Words. I love everything about them. I love how they look on the page, how they sound to the ear, how they create worlds.
Letter combinations fascinate me. Ck has its own identity (cluck and smack and clack and brick) as do Ch (church, chat, charm, chisel, approach) and Bl (blood, blue, blind, bland, bloom) and Sk (sky, risk, skillet). There are so many that appeal. I like words with x in them. Saxon. Saxophone. Axe. Some letter combinations are of the workhorse variety; others are mysterious and alluring when we read them.
I enjoy letters and words so much that I play games with them. Someone speaks, and I instantly spell the words in my head. Yet never a traditional spelling--I put the letters in alphabetical order. Interstate is aeinrst, house is ehosu, property is eoprty. I've done this since I was a child. I didn't tell anyone (would you?) until I saw someone else who did it. He was featured on The Tonight Show, of all places. I discovered that night that many of us spell in alphabetical order. Something about over-learning the alphabet.
I think in words. Do others see words instead of pictures? When the computing world switched from DOS to graphics, I was distressed. What do all those icons mean? Do they mean anything? What's wrong with words?
And you know that mental trick, the one about telling someone that whatever they do, they shouldn't think about a pink elephant? No, no pink elephants. Don't think about pink elephants.
Well, I think about pink elephants. Just like everybody else. But instead of picturing the huge animal with the long trunk and baggy skin wearing a lovely shade of little-girl pink, I think pink elephant. Honest. That's exactly what I see. No caps. The letters are Times New Roman font or something like it. The e is perfectly formed, the way I could never print it as a child.
Tell me that's not odd. Please.
And the sounds. Aren't there words that simply appeal to the ear? Purple. Evocative. Whisper. Buzzer. Sensual.
It's more than onomatopoeia, though that's part of the fascination. Some words attract the eye and ear because of their sound or the combination of letters. But other words appeal because of the emotion they evoke. A husband's name, a birthplace, a child's first word.
Words are my building blocks as well as my toy blocks. I work with them and I play with them. They never break, though like any toy, an ill-favored word may find itself on the shelf for a time. But I pull it back out eventually. I like my blocks. I refuse to let one languish, unused and forgotten.
Words are unique. We know thousands of them. Use fewer in everyday speech and writing than we could, but most of us can pull out quite a number when prodded. And each word stands for something concrete. All the squiggles and lines and loops have meaning. They frame arguments or passionate declarations or jokes that make us laugh. Words can frighten us, build us up, tear us down. They can excite or incite. They soothe or agitate or reveal. They can be harsh or melodic or mean or tender or juicy or evocative or comical. Words produce emotions and spur incentives, and with even bigger impact, they make universes.
I'm thrilled at the worlds I can build with words. I lose myself in the worlds others create. I may not be able to point on a map to a book's place or setting, and maybe I don't have a stamp in my passport to prove I was there, but after two or three hours living in a fictional world, I can say I've truly walked in a different locale. And I'll be happy to tell you about the people I met and the surroundings and all the events I experienced.
I have lived in that world, if only for a short time. I have experienced the creation of a country. Been present for the birth of a child who grew up to save his kingdom. Watched helplessly as an innocent was murdered. Cheered with thousands as the battered hero returned to claim his birthright. Shared the lovers' first kiss. Tasted the sweet juice of just-picked berries and the bitter tang of betrayal. Caressed the hand of a dying mother.
I have been there. I have done that. And I've lived thousands of adventures crafted from squiggles and lines and loops.
I'm attracted to these letter creations. The construction of them. Their appearance on a page. The life they create.
I love words.
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Comments: 38
I got into some deep study of morphology, but don't recall spelling words in any alphabetical order. How interesting!
I share your love of words, and the way that some knowledge of them can enhance the scope of daydreams. I recall Alice (In Wonderland) saying, "Somehow they seem to fill my head with ideas," after hearing the Jabber poem.
Today, most adults have about 40,000 to 60,000 words stored in their lexicon, and think how few of these we actually use! ( I'm still hoping to have cause to use "antidisestablishmentarianism" properly in a sentence someday. :))
And writing is making up the book you want to read!
Thanks.
Lisa, I studied Spanish and Latin in high school, Italian in college. Can't speak well in either Spanish or Italian but I can understand the written words fairly well. I wanted to take French in college but when the classes were full, I ended up with Italian, a beautiful language. And you haven't read Dante until you've read him in old Italian!
Barbara, I though of antidis... yesterday as well! And you did get to use it in a sentence. And I definitely agree that words give us ideas. Lots of ideas...
Shepherd, words are endlessly wonderful. So you knew at 6? What kinds of works you write? Have you been writing since then?
Julie, oh the books! We have at least one bookscase in every bedroom and we turned the dining room in this house into a library! Who needs a dining room that's used twice a year? We've got one wall with floor-to-ceiling bookcases! But I'll do the library thing, even have library cards for 2 counties. I just can't afford to buy everything I want to read.
As for the dictionary? You're not the only one.
John, I love the idea of a courtship with words. It's been ongoing with me for many years. I believe, for all of us, that it will only get stronger and deeper.
Thanks for commenting everyone.
Lovely.
Birdie, once that love for words grabs hold, it's got you for life. Just a warning ;-)
Ty, improv is tough for me. If I know the subject, it's much easier, but I know people who can give a convincing speech about ANYTHING. I'm not a very good liar, so when I don't know something, it's obvious. (Of course, I'm opinionated, and when the subject is familiar to me, the words can fly.)
Bedtime stories are best with voices and sounds. Do you add all that in when you do daddy stories?
Oh yeah, the sounds and voices and props and whispers and SHOUTS and sometimes I get carried away, forget my audiance and cause nightmares. I learned a big lesson once not to scare the children at bed time.
I can appreciate beautifully used words and well crafted sentences the way others appreciate a painting or sculpture. My own personal hell is having so many words, and not having the slightest clue what to do with them. Oh well. Back to learning what the heck a 'plot' is...
Eschew Obfuscation!
I hope your wife still gets mileage out of that scare. A spouse should be able to use something like that for many years.
Pat, Russian would be wonderful to learn! It's pretty on the ear and on the page.
Okay, so how many of us have books on etymology and the development of languages and word fun facts and lots of dictionaries and...?
Russian is not only wonderful to read and speak, it is the best language I've run into for singing. "Ot skali grozniye u nas varyagov kosti" ("Of dreadful stone are the bones of us Vikings") -- a line from Rimskiy-Korsakov's opera "Sadko". Its major drawback is that its verb "aspect" system was designed by mad geniuses to confuse the enemy.
Pat, "The Lord of the Rings" was assigned to us in my sophomore English class in high school back in '63, with extra credit for learning the Tengwar (letters) of Feanor and the Cirth (runes) of Daeron.
This summer my almost-18 year-old son and I are going to study Old English together. He just barely passed Spanish, but he wants to learn OE; he's the only person I know who's read four different English translations of "Beowulf".
Today I write functional specs for software; basically, I 'translate' what systems should do into a language that the 'business' side can understand (and sign off), while at the same time 'translating' business language into something programmers can understand and code to.
Learning OE sounds like a heavenly way to spend a summer! Yeah, how crazy is that?!
Basically, I guess you could say I love words in any language!
I grew up with a dictionary on the kitchen table. During dinner (back when familes ate together), if we didn't understand a word in the 'grownup' conversation, Dad would make us look it up instead of explaining it to us. One word would lead to another. Yes, I love reading dictionaries!
Was just having a conversation with hubby about words. His question: Although words facilitate communication, can they also be barriers to communication? He posited that although babies don't know words, they still communicate. I responded, that yes, they do, but not very well!
The other books which do for me almost what dictionaries do are atlases. And then you combine the two, and start thinking about the places you want to go, not because of where they are, necessarily, but because of how they sound. Samarkand. Trebizond. Ougadougou. Moose Jaw. Jogyakarta. Sannicandro Garganico. Auchtermuchty. Got your passport ready?
There is in linguistics a concept that dates from the early-middle 20th century, the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis. Benjamin Lee Whorf and Edward Sapir held that one's perception of reality is dictated by the form of one's language; since there is no such thing as "pure thought", all thought is couched in language, and the way that language pigeonholes elements of reality controls one's perception of reality. TThis is at a very basic level; words for time, and even tense structures. What does it say about the different concepts of time in an Indo-European language such as English or French, where there are numerous tenses (pluperfect, progressive, etc.) as well as moods, voices, etc., and in, for example, Vietnamese, which has only one verb form, with two optional tense markers. "Toi di nha" (I can't give you all the little diacritical marks used in the quoc-ngu alphabet, but they're also a lot of fun) can mean "I go home", "I am going home" "I will go home", "I was going home", etc., etc., etc. The tense markers "se" (future) and "da" (past) are only required if you can't get the intended meaning from context. One possible (and probably simplistic) interpretation of this difference is that we, the French, and other Indo-European speakers view reality as a film strip; each moment is broken up into time-dependent segments. The Vietnamese, however, might see reality as more of a mural.
Whorf was an authority on the Hopi, and although some of his early studies on the psycholinguistics of their language have been challenged, I think one of his observations is still fascinating. There are two categories of Hopi verbs (probably not only two, but two involving this particular "quality") and the categories are not merely semantic but are also, I believe, expressed in verb forms; one might consider them "conjugations". (I hope my failing memory is getting this right; I'd hate for a Hopi or a professor at Northern Arizona State to read this and destroy my entire comment). The two verb categories are: actions which begin in the spirit world and end in the physical world, and actions which begin in the physical world and end in the spirit world. An example of the former would be "to rain", and of the latter, "to die".
Sorry to go on at such unseemly length, but language is a passion for me.
(those last two paragraphs are WONDERFUL - my mind's eye could almost see where you've been, Karen)
Go medai Dia thu! (a bit of Gael)
What I love is the way languages create words that are important to that segment that uses them, even if they are of no use whatsover to peoples of other cultures/languages. My little Hawaiian reference book tells me that the Hawaiian langage has 179 terms about sweet potatoes, and 225 words about taro plants!
When learning French and Spanish, I had a terrible time with the concept of 'gender'. A table is feminine, a cat is feminine, a pen is feminine, but a dog is masculine. A crowd of women is feminine, but even one male, surrounded by a hundred females, changes the reference to masculine. I never tackled German, although I understand it also has a 'neutral' gender. And yet English has none of that. And then there's the whole peculiar 'th' sound, which I don't believe is found in other European languages, which is why non-native English speakers tend to translate it as 'd'. Then again, the French make some sounds through their noses, which Americans have a hard time mastering.
Beth, bet you never knew this article would head in this direction! Thanks for starting the conversation!
That sound in pleasure is appealing. It actually feels good in the mouth to say it.
I remember loving Beowulf in high school. We did Canterbury Tales at the same time. I thought both much more fun than having to read the famous American male authors. (Sorry about Hemingway, Mark. But even the most respected authors aren't for everyone. Hemingway, Faulkner