There is a strange, stony silence that ensues when your partner looks at you and says, “Well, I’m officially broke.” The realization that both of your bank accounts add up to less than a hundred dollars leaves a bitter, malnourished taste in your mouth. It causes you to think about the direction your life has meandered, the purposes you’ve undertaken, and the nutritional information on the back of Top Ramen.
Maybe it’s the liberal arts education, and maybe it’s my recreational use of the dictionary (though I’ve also dabbled in glossaries), but when fecal matter starts flying at the spinning blades of cooling appliances I tend to linguistically analyze these accepted concepts rather than sink into a depressive funk. For days, the use of the word “broke” bothered me, and not just because it’s a conjugated verb being used as an adjective. It bothered me because the connotations to using a form of the word “broken” to describe one’s condition are deep and unsettling. So I decided to look up the origins of the term.
Unsurprisingly, the word “broke” is slang and comes from the word “broken.” The first person to use “broken” in this context was the Bard himself. William Shakespeare wrote in Act 1 of Richard II, “The King growen bankrout like a broken man.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines “broken” as “Reduced or shattered in worldly estate, financially ruined; having failed in business, bankrupt.” By the seventeenth century, the word “broke” was being thrown around as a colloquialism for the reduction to poverty, bearing various endearing forms like “broke to the wide”, “broke to the world”, “broke clean”, “broke dead”, “flat broke”, and “stone-broke.”
Here’s my problem with this word: we equate poverty with being broken, as Shakespeare did with one throwaway characterization. This creates a social understanding that to have no money is to be dysfunctional or useless—if you’re poor, you’re a broken piece of society.
The question is: are we comfortable with this association? Are people without wealth really defunct, broken human beings? There are people making less than $15,000 a year volunteering at homeless shelters and creating some truly inspiring art. Would you feel comfortable looking one of them in the eye and calling them broken?
Some of the best memories Kaitlyn and I have created together have been during these “flat broke” times, when we have nothing but each other, when we can barely afford a cup of ice cream between the two of us—but it’s the best damn ice cream in the world. When you stay in because you don’t have gas money, when you cook grilled cheese because you don’t have cash for sushi, when you watch the world map on the wall where most people have a TV and talk about all the possible backpacking routes from China to England, then you have experienced a raw form of existence with a very specific person. And in those moments, I promise, you will not feel broken.
