In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [2]
For our first meeting Mark showed up in a T-shirt with the International Phonetic Alphabet printed on it, and I soon discovered that all his T-shirts were a form of self-expression. In fact, everything he owns somehow advertises his interests to the world. On his minivan he has a KLI license plate holder and an LNX sticker (proclaiming himself a user of the Linux operating system). On the vest he wears most days, he displays his three Klingon certification pins; membership pins for the Dozenal Society (“they advocate switching to a base 12 system from the base 10 system we use for numbering”), Mensa (“it's a way for insecure people to feel better about themselves”), and the Triple Nine Society (“a more extreme kind of Mensa”); and a button he made that says “If you can read this you are standing too close” in Braille.
I usually met with Mark at a kosher pizza place. He's an Orthodox Jew who follows all the rules, but jokes that he would be an atheist “if I weren't such a scaredy-cat.” He is slender and jittery, one knee constantly bouncing as he talks in a speedy patter. His eyes convey both friendliness and sadness, as if he hopes you will like him but wouldn't be surprised if you punched him. He never finished his Ph.D. in computer science, and he has had trouble holding down a job, to which he credits his attention deficit disorder (“It's not an excuse; it's an explanation”). He cares for his children while his wife, a physician, works, and he teaches computer programming part-time at a yeshiva in Newark. While many bright people like Mark tend to blame the world for not rewarding them more heartily for their smarts, he accepts his own responsibility in the matter. He knows a lot, but not much of it is career making. He is, as he might put it, a polymath of esoterica. His other interests include knot making, typography, mathematical knitting, and calendrical systems. We flew to Phoenix together, and when the plane took off, he pulled a book out of his duffel bag titled Science from Your Airplane Window.
Mark is an extreme case of the Klingon-speaker type—a computer guy with an interest in languages and a slightly hurt pride in his status as an outsider. He doesn't fear being called a geek, even by the geekiest, because what is happening with Klingon is just too damn interesting. “So-called normal society,” Mark says, “spends all these resources figuring out new and exciting ways to drape cloth on our bodies. What's so bad about having fun with this little language?” While his life has been marked by some unpleasant run-ins with so-called normal society, he has no desire to appease it. The part of the qep'a' he was most looking forward to was going out to restaurants with the participants (some in costume), speaking Klingon, and “scaring the mundanes.”
I wasn't looking forward to that as much. Not as brave as Mark, and probably more of a mundane myself, I felt conflicted about whether to call the conference hotel to request the special conference rate. In order to do this, I would have to, as the registration materials stated, identify myself as a conference attendee. I rehearsed in my head: “Hi, I'm with the Klingon conference …” I tried to get up the nerve to call, but in the end I reserved my room online from a comfortable cushion of anonymity.
And then I got to work on my verb charts and lists of affixes. I needed to study in order to pass the first language certification exam. The Klingon Language Institute, what you might call the academy of the Klingon language, runs the qep'a' and also administers the Klingon Language Certification Program. Passing the first certification exam earns you a bronze pin and the title of taghwI' (beginner). The second test confers a silver pin and the title ghojwI' (intermediate), and the third test earns a gold pin and the title po'wI' (advanced).
I didn't know about the tests until Mark told me. I had been casually studying the Klingon dictionary, intending to familiarize myself with the grammar from a clinical distance. But the idea of a test stirred something