a winner. Won… won… won.