As I’ve been visiting the very far away land of Gwot (as evidenced in my previous few posts) it isn’t surprising that I’ve been thinking a lot about things such as language, customs, and those odd things humans do, once really large numbers of them get together and start doing those things that large numbers of humans do, as if they’re—somehow—picking up on some kind of subsonic, ultrasonic, or olfactory cues. As I’ve been visiting the very far away land of Gwot (as evidenced by my previous few posts) I’ve been in a rather interesting head-space. My Muse, it would seem, has decided to become an anthropologist—or at least an armchair anthropologist. Because of this, I’ve been looking at the meanings behind, under, and embedded deep within things. As I took a break from wandering around Gwot, and listening to various people there, I wandered around in this world with Corey. I did this, yesterday. It was a very cold day, but we were both in the mood to see a part of Chicago we scarcely get the chance to visit. We went to Greek Town. We ate lamb with stuff on it. We froze our fingers off. But not before being trampled by a large number of geriatric tourists from…suburbia. In our wanders—or at least on my half of our shared wander—I saw countless half-familiar street-signs. Greek Town, like many of the other European neighborhoods in Chicago, possesses a distinctive flavor: a nod to the old country, and in the case of Greek Town, to the old city-state of Athens: yeah, the mood goes that far back, and judging by some of the musical instruments I heard in one of the restaurants, so do some of the songs! Because of my suddenly anthropological Muse, I found myself reading street signs, neon signs, announcements, and other written things. I noticed that quite a number of them were written in that one particular style of Greek that makes people think of…well…um…double-jointed Cyrillic; that isn’t surprising, really, since Cyrillic was stolen…um, I mean, cut-and-pasted from Greek. As I read signs, I thought to myself: Yep…that looks like Greek to me…a play on an old, actually “biblical” idiom referring to the particular sound (and look) of literacy. For a time, Greek was the Lingua Franca of civilization (how’s that for a jarring, mixed metaphor?) and was closely associated with literacy. The phrase “It looks like Greek” or “It sounds like Greek” was…in some circles, taken to mean: “Golly-gee, those guys sure do write pretty!” I thought of this as I took a photograph of neon signage in a window, apparently selling…um…nouns of some sort. As I snapped this photograph (with exceptionally cold fingers,) I began to think of the Greek language and my excuisitely-limited knowledge of it. I know that it’s quite a descriptive (and efficient) language, prone to encapsulate whole chunks of reality in massive, supremely compressed, though exquisitely-long words, and as I snapped this photograph, I wondered what single Greek word might encapsulate the experience of photographing neon and reflections on an exceptionally cold, but sunny day in Chicago, before eating lunch based upon a lamb dish. And from what I know of the Greek language, there probably is a single word that means exactly that. Maybe I’ll learn it. Maybe I won’t. But at any rate, here is a photograph, of neon…in Greek. As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and I hope you’re all having a great week.