In the Language of My Former People

Photo by M.Peinado/Flickr

By Leah Elliott

One day, my mother’s name appears in my inbox. I open a message announcing that my parents have been called to be missionaries in the Philippines. I cringe, sigh, and think, I’m sorry, as I picture my parents—oh so pious and paternalistic—carrying out the Lord’s holy work of perpetuating colonialism in the Philippines.

I close my eyes. Truly, sincerely, I’m sorry.

•••

I was a Mormon, the earnest, orthodox, devout, faithful, believing kind.

On my father’s side, my ancestors were some of the very first members of what would become the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They were among those who knew Joseph Smith and those who walked across the plains with Brigham Young to settle Utah. My mother was a convert from Florida. In 1966, at the height of the Civil Rights and Women’s Rights movements, my mother’s big act of rebellion was to stand up to her pastor and defend her decision to leave the Southern Baptist Church to join the Mormon Church. In 1968, she gave up a scholarship at a state university and instead enrolled at Brigham Young University. By the time she was nineteen, she and my dad were married. My oldest sister was born before their first anniversary, and there would be no ebb to the procreating for the next twenty years.

Mormonism made up the fabric of my childhood. It saturated my days with its regimen of six a.m. daily family scripture study; morning and evening family prayer; blessings on meals; individual prayers; individual scripture study; a weekly three-hour church bloc; midweek church activities; monthly fasting and bearing of testimonies; obedience to the Word of Wisdom, meaning abstention from alcohol, cigarettes, and caffeine; observance of the Sabbath, in the form of refraining from activities deemed too raucous or worldly; General Conference, Stake Conference, ward conference, youth conference; temple preparation, missionary preparation, celestial-marriage-to-a-returned-missionary-for-time-and-all-eternity preparation; seminary; modesty in dress; Book-of-Mormon distance for dancing partners; avoiding even the appearance of evil; being in the world but not of the world; absolutely no sex ever, of any kind, not ever, not even with yourself, never, not ever until after you’re married, and then only with your opposite-sex spouse, and even then nothing too kinky .

Not one wisp of my life escaped Mormonism’s touch.

By the time I was twenty-five years old, my mounting disillusionment with Church culture and unsatisfactory answers to doctrinal and historical questions led me to leave the Church.

That year was the first time I tasted alcohol.

My experience of Mormonism was more harrowing than not, something I think of having survived and something I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to distance myself from.

Still, the tendrils of it follow me everywhere. It comes up frustratingly early with new acquaintances. When the answers to common getting-to-know-you questions are responses such as “I have ten siblings,” and “My parents live in Utah,” you can’t really plausibly deny ever having had anything to do with Mormonism.

I’m not especially proud of having been a Mormon. It was an unchosen identity, assigned to me at birth like gender, one that I earnestly tried to fill but ultimately found ill-fitting and had to drop. I get tired of being defined in terms of what I’ve chosen not to be, and my most painful life experiences aren’t really what I want to talk about with people I’ve just met. I’ve settled on a response for the inevitable, “Are you Mormon?” question: “I was raised that way, and my parents are, but I’m not anymore.” All of which is true, and none of which conveys any of the actual truth of the experience.

I usually ignore Facebook friend requests from people I don’t know, but if all my ex-Mormon friends show up as our friends in common, I accept the request. I know what it means to have been Mormon, and to go through the never-ending process of becoming not-Mormon. I know there’s a story of loss, grief, betrayal, disillusionment, and abuse. I know they’ve lost friends, and not uncommonly, have become estranged from at least some of their family. I know that, regardless of where they fall on the gender and sexuality spectrums, they’ve dealt with intense shame over their sexuality. I know they’ve had to learn how to reorient themselves to a world they were taught to remain aloof and unspotted from. Those within the Church regard you as fallen, deceived, succumbed to the influence of Satan, but life in The World is foreign.

