Big Fear

As I mentioned a couple of blogs ago, Helena is trying to figure out the feeling of fear.  When we got back to the United States last week, she found something else to fear: her Pampers.  There is no Sesame Street in Brazil, so she never had the chance to see Elmo and the Cookie Monster and the Count; her first interaction with these monsters (because, cuddly as the muppets are, they are still strange critters) comes in the very intimate space of her underpants.

Over the last couple of days, she has resolved the conflict linguistically.  Instead of saying "medo" (fear) when she sees the muppets on her diapers, she says "medão," or "big fear."  And strangely, "big fear" inspires more laughs than terror.

Has Helena discovered irony?  Maybe.  I think it's more likely that she has found that words influence the things they describe.  The book that made Helena think about fear for the first time, "Little Yellow Riding Hood" by Chico Buarque, ends with the girl able to face the wolf when she discovers that by inverting wolf (lobo) she gets a cake (bolo).  We have a naïve sense that words simple describe the world, but in fact they make it: the idea from the Gospel of John than "in the beginning was the word" may sound strange to modern scientific ears, but it isn't far off.

I remember a debate in Hebrew class, years ago, about the etymology of the noun D-B-R, which means both thing and word.  In the European tradition, we distinguish strongly between words and things, but I think there is something in the Hebrew assimilation of the two seemingly disparate elements.  And I think that Helena is coming to learn that a word is a thing that can be played with, modified, changed, little different that putting clothes on her baby dolls.  And as she clothes her words in new sounds and new adjectives, they start to change the things to which they refer.  Fear isn't as heavy when it is "big fear", and a lobo isn't so dangerous when you realize it's just a backward bolo/cake.