The -mis tense was one of the things I complained to my mother about. Every time I heard -mis, I felt caught out. "The dog scared-mis you." "You told-mis your parents that if Aunt Hulya came to America, she could live in your garage." When you heard -mis, you knew that you had been invoked in your absence - not just you but your hypocrisy, cowardice, and lack of generosity. "You complained-mis to your mother," Dilek would tell me in her quiet, precise voice. It could be translated as "it seems" or "I heard" or "apparently." I associated it with Dilek, my cousin on my father's side - tiny, skinny, dark-complexioned Dilek, who was my age but so much smaller. The suffix -mis had not exact English equivalent. You were always thinking about it, every time you opened your mouth. You were always stating your degree of subjectivity. Batumans fiction is unguarded against both lifes affronts and its beautyand has at its command the complete range of thinking and feeling which they entail. Turkish, for example, had a suffix, -mis, that you put on verbs to report anything you didn't witness personally. The Idiot is a heroic yet self-effacing reckoning with the terror and joy of becoming a person in a world that is as intoxicating as it is disquieting. I knew I thought differently in Turkish and English - not because thought and language were the same, but because different languages forced you to think about different things. “In my heart, I knew that Whorf was right.
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