Every former Mormon who sincerely believed the One True Church narrative, who had a testimony of the truthfulness of the Gospel, as they say, has come to a point of realization that this Thing that they have based every aspect of their lives on is not what they thought it was. The sheer terror of being thrust into freefall when your entire worldview collapses, the enormity of the gaping maw of the “So now what?” that you are left with, is impossible to explain to someone who has never been through it, and needs no explanation for someone who has.

•••

There are lots of names for people who leave the Church: ex-Mormon, Jack Mormon, former Mormon, recovering Mormon, anti-Mormon, or (my personal favorite) Mormon Alumni.

But still “Mormon,” all of them.

I had a Sunday School lesson when I was about four years old. It was an object lesson, a Mormon favorite. Our teacher gave us each a fresh sheet of clean, white paper and told us to crumple it up as small as we could. We were excited at being instructed to do something we’d normally be scolded for, and the room erupted with the noise of crackling paper. After a minute or so, our teacher reversed her instructions: Try to make the paper as it was before you crumpled it. Of course we couldn’t. And that was the point of the lesson, which was on consequences: Some things just can’t be undone.

I can be not-Mormon, but not never-has-been-Mormon.

In 2009, four years into my journey out of Mormonism, I arrived at a brief period of atheism and started a blog, which I titled “The Whore of All the Earth.” The Bible mentions the whore of Babylon, but “the whore of all the earth” is a phrase from the Book of Mormon, unique to Mormonism. I chose the title, in part, because I knew it would serve as a homing signal to other ex-Mormons. It was me trying to snap my fingers and catch their eye across a crowded room: “Yo! Yo! Over here! I’m one of you!”

And it worked. I blogged my way into an online community of others who had left the Church, people who got it in a way that never-were-Mormons can’t. But after a couple of years, I got burnt out on hearing “this was my awful experience of Mormonism” stories, weary of talking about Mormonism in general. There were reasons why I left, after all. So I withdrew from the ex-Mormon blogosphere.

•••

I constantly jot down random thoughts that go through my head. Sometimes these scribbles become the building blocks of poems. Sometimes lines of scripture come to my mind, and then I have to Google to see whether it’s from the Bible or from one of the books exclusive to the Mormon canon. In my upbringing, “scripture” was an umbrella category. There wasn’t much need to pay attention to whether a passage being quoted was from the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, the Pearl of Great Price, or the Bible, because all carried equal authoritative weight.

If a line I’ve jotted turns out to be from the Bible, I’ll go ahead and use it in a poem, but not if it’s from one of the Mormon scriptures. For one reason, relatively few people would recognize the allusion. For another, most of the time I wish I could just excise this past of mine.

One night, I was scribbling away, when this mash-up of the Mormon children’s song “I Am a Child of God” and the Velvet Underground’s “Jesus” started working its way through my head. I noticed how similar the melodic and formal structures are, and even some of the words, and the delicious chromaticism that happens if you start the chorus of “I am a Child of God,” then swap out the line “Help me find the way” with the melody and words of the line “Help me find my proper place” from “Jesus.”

Aw, man, this is genius! I thought. Who could I share this with who would possibly appreciate how genius this is? There are approximately nine million Mormons in North America, or about 1.5% of the total population. I don’t have statistics for the number of Velvet Underground fans in that same area, but let’s assume that they’re a similarly narrow segment of the population. We can deduce that there probably isn’t a lot of overlap between these two groups. I felt a wistful twitch at the corners of my mouth as I realized that I might be the only person who would appreciate how cool the mash-up was. For the first time, I wanted to use something from Mormonism to make art. The problem wasn’t needing to hide having been a Mormon; the problem was that no one would get it.

But then I thought of other writers who allude to a non-mainstream heritage. Joy Harjo, for example, has used the names of Native ceremonial dances in her poems. There’s a little asterisk and footnote for those unfamiliar, and it’s not an issue.

I had another thought I’d never had before: Maybe having been a Mormon could be a thing that made me unique in a positive way, instead of just making me a weirdo.

