minimum

Minimum is this kind of Latin word which gives me a taste of metal in my mouth. It makes me think of Mies van der Rohe and his suit making their way on a heavy taxi through the city of Chicago in the 50-s. Less is more indeed. I wouldn't say that all Latin words sound to me like that but some really do and "minimum" with its counterpart are among them.

I wish, I knew more languages and I am set to. Now I speak only Russian and English, German is slowly fading into the blue for the last ten years. I still can manage to make an order for an omelet with cheese and vegetables, probably in 5 years it would be only cheese and later I will stay hungry.

We do have quite a lot of Latin words in Russian and they settled well there, they fit our language, we bent and skew them as we like and they even look similar to the Russian words. You know, some type designers agree on that the Cyrillic script has too many vertical strokes in the letters and they are spread too much in the Russian words. Take the word "пиши" ("to write" in English) -- it looks like a solid fence, not even one curve. You shall not pass.

The same with the word "minimum", one can actually spell it by putting 15 vertical strokes in a row and then connecting few of them almost in a similar way. Two dots, one little above the fourth vertical stroke, second above the seventh, 8 short horizontal strokes and voilà. Stumbling upon such a word in an English text I compare with finding something sharp in some soft and safe substance, a needle in a haystack or a thorn in your shoe or a knife in a pillow.

I am not saying that I don't like these words in English, not at all. I just strongly feel that there is something different about them, another audio-visual layer in the body of the language and I find it very interesting. As a bath half-filled with hot water and the other half with cold, you step in it and depending on your luck either draw back because hot water burns your skin or clench your teeth because it's freezing. Curiously, I don't feel such a presence of the French language in English but as I understand it is very much there thanks to William the Conqueror. The Tower of London remains but the perception of presence has faded in the language. I wonder if there are still standing Roman castles in the Great Britan or maybe it is that the heritage of Normans is in the bricks and the heritage of the Romans got its fortifications -- fences scattered in the Exford Dictionary.

Imagine how those people who came up with "I-am-sterdam" sculpture are lucky that this word has all these different letters inside. With all those strokes and curves you can lean against these letters, you can climb some or you can climb in others and even slide some. A lot of people are happy. Truth must be told, words are Worlds but some of them are better sculptures for public spaces than another.