Some of the "chit-chatterers" of this column got confused and wrote to me saying: "Why did you call it 'chit-chat'?... Would it not have been more correct to call it 'sophistry'?" So I took up the dictionaries of the Arabic language, the old ones and the new, turning their pages and saying to myself: perhaps "chit-chat" does mean "sophistry"... perhaps my study of the language of the people of the Dad has not yet reached the level of telling the two words apart... And every time I turned a page of those huge tomes they call "lexicons," my tongue let loose a torrent of curses upon everyone who ever taught me a letter of Arabic... How could it not, when he is the cause of this literary bedraggling of mine... after this long lifetime of wrestling with the words of the language of "ifranqa'"...
And at last — "I found it!" — sophistry, it turns out, means the disguising of truths... the altering of truths... and what a distance between chit-chat and sophistry!...
And I apologized to Sibawayh for my curses... God forgive you, dear reader... Is this my confidence in you and in your mental and literary level?... But you, as I see, cannot free yourself from the traits of "Abu Arab," among them cursory reading... skimming over meanings... and individualism, indifference, selfishness, reliance on others, improvisation... etc., and other such terms contained in the dictionary of life among us, the progeny of Qahtan — may God sweeten his dust and grant him rest in his grave from the vexations of this age... The aforesaid terms are matched, in colloquial Arabic, by... "for my sake, let it slide," and "never mind," and "come along now, dear self," and "the Lord will set it right," and so on and so on.
I ask you, in God's name... is it possible for a nation that aspires to rise and to march in the caravan of civilization to reach its goal, when its constitution for life is of this sort?
Take, for example, this tale, cut on the "indifference" pattern... Yesterday the neighbors' son charged me with finding a doctor to still the sudden pains that had struck his aged mother... This neighbors' son is a poor young man who cannot send his mother to the hospital... and his mother needs a "specialist" in women's diseases — and they are few... So I picked up the telephone and conducted the following dialogue:
— Hello... Dr. So-and-so?
— Yes... at your service...
— Come quickly, Doctor — our neighbor is in danger.
— What... what... Have they nothing better to do than chase after me in the very middle of my evening party?... I'm sorry, I have guests... and I can't leave them.
— Very well — no offense meant...
And my hand stayed hanging on the cold receiver.
•
As for the outcome — the readers of the newspapers saw it the next day, in the obituary column.
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