I was in high school the first time I realized, We’re one of those weird religions! It was 1996 and Mike Wallace interviewed Gordon B. Hinckley, who had recently become the president of the Church, for a segment of 60 Minutes. This was long before Mitt Romney and The Book of Mormon on Broadway. At that time, it was a Big Deal for Mormons to see anything about One of Us on “real” TV, and Very Big Deal for our prophet to be talking a real newsman. My whole family gathered around to watch it. What I remember most is the image displayed behind the talking head who introduced the segment: “MORMONS” in huge banner letters.

I didn’t have a name then for what I was seeing, but I recognized it: sensationalism. I witnessed myself being portrayed as Other.

So I knew that being Mormon had made me weird, but might I want to claim this heritage after all, perhaps the way secular Jews claim theirs? Or the way my queer friends now embrace and celebrate identities for which others once mocked and shamed them?

But this wasn’t like that. Although Mormons are a minority in most parts of the United States, and in broader American culture, where I grew up, in a region north of the Grand Canyon known as the Arizona Strip, we were the majority, and often we were real jerks about it. And I’m the one who finds this identity shameful, a thing to be hidden and denied.

Still, it’s been more than a decade since I left. Most of its sting and noxious fumes have dissipated for me. Mormonism has become a thing I can manipulate and examine with a degree of detachment that I didn’t have when I first left. Maybe that heritage could be a source and a perspective that informs my work instead of something I’m always trying to run from. Maybe I could begin to integrate it.

I mentally played the rest of “I Am a Child of God” in my head:

I am a child of God

And He has sent me here,

Has given me an earthly home

With parents kind and dear.

I noticed that that last line always plays in my head as, “With parents kine dandeer.”

Then I realized why this must be, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up, the way it would if you suddenly sensed that there was someone hiding in the closet behind you, watching you.

I knew this song before I even really knew language.

•••

During a solo road trip soon after, I was singing through hymns that I hadn’t sung in years, mining them for material, interesting ideas or turns of phrase. I sang the chorus of “Praise to the Man,” a hymn in honor of Mormonism’s founder, Joseph Smith:

Hail to the prophet,

Ascended to heaven!

Traitors and tyrants

now fight him in vain!

Mingling with Gods he can plan for his brethren!

Death cannot conquer the hero again!

I burst out laughing as I spotted the resemblance to the self-aggrandizement of a certain commander-in-chief. I texted the lines to one of my brothers, with the comment, “Joseph Smith started a religion, a fantastic religion, incredible, the best, tremendous, you’re gonna love it, believe me!”

Alluding to Smith’s clandestine marriages to dozens of women, some as young as fourteen, others already married to other men, my brother texted back: “When you’re a prophet, they let you do it.”

Joseph Smith was just a silly old megalomaniac conman. I had a living example of his type to compare him against now, and somehow that took most of the menace, and all of the validity, out of him and this whole enterprise that he’d started.

I wiped tears out of my eyes. Of course I’d known that it wasn’t my fault I was born into generations of Mormons, but that was when I knew, in the way that’s the real beginning of healing for a survivor of abuse: It wasn’t my fault.

The culpability for Mormonism’s ills fell from my shoulders. The weight of the need I constantly feel to say, “I’m sorry,” for having been a Mormon was gone. I need no longer bear the sins of my fathers.

•••

Just as Trump was taking office, I unexpectedly found myself adding Civics to my community college teaching course load. I’d never taught the topic, so I was doing a lot of reading every week to prepare for classes. The daily headlines seemed to me the natural result of the history I was reading: a country founded on corruption, oppression, racism, imperialism, and crony capitalism just as far back as the historical eye could see. And the parallels and connections between the corruption in Washington, D.C., and the corruption in Salt Lake City were about to start popping up all over my consciousness.

I read an article about a Mormon Maori man’s unsuccessful efforts to prevent the Church from demolishing a Church-owned school near Hamilton, New Zealand. The school had been an important center to the Mormon and non-Mormon community there, but it was near a Mormon temple, around which the Church was now undertaking an expensive real estate development. Like so many imperialists and capitalists before them, the Church dismissed the concerns of the local community to make way for its business venture and to increase the allure of its temple.

