Hey, it's the poetry anon again. I'm sorry that life is rough for you right now. D: I thought maybe these poetry adjacent headcanons might provide a moment of levity?
I often have issues remembering words (I think it's an ADHD thing) even though I'm a poet. And since I low key want to claim Joe for us ADHD folks, and also since he knows so many languages, and has lived so long, I sort of suspect that when he's writing he sometimes forgets that exact perfect word he's looking for and it drives him up a wall. And he'll just look up and get this cute scrunched up face and if Nicky is in the room, he'll immediately know that Joe is trying to think if a word. They regularly have conversations about words with Nicky offering up suggestions & them getting distracted by etymology and it almost always ends in several different dictionaries getting pulled out and only SOMETIMES results in them figuring out the word, but they love talking about words and language and how things connect it doesn't really matter. I think they have conversations about language and words a lot actually, whatever the context.
Both love learning new words & languages, but they go about it differently. Joe picks things through conversation -- I see him as being an aural learner -- whereas Nicky winds up learning languages by picking up long complex texts and slowly reading through them. So before they're both fluent, Joe winds up being the person best suited to ask where the bathroom is, while Nicky is the person who can best follow an obscure conversation about philosophy or whatever. And since Joe learns on the fly so quickly he doesn't worry so much the breath of his vocab -- he picks it up as he goes. Once he has the structure of a language he feels comfortable even if he doesn't have all the vocab yet. Whereas Nicky feels the need to really dig into the words themselves, and the structure comes later.
Of course at this point they both know so many languages that it's a bit of a moot point -- what might take others years takes them months, because languages are interconnected & they have picked up so many. But they do kind of make it a game between them: who can learn the most the quickest.
Also, both of them lean into having an accent or not in any given language based entirely on how the other one responses when they read poetry.
i love this vision of them as language acquirers so much! and thinking about how they must help each other in different wanys because of it.
all of this is lovely - i’m too emotionally exhausted to come up with any clever responses today, but thanks so much for sending this!
i love joe forgetting words (something i do a lot too, due to whatever my particular mix of undiagnosed brain stuff going on is) and that ending up with them browsing dictionaries. i also wonder if they have ever made their own little, informal dictionaries - words scribbled in weird approximations in different scripts in old notebooks, because they want to make sure they don’t forget them, after the other speakers have died or the language has changed and the word has gone.
