elope with me in private and we’ll set something ablaze
I’m always a bit hesitant to profess my love for anything or anyone because such a declaration would seem to imply mastery, to some degree, of the party in question. If you say you love to dance, people generally assume it means you’re good at it. People are quick to associate a relationship classified as loving with smoothness and success. So when I make the confession I’m about to, please don’t read anything more into it than what I say.
I love words.
I love the way they sound, the ways in which they fit together, the art of trying to fit them as closely as possible to an abstract meaning. I love the aesthetic comfort in words like “catastrophe” and “tweed”, and I love the emotional comfort in assigning labels to concepts too wide to comprehend otherwise. I love puns.
I’ve spent much of the week ruminating on the idea that they haven’t always been ours (that is, mine and everyone else’s alive in the English-speaking world today). As I’ve spent more time actively trying to maneuver language than work my own muscles, it’s difficult to keep in mind that learning how to use words is like raiding an ancient relative’s closet and figuring out how best to configure my findings. When I write something, it’s nothing more than a speck in the constantly expanding literary and linguistic picture that’s existed for centuries. There are so many words I don’t know and so many lying unused in the periphery of my lexicon. There are so many ways to arrange sentences and to articulate ideas I’ve not yet encountered.
Isn’t that amazing? Just by speaking to each other, we’re making the picture fuller every day, and it never will stop growing and changing. All we can do is treat language as gently as possible, as we would any other inherited object.
(ps- I realize this blog post is incredibly cheesy, but the point arose during one day’s reading of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. I’ve also been inspired/excited lately by words from the likes of Virginia Woolf, Belle & Sebastian, fellow AP Lit students, authors of submissions from old issues of Pendragon, Dar Williams, my choir director, Vladimir Nabokov, Lemony Snicket, my friends, and Mr. Lucia — to name a few.)
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I love this idea. I’ve been thinking too about how important words are, how powerful they are, and how we attach so much meaning to these syllables that are not necessarily ours to attach meaning to. Sometimes I feel amazed at the idea–that we can have such a system of words and idioms and understandings based on the ways words are said and written, and sometimes I feel saddened almost because I think about how reliant we are upon words and how there are so many things and emotions we cannot express. I’m rubbish at displaying and relaying my emotions, and I doubt I could describe pagan holidays with our language, for instance. But, at the same time, words are powerful. They convey much more than I think I can ever understand, and they enable us to share and describe, and for that, I have to be grateful.
Posted March 7, 2011, 10:26 pm #That was a perfect comment, not least for the B&S.
Posted March 7, 2011, 11:09 pm #