Speaking of its developments near its Philadelphia temple, the Church’s senior real estate manager claimed that “the church is sensitive to what can be developed next to its temple” and always wants to have something “very compatible to the sacred nature of it.” I wondered, was he perhaps conflating “sacred” and “lucrative”?

I thought of downtown Salt Lake City, which the Church has groomed to function as its Mormonland theme park. The Church controls the experience by means of varying subtlety, from signs discouraging giving to panhandlers, to paying the retail stores at the recently-built, upscale Church-owned City Creek Center to stay closed on Sundays. Temple Square and its accompanying visitors’ centers and museums are all free, but visitors spend money in Church-owned businesses downtown, and if they convert, they become tithe-payers.

When it was completed in 1972, the Church Office Building was the tallest building in downtown Salt Lake City, almost twice as tall as the adjacent temple in Temple Square. No nefarious outside entity or city ordinance created a building that dwarfs their temple; they chose that themselves. The building that they claim is their most sacred edifice is literally in the shadow of the building devoted to their administrative and financial affairs.

Among other rites, Mormon temples are where sealing ordinances take place; only in the temple can members receive the rites that guarantee that they’ll be with their families for eternity. Members must pay ten percent of their income to the Church for the privilege of being worthy to enter the temple to receive these rites. All of these funds go to Salt Lake City before being disbursed locally. In addition to tithing and other offerings collected from members, the Church has various for-profit business and real estate holdings, many of them near their temples.

The Church has not publicly disclosed its finances since 1959. I have two thoughts about this. First, I don’t trust anyone with a lot of money who isn’t willing to be transparent about where they get it. Second, what would I expect from a church founded by Donald Trump’s early nineteenth-century counterpart?

During the first few years after I left, I’d been able to see the Church as misguided but well-intentioned. I still thought this was true of most individual Mormons, but the Church as an institution was looking to me like just as corrupt a sham as ever there was and entrenched in the larger systems of corruption and oppression in the United States.

One Sunday morning, an article on the backstory of the publication of Silent Spring came up in my news feed. As I sipped my coffee, I read that Ezra Taft Benson, who simultaneously filled the roles of Latter-day Saint Apostle and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture under Eisenhower, and who would lead the Church as prophet, seer, and revelator from 1985-1994, had written that Rachel Carson was “probably a communist” because he couldn’t conceive of any other reason “why a spinster with no children was so worried about genetics.”

I went searching for more context and turned up some other facts. This man whom I had called “prophet” through the bulk of my childhood had authored a pamphlet titled “Civil Rights, Tool of Communist Deception.” Then during his tenure as Secretary of Agriculture, he had brought us industrial agriculture and factory farms with his insistence that farmers “get big, or get out,” and had attempted to silence the woman who sparked the environmental protection movement, on the grounds that she had a vagina whence no babies had come.

I was indignant. I took it personally, because between the two of them, where I saw myself was in Rachel Carson: a woman intellectual, a writer, a lover and defender of the natural world, and not a Mormon. I wanted to tell the dead man off on our behalf.

You went after Rachel Carson?! You fucking clown! Guess what? Rachel Carson was right. What the hell kind of prophet are you? You’re ridiculous! You’ve got no fucking clothes! Let me just blow away your remaining shreds of credibility there.

I went back to my coffee and Sunday reading.

I’m not afraid of you anymore, so just get out of my closet, and go on now.

•••

Can you ever really divorce the parts of yourself that you don’t want? Can you pick and choose what you’re made of?

I’ve got plains-crossing, polygamy-practicing ancestors. I was born under the covenant, one of eleven children to parents kine dandeer who met at the B-Y-motherfucking-U. Except for the part where I reject all their doctrine and terminate my membership, I’m as legit as it gets. If there’s a minority culture I could definitely claim I’m entitled to appropriate, it’s Mormonism. But did I want to?

I started compiling a list of uniquely Mormon phrases that I found aesthetically or conceptually interesting. I could almost feel my neurons firing with connections, ideas, possibilities of all the things I could craft out of these words. The title of a volume that Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird edited of writing by Native women came to my mind: Reinventing the Enemy’s Language. Yes. That’s what I would do. I would not claim Mormon as my identity, but I would take that crumpled paper for my art.

