Learn

Word of the Week

“Take that!” hollers Yosemite Sam, a Roman legionnaire, banging a caged lion on the head for roaring when he didn’t expect it.  “Maybe that’ll larn ya to keep yer big mouth shut!”  But Bugs is right next to the crank that raises the bars.  Oops!  “Ah hates rabbits,” says Sam.

I can just imagine Friz Freleng and his madcap animators, in a room full of cigar smoke and the smell of stale coffee, saying, “Hey, let’s put Sam in ancient Rome, and Nero tells him he’s got to get a victim to start the games, and Bugs Bunny is the only victim left,” and so on, and part of the great joke is that Sam speaks Hillbilly and Bugs speaks upper-class Chicago.  We immediately register Hillbilly as hokey, under-schooled, ragged round the edges, as when Dizzy Dean drove every schoolmarm in America wild with his Ozark Mountains slang – “That there fella slud right under the tag!”  But you know what?  Slud is pretty close to the Old English past tense of slide: slad; closer to it and older than our slid is.  And learn as meaning to teach was also what you’d have said in London in the year 1000, and in the rest of England besides, well into the 1800’s.  But shouldn’t we pronounce it as lurn?  Ah, well, the pronunciation larn entered the language in Middle English, just like clerk = clark and Derby = Darby and, yup, vermin = varmin(t).  And if you think about it for a minute, when we call somebody learned, we mean that he's been larnd, that is, he’s been taught, somebody’s learnt him.

George Henry Durrie, “The Red Schoolhouse.” Public Domain.

My father always used to say that one of the problems in the world is that there’s always “too many chiefs and not enough Indians,” meaning that everybody wants to boss people around, but nobody wants to take direction.  The result is confusion.  Nothing gets done.  Maybe that is the desired result.  I can imagine a dingy underworld office of mid-level demons, Frizzleface, Chuckamuck, and Clampergob, puffing cheroots stuffed with imitation-Pharisee, and saying, “Let’s have the dopes go for ‘leadership’ for everybody, and make ’em all stooges for the next piece of work we’ll sell ’em,” and they start roaring and coughing with spiteful glee.  For the quickest way to make somebody into a patsy is to fill his head full of notions of his own smarts and his own fitness to lead.  Since he has not the slightest idea where to go, he will be prone to follow the latest fad, always adopting it as the result of his own independent thought.  He won’t learn.  That’s the way we mostly take part in leading: we submit to being taught.  We follow; we learn.

When Jesus called the first disciples, he said, “Come, follow me.”  He didn’t mean that they should just go to the next town where he was going.  Nor did he mean that he had a certain bag of information to give them, which they could then use as they pleased.  He really did mean that they should submit to being taught, to learn from him: as we might say, they should follow in his footsteps.  The relationship between master and disciple, between teacher and learner, is a wonderful and, often, a deeply personal thing.  So it surely was between Jesus and his disciples.  We catch a trace of that in the fine and expressive Old English words for disciple: leornungcniht, learning-knight, and leornungcild, learning-child, learning-servant.  Even modern German preserves much of the charm and the humanity of the relationship.  Jesus’s disciples are his Juenger, his lads – that is, his servants who take instruction from him.  “Take my yoke upon you,” he says, “and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you shall find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.”

Now, you have a yoke on your shoulders only if you are going somewhere, and that too is at the heart of what Jesus is saying, because to learn from him is to follow him, to follow him with your cross that he makes light.  I won’t talk about the burden here, but about the following.  If we go way back into the misty past of our ancient linguistic forebears, we’ll find that our verb learn comes from a root that means furrow, track.  “I follow here the footing of thy feet,” says the poet Spenser, in tribute to Chaucer, the elder poet he loved so well.  In other words, he sees the tracks Chaucer has laid down, and he follows in them.  That’s one of the secrets of artistic and intellectual genius: you learn by following in a master’s traces.  It is also the secret of the saint.  Never follow a spiritual guide who makes a big show about leading but doesn’t say whom he follows; Jesus himself said that he did nothing but what he saw the Father do.  What happens if you won’t learn?  Well, a cousin of English learn, Latin lira, furrow, may tell us.  You stray from the right track: you go delirious.  Lots of delirium in mass entertainment and mass schooling today!