The Romance of Language

I spent much of yesterday in the company of a business associate who was in town (that town being San Francisco, incidentally) from Florida for a meeting. As we chatted genially about e-mails, time zones and cross country flights, it occurred to me that, even in the midst of our post-modern, 21st Century digital lives, the questing, adventurous spirit that is uniquely American lives on, embedded in our very language.

Those of us who have spent most of our lives on the West Coast speak of going "back East" when traveling to the East Coast. Conversely, travel in the other direction is usually expressed in terms of going "out West." Have you ever spoken of flying "out East" or "back West?" There is something inherent in our language, it seems to me, that preserves the sense that the East Coast is the starting place, the home and the root, and that all else West is the destination, out there somewhere. I even edited the first sentence of this post to take out my original construction, describing my collegue as having "flown out" to California. Even us Westerners (or at least this one) acknowledge by our language that this is still the outpost, to which others journey from the well-established settlements in the East.

As reduced in size and time as we believe our world has become over the recent decades, there is something in this unconcious mapping of our syntax that comforts me, that there is still a cultural memory of journey, adventure and hope.