A stupor of thought,

a son of perdition,

the brother of Jared,

the City of Enoch,

a stripling warrior,

an eight-cow wife,

health in the navel,

marrow in the bones,

strength in the loins and in the sinews,

popcorn popping on the apricot tree,

and Saints and angels sing…

Take it! Take it all!

•••

LEAH ELLIOTT is a writer, poet, teacher, and journeyer. She lives in North Carolina with her partner, children, and stepchildren. You can find poetry, social media links, and other good stuff at her website: www.leahielliott.com.

My Word!

By Jonathan Kalb

From as far back as I can remember, I was what grownups called a verbal kid. My parents were both high school English teachers, my mother for thirty years, and I was lucky enough to inherit their predisposition to articulate speech. At this point, in middle age, I know that this articulateness is a privilege—a gift reinforced by a few beloved mentors and heaps of inspirational highbrow entertainment—but that’s not how it always felt growing up. Speaking precisely was no social advantage in the public schools I attended in suburban Wayne, New Jersey. I would much rather have been good at baseball.

Early on, I developed a tendency that, for all I know, is common among verbal kids, though I’ve never heard it mentioned. I began privately adopting certain words as my own in the secret belief that, like an ardent lover, only I fully understood their true colors, coded signals, and secret desires. I’m not speaking of what people often call pet words—favorite, everyday words that we all have, replace over the years, and tend to overuse. The words I mean are deeply lodged within our psyches and continue to move and sometimes bedevil us even as we age out of them.

I have intensely vivid memories of the circumstances surrounding my learning these words, which subsequently became totems and touchstones, seeding private jokes, tempering and organizing experiences, and affirming my core beliefs.

•••

“Solicit.” Google definition: “to ask for or try to obtain (something) from someone.”

One day during tenth grade, I saw an enticing ad on my high school bulletin board: “Easy work. 1-3 hours after school. Earn $50 to $100 a week.” That was big money in 1974.

The job turned out to be selling subscriptions to The New York Times door-to-door on commission. The clincher was that the guy on the phone promised I’d be paid a minimum daily fee no matter how much I sold. My mother liked his articulate-sounding voice and didn’t pay close attention to details. He picked up me and five other boys in a van the following week and drove us to a leafy section of Hackensack.

We were set loose in pairs, and my partner and I were at it about fifteen minutes when we walked up to a stocky guy standing in his driveway, who asked what we wanted.

“Would you be interested in home delivery of the New York Times?”

“Are you soliciting?” Neither of us knew that word.

“We’re selling subscriptions to a newspaper.”

“So you’re soliciting.”

“We’re selling …”

“That’s soliciting. Soliciting is illegal in Hackensack.” The guy then pulled out a police badge, yelled toward his house, and asked whoever was in earshot to summon a patrol car.

Twenty minutes later the two of us (and then four, then all six) were sitting on a bench at the station, waiting for Hackensack’s finest to decide our fate. We could hear the panicked van driver being grilled in a side room. The next few hours were a gauntlet of tedium, hunger, peremptory harangues, and supercilious questions from cops half-heartedly trying to bait and shame us.

They eventually just let us go. I thought my mother would kill the driver when we got home very late, and he explained what happened. He never paid us for the day.

The dangerous and dubious edges of “solicitation,” the word’s slightly sickening aura of unfairness, has been part of my worldview ever since. When I later learned this word’s association with prostitution it made perfect sense to me. It was a name for something casually polarizing, acceptable to some, depraved to others: not just selling but unwanted, disreputable selling. Not just asking, seeking or applying but supplication, begging, the stain of importunateness always there.

I’ve collected random bits of trivia over the years about many of my words, but particularly about “solicit.” I happen to know, for instance, that the Latin root sollicitare means to disturb, rouse, trouble, or harass. I make space in my head for the fact that Samuel Beckett used “soliciting” to describe the diabolical activity of the purgatorial light interrogating the characters whose heads stick out of funereal urns in his anti-drama Play. I’m probably the only fan of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus who looks forward to the particular slur a plebeian politician uses to trigger an anti-patrician mob reaction: “He did solicit you in free contempt.”

To this day, any neutral use of “solicit” startles and jars me. If a colleague, for instance, proposes soliciting opinions or applications, I automatically regard the appeal as disingenuous and probably futile. The colleague’s motivations seem questionable purely because of the choice of word.

“Solicit” isn’t for everyday use (unless you’re a British lawyer). It’s one of those occasional words that hangs around your brain and exerts its force over time. My sense of its effect on me is that it influenced my disposition toward decorum, convention, and propriety—the whole basket of deplorable ideas that poisons the concept of respectability. Thanks to the Hackensack police, Beckett, and Shakespeare, the word is forever linked for me to all the species of exclusion and harassment that authorities soft-soap as protection: “right to work” laws, gratuitous prohibitions in public spaces, arbitrary restrictions on journalists, protesters, students. I would guess that, more than any other word, “solicit” helped make me politically liberal.

•••

“Spontaneous.” Google definition: “performed or occurring as a result of a sudden inner impulse or inclination and without premeditation or external stimulus.”

When I was ten, I nearly set fire to my family’s house. I, like many kids, needed to test grownups’ claims, and one that struck me as particularly dubious was that gasoline was flammable since it was a liquid. Every liquid I’d ever seen meet a flame—water, soda, juice, pee—had extinguished it, and, yes, I’d done that experiment any number of times. How could anything you poured out, that splashed and sparkled, possibly burn?

One day when my parents were out shopping I rolled our lawnmower onto the driveway, unscrewed the gas-tank cap, and tipped it over—a clumsy maneuver that created a bigger puddle than I intended. Some gas dribbled toward the driveway’s edge, but it looked as if it had evaporated so I wasn’t worried. I threw a lighted match at the entrancing polychrome fluid, jumped back, and thrilled at the windy whoosh. What do you know—the adults were telling the truth!

Within seconds, however, the harmless blue flames on the pavement had spread to the bushes in the adjacent flowerbed and were snaking toward the garage. I stomped on them, waved my arms and dashed about, but the area was already too wide and I found myself surrounded by fire. Then, out of nowhere, an older boy who lived across the street—who had evidently been watching me—ran up, pushed me away, grabbed a garden hose, and doused the fire in a heart-attack minute. Thanks be for fluids that behaved themselves!

I begged him not to say anything to my parents. Then I dashed inside and dialed the Wayne Township Fire Department, asking the guy who answered: “Hey, is there any way that gasoline can catch fire without a flame?”

“Spontaneous combustion,” he shot back, declining to elaborate.

I ran to the dictionary. I didn’t completely understand its complicated definition, though the gist was clear enough and flooded me with relief: a thing could ignite on its own without heat from any external source. I’d found my alibi, and a marvelous new word. What grownup could possibly have such specialized technical knowledge?

My father saw the damage as soon as he pulled up in his Buick Electra. I babbled out my terrifying tale of having “accidentally spilled some gas” while trying the start the lawnmower, after which I was shocked to see it “spontaneously catch fire all by itself. I have no idea how!” Then he asked me to tell him what really happened.

Long story short, since he knew exactly what spontaneous combustion meant and knew it couldn’t happen out on a driveway, he confronted me. He said that if I’d admitted I was trying an experiment because I didn’t believe that gasoline could burn he would have been annoyed and probably made me pay for the bushes. Instead my lie had deeply disappointed him and had to be punished.

This is how the word “spontaneous” became inseparable in my mind from visibility and discernment. My father saw right through me; there was no hiding from him, and this incident marked the turning point in childhood when I suddenly grasped how much more adults saw about me than I’d allowed myself to perceive. All children are humored and cosseted. Adults want them to enjoy their natural curiosity and spontaneity as long as possible. But that indulgence is mostly pretense, condescension. Real respect, I realized then, can’t come from pretense. It has to be earned. I’d been expelled from the Eden of childish egoism and felt naked and embarrassed.

From that day on, “spontaneous” could never again be an index of simple or sincere expression to me. The word instead reminds me how complicated trust, honesty, and instinctiveness are. If, for instance, someone praises an actor, a musician, or a painter for the amazing spontaneity of a creative act, I might share in the admiration but I’ll also ponder the years of preparation and seasoning behind the act. If a child asks for my spontaneous reaction to something—a joke, say, or a picture, or a feat of agility—I will oblige, but I’ll also wonder what his real game is. I know something else is at stake and want to know what.

“Spontaneous” set off brain-alarms when I first noticed how overused it was in the essays of Richard Wagner. Wagner felt that his music-drama was the spontaneous expression of the will of the German Volk, and this word made his ardor suspicious well before he made clear that the German Volk excluded Jews. “Spontaneous,” ironically enough, planted cautiousness in me and reinforced my naturally analytical disposition.

•••

The earliest word I remember adopting is “shortchange.” Google: “to cheat (someone) by giving insufficient money as change.”

On a field trip to the American Museum of Natural History in fourth grade, my parents gave me six dollars to spend on lunch and souvenirs. My bill at the cafeteria, where I’d scrimped to be able to afford a dinosaur at the gift shop, was $1.83. I gave the cashier my single, searched my pocket in vain for change, and then handed her my fiver. She gave me back seventeen cents, snapped her drawer shut, and wouldn’t acknowledge or investigate the error no matter how much I protested.

My tears came, the manager came, and the upshot was that they would reconsider my claim only at the end of the business day when all the register cash was counted. A sympathetic teacher brought me back to the cafeteria then, delaying the homebound buses, and the manager handed me four dollars—“Okay, young fella. I guess you were right!” I still felt indignant since the gift shop had closed. Worse, when I showed my four dollars on the bus, a creepy little red-haired kid cracked wise that he thought I’d just been “jewing” the lady over my lunch bill.

For me this was a story of epic complication and monstrous injury. My parents—whom I never told about the bus comment, which felt humiliating—glossed it with a single word: I’d been “shortchanged!” A good word, I remember thinking, useful, self-explanatory, but too succinct for the outrageous context. It left out the condescension, the bigotry, and the still more stinging injustice that I never got a dinosaur.

Since that day “shortchange” has carried a charge of special outrage for me. It doesn’t just mean cheating, but cheating with malice, discrimination, and intolerable collateral damage. I never hear or use it without flashing back to the experience of not being believed, of belonging to a category of person (children, Jews) whose complaints could be summarily brushed off. In college, I once joined an anti-apartheid divestment campaign I’d been ignoring after receiving a flyer about blacks being shortchanged by the South African government. Recently I deleted the Uber app from my smartphone after reading a headline about the company shortchanging its drivers in New York City. The word made it impossible to believe that Uber’s error was anything but a deliberate fraud.

Even when “shortchange” is used in its softer sense of underestimate—as in, “Don’t shortchange Mitch McConnell. He’s a sly old tortoise!”—it carries a repugnant aftertaste for me, a sugarcoating on dishonesty. Someone is lying to him- or herself about the real merit of an opponent. The word is fused in my head with the principle of fairness at the core of democracy, which is no doubt because as an adult I know that bourgeois democracy, with its rational values, is what gave Jews a path to social inclusion and equal opportunity after some two millennia of exclusion. Jews esteem articulateness. For a long time they did so out of faith in the Enlightenment dream that reason would soon reign over human affairs—that the articulate, being most reasonable, could compete to best advantage on a level playing field in the brave new reasonable world.

•••

Many people have personal dictionaries, lists of words and phrases they use and understand in idiosyncratic ways, shaped by their unique experiences and quirks. These dictionaries are usually unwritten, though a friend of mine told me that she and her siblings once wrote one as a gift for their father on his seventy-fifth birthday. It was about fifteen pages long, she said, and contained several dozen personalized definitions of not only his pet words but also the grumpy connotations, guilt-trippy subtexts, unspoken addendums, and affectionate intimations behind his expressions. The gift made him weep—the tears prompted, I imagine, from the feeling of being so clearly seen, so intimately known by his loved ones.

No one but me could compile a dictionary of my adopted words—and I could add a dozen more to these three—because I don’t use them often. They operate in my inner life as sources of knowledge and attributes of my character. They’re not quirks of speech. Even my wife of twenty-nine years didn’t know most of these stories until she read a draft of this essay. I sometimes think of these words as my deep personal myths.

Roland Barthes famously argued that myth was “a type of speech,” not merely a genre of story. He defined it as speech that treats anything (objects, ideas, people, places, words) as rooted in the natural order when in fact it reflects a very specific and contingent ethos or value system. Nations, communities, and social classes share experiences that make certain concepts appear ineluctably true, timeless, or transcendent. Loving wine, for instance, becomes a token of being truly French, loving ideas for their own sake a mark of being German, and trusting inarticulate people more than articulate ones an acid test of Americanness. Personal myths are much the same as communal ones, only subtler and more virulent in their effect on the psyche.

Since the election of Donald Trump, I’ve been struck again and again by the fact that the leader of my country is now a man so antipathetic to language that he might as well be my mythical enemy. Everyone can see that the communal myths that helped elect him are noxious and retrograde, even his supporters. What interests me more are the personal myths that roil and curdle and fester inside the man. These you can’t see but I imagine them to be grotesque counterpoles to mine.

Trump is a prodigy of belligerent self-absorption who hides behind a protective wall of muddled, degraded, and degrading language. Most of the words he relishes are monosyllabic fetishes (“win,” “sad,” “huge,” “weak”), and he deploys these more like punches than thoughts. I doubt many of them hark back to complicated childhood stories. Nevertheless, without getting too psychoanalytical about it, they probably all have sharp early associations with shaming by some combination of teachers, coaches, and Fred, his blunt and brutal father. One can easily imagine this rolling dumpster being set aflame with remarks to the effect that, “Whadda you smilin’ at? You didn’t win!”; “That’s a sad report card!”; or “Why such a weak swing? Choke up!”

We will obviously never know the whole truth about Trump’s myth of grievance against proper and precise language, though we can all agree it’s now a serious matter indeed. It’s one thing for an average person to heedlessly mangle and ravage words, quite another for the most visible and influential man in the world to do so.

Masha Gessen, in her wonderful “Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture” this year, carefully explained just how thorough his assault on clarity and truth is. She examined a random interview transcript and pointed out that approximately one in ten words was wholly drained of meaning. “Trump’s word-piles fill public space with static,” she wrote. “This is like having the air we breathe replaced with carbon monoxide. It is deadly. This space that he is polluting is the space of our shared reality.”

Our shared reality. That is what a myth purports to define but instead pollutes, sickens, and destroys when it is this malignant.

I’ll be candid about my own corner of this shared reality. My adopted-word myths admittedly contain fear, loathing, envy, and even aggression toward people who can’t or won’t speak well. Zadie Smith put the matter succinctly in a recent piece on the question of who owns black pain: “Our antipathies are simultaneously a record of our desires, our sublimated wishes, our deepest envies.” Yes, all those dull-witted kids who could catch, throw, and bat better than me, win more votes for student council, and get dates with the cheerleaders—they had things I wanted. Personal myths are defenses as well as weapons. At their worst, they’re a form of lamination keeping our ideas clean and utterly unreactive.

The learning moment then must be when the lamination tears. At some point, we must all hope, that will occur in Trumplandia. Some anomalous freethinkers in his ragtag army of gloating elite-bashers, pricked to attention by the jagged edges of, say, “collusion,” “rapist,” “hacking,” “laundering,” “proliferation,” “denial,” “fraud,” “fact,” “treason” or some other word that miraculously survives the wreckage, will pluck up the courage to admit their real resentments. Only then will the mythical curtain start to rend and make the driveling man behind it visible again.

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JONATHAN KALB is Professor of Theater at Hunter College, CUNY. He has published five books on theater and his essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Nation, Salmagundi, and many other publications. His blog, “Something the Dust Said,” can be found at www.jonathankalb.com.