Rejection, liberation, revolution: The many layers of one short, loaded word

I wonder what it is about the word ‘out’ that shocks, saddens, and makes us feel disqualified. A monosyllabic sound, so open-mouthed that it could be misunderstood as ‘awe’ if one were to see the word in a silent movie, it emerges from inside us. And that’s the surprise – when we say ‘in’, we pull the world towards us, like we do when we use the first-person pronoun ‘I’; when we say ‘out’, it’s not the world we are rejecting, though that is what it seems like, but ourselves, for, as the movements of throat and lips indicate, we are pushing out of ourselves. There’s a finality caused by the ‘t’ of that sound after which it is hard to imagine anything. It is that finality we thunder in ‘Get out’, for instance. Nothing really needs to be said after that, even though we sometimes add phrases like ‘of here’ after that. It’s not necessary.

The open-mouthed ‘out’ would seem like a valve, allowing for unidirectional traffic, but our own histories, of the body and the mind and of our communities, tell us otherwise. I am thinking of the mouth, through which ingestion happens – we put things inside our mouth, we bite and chew and swallow, but, during the period of eating, of any form of consumption, we do not think of what would be excreted. And yet, so many things enter our mouths only to be forced out – orange pips, tamarind seeds, betel leaf juice, all spat out as if it were sputum. I’ve always wondered about the temporary residency of things – and beings – whose destiny is to be secreted out of orbits.

The history of the usage of the word ‘out’, particularly as it acquires girth, becoming phrasal verbs and the idiomatic, is a wonderful example of how counterarguments can occur in and through the same word. The contempt in ‘Get out’ or the punishment of not being allowed to bat and play anymore in ‘Out’ (‘bowled out’ or ‘run out’) is subverted by the celebration of ‘out’, as in ‘going out’ or ‘coming out’. ‘Going out’, for instance, behaves in two kinds of ways – it’s the opposite of ‘staying in’, being indoors, and it’s also an oblique manner of confirming a romantic relationship. Both of these are reclamations of joy, of challenging a penal regimentation, of attesting that what connects us to other forms of the living is this ‘out’; that the new history of dating that attaches itself to an expression like ‘going out’, the need and desire of a couple to be away from the scrutinising gaze of family and its house, is part of a turn in our history where the significance of the ‘out’ gradually begins to be acknowledged. A similar subversion can be seen in the phrase ‘coming out’, used for public self-disclosure of one’s gender identity or sexual orientation. Once used for young upper-class women whose ‘coming out’ at a ball would be an announcement of her arrival into adulthood and consequentially to marriageability, the phrase was adopted and immediately subverted to declare what George Chauncey has called a ‘coming out into… homosexual society’ in the early twentieth century.

It’s liberating to see these invisible histories of resistance, these subtle victories inflexed into words as they move through time, dropping something, gaining curves. Noticing them is as much a political act as making these phrases actionable. That also brings in adjacent thoughts – is being ‘out’ as natural a phenomenon as being ‘in’ is presumed to be? What kind of imagination necessitates an expression like ‘out of the world’ or ‘out of body experience’? These are only two examples from the same tradition of subversion, that wants to challenge the policeman’s use of the word, the power that attends his ‘Out, out’ to people inside a car or a café. To be able to conceive of something outside the world and outside the body involves a kind of energy that is different from what exists in our archives of experience – the body and the world, both provisional, that we live in and live with. The sense of ‘out’ in these phrases is liberatory and even revolutionary – it is an argument against the puritanical ‘in’. It also allows leniency as and when necessary, as in the phrase ‘cop out’, the fear of the first word diluted by the second.

I love the elasticity of the word, so much so that going against etymological history, I enjoy the cheap thrill of seeing how it can accommodate opposites, both ‘sc-out’ and ‘fl-out’.