Recently, I was reading. As the words passed through my brain, one particular combination caused a brain clog. Such was the nature of the unpleasantry that I had to fix the clog. The phrase was:
‘hold my own’
Examples: I can hold my own in cage fights with wolverines. My roommate holds his own when he’s pixie dancing.
Hold my own? Hold my own what? What does that even mean?
As I researched the phrase, I found things. But they didn’t satisfy. They didn’t make semantic or morphologic sense. I was left empty. So empty…
But then my brain unclogged a bit, and I was able to think. Maybe I was going about this all wrong. Maybe I was missing some key factor. Since the phrase didn’t make sense as presently constituted, perhaps there was a previous constitution that made lots of sense—a sense factory, if you will. Maybe the phrase had changed over time. But from what? Since an own or one’s own is not something that can have an action done thereunto, I decided to investigate this first. The only logical explanation is that the original phrase employed some different manifestation of ‘own,’ a different spelling maybe.
Whilst preserving the phonetic purity of the word, the only other spelling I’ve found is ‘Oanh,’ a Vietnamese surname. Therefore, the phrase, written, is actually ‘hold my Oanh,’ which is to hold this:
Maybe it's a holdover from the war. Maybe it was coined to engender interracial appreciation. Maybe it's a phrase of endearment. By all means, it doesn’t make sense. ...logically. But it does make perfect sense semantically and morphologically, and the primary purpose of language is semantics. Therefore semantic accuracy is always the goal, and can always be used to sort out confusing linguistic conundrums. Personally, I think it better not to make an Oanh one's own, let alone hold one. But to each his Oanh.
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