Page 50 - SA Mountain Issue 62

THE ENIGMA
by TERENCE LIVINGSTON
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words . . . they just confuse me!
“I had a hand-jam, looking to go for a manky jug, when I suddenly got elvis-leg. I peeled, man! No redpoint for me!”
If you didn’t know any better, you could swear I was at some sleazy club trying to pull some Channing Tatum dance moves or at worst, just hoping to get lucky! Far too often we get lost in translation when we don’t speak the same language.
I often get the same feeling when I have to visit SARS and they tell me I need an IT34 and a Letter of Drawings. I immediately surrender and seek out an interpreter – my accountant! She speaks their language! Or when I overhear my daughter with her friends chatting about the latest trends.
Every group has their own carefully constructed jargon that they treasure and ing about with abandon, especially when an outsider is within earshot. It makes us look important – even more, it gives us a sense of belonging!
In WWII, the Nazis conceived a machine that befuddled the British and allowed them to pull off a string of successful daring raids against their enemy. The contraption was a modi ed typewriter that used complicated ciphers to send instructions across the wires. The annoying aspect was that the code changed every so often making it even harder to nd a pattern to interpret. It
took countless hours for a special team of code-breakers to nally crack the Enigma. Only then could they comprehend the enemy strategies and thwart Germany’s in ltrations. I work with a woman 20 years younger than me – a different generation altogether; the music, the style and of course the language. Often I am left at my wits end, Googling each of her many 3-letter responses to my WhatsApps. ‘LOL’ I get, but I was totally in the dark with DMC (sounds more like a climbing brand!), SETE and EYC. Every now and then I throw some climbing jargon back at her and feel justi ed when she replies with a small, confused monkeyface emoji. Kudos to myself!
For those just starting out in the world of scaling cliffs and boulders, it can be equally frustrating. No one likes having a beta sprayer for a belayer, especially when you don’t speak the lingo. Just trying to focus all your attention on not letting go with your ngertips on a crucial crux and now you have to decrypt all this slang thrown up at you. ‘Go for the off-width next to the open book.’ Huh? Learning all the moves and their speci c terms can take a while, not to mention the gear! You may be misconstrued for alluding to a political scandal when asking for a ‘screwgate’, or about to have a shootout at high noon with a ‘quickdraw’, or join
the aeronautical realm with an ‘Air Traf c Controller’. Even more interesting going on a search to nd the right nuts for your crack! They have some great dictionaries online for every mountaineering term possible, (my favourite being www.abc- of-rockclimbing.com) and not just for beginners, either. As with any language, ours is always evolving, and keeping up is important if you want to make sure you don’t get offended when someone shouts ‘Venga!’ at you while attempting a dif cult section. After Chris Sharma relocated to Spain, this Spanish phrase meaning ‘Come on!’ has become the norm at many cliffs worldwide.
I remember when I rst began this crazy sport of hanging off a precipice, I had little idea of what I was doing – even less what everything was called. But I learnt each move and piece of gear, and with it the names associated with them. Time-consuming, and sometimes confusing, but it was a rite of passage. It is the same with any activity, and for most of us, who have been on the rocks for some time, many of these terms are so ingrained in our conversations, we don’t even notice the uniqueness they possess. They de ne us, set us apart from the rest of society.
Like a gang with our very own secret code.
48 SAMOUNTAIN.CO.ZA SEPTEMBER–NOVEMBER 2017