In the words of Koko

About two weeks ago I complained to Patti Jo, as I often do, that a piece of writing I was working on wasn’t going well.

“It just sits there,” I said. “It just, it just ... “

Patti Jo looked at me sympathetically.

“Looks like stink?” she suggested.

The phrase kind of jumped out at me, and I asked Patti Jo where it came from.

She said its originator is Koko, the celebrated gorilla whose extensive sign language vocabulary has been documented by Penny Patterson and the Gorilla Foundation.

It seems that some time ago Koko was being shown pictures of possible future boyfriends by her keepers, and she signaled her unfavorable reaction to one of them by signing, “[He] looks like stink.”

The phrase has been reverberating in my head ever since I heard it. It’s pungent and pithy. It combines two senses in an instant one-two punch, and the result, to me, is a knockout.

Children freshen the language this way sometimes, inventing new phrases as their vocabulary expands.

Adult humans rarely can. Our vocabulary runs in grooves as we grow up; we learn our key remarks and repeat them in most circumstances -- things like “We’re No. 1,” “I could care less,” and “It would be inappropriate to comment during an ongoing investigation.”

I was so taken with “It looks like stink” that I couldn’t wait to use it myself. It clearly had several possible applications. You could use it when you don’t like your dinner.

You could use it to describe the new paint job on your neighbor’s house. You could use it to respond to the work featured in a local gallery, or a friend’s new outfit. As an instant, vivid, thumbnail critical reaction, I thought, it was superior to anything I’d ever heard.

So I went out into the world, armed with my new capsule comment. I thought people would respond to it, and they did.

But I also thought they’d appreciate the innocent candor of it, and they didn’t.

What I’d done, I see now, was underestimate its power to offend. In retrospect I feel that humans should exercise caution with this expression.

I still love it. It’s easily memorable enough for Bartlett’s, and I think it should be included in the next edition as the first quotation contributed by a member of another species.

But Koko is encouraged to say whatever’s on her mind, and humans aren’t. I find it’s a question of whom you’re talking to. And of how big you are. In order to go around saying “It looks like stink,” you pretty much need to be a gorilla.20051111hrimoxkf(LA)