For much of the 20th century The Man with the Golden Helmet was esteemed one of Rembrandt’s greatest paintings. The brilliant play of light on the gilded helmet, the subject’s shadowed face and pensive, down-turned eyes, and the secondary glint off the metal of the gorget seemed to most viewers a bravura display of the master’s technique. But by the 1960s some scholars had begun to question whether Rembrandt had in fact painted it; and two decades later, after extensive analysis, a scholarly consensus arose that it had probably been done by one of Rembrandt’s students.
What are we to make of this? Is the painting still a masterpiece? Did we set too high a value on it when we mistakenly thought it a Rembrandt? It is still the same picture: do we get less pleasure from it now that we strongly suspect it to be by a lesser hand? Why did we love it in the first place: because it was a brilliant artistic achievement, or because (as we thought at the time) it was by Rembrandt? These questions have no simple answers. They are all related to the intractable problem of taste.
In Ohio, on a clear Saturday morning in May, I load the getaway car and drive east toward a writing workshop at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York. Car Talk and Brené Brown fill my head as the miles accumulate between my home and body.
Since having a child, my husband and I have each stolen solo writing time. Reprieve from the dance marathon of parenthood helps us survive. This is normal, this is important, this is okay. Still, as I leave for a whole week, the word abandon skulks in. Other words too, phrases and protests like: unfair gender pressure! and self-care is acceptable! Driving east toward the serene and blessed woods feels like getting away with a crime.
Most adults, happy even to be permitted their hash browns, tend to acknowledge such peculiarities with a bemused smile or a shrug of the shoulders. But for Arika Okrent, genial perplexity isn’t a good enough response. Although we may not discern linguistic oddities until they’re baked into everyday usage, it is still possible to understand how they came into being. “All languages have their infelicities and awkward bits,” she declares, “but English has its own special kind of weirdness.” In “Highly Irregular,” her mission is to explain some of its more conspicuous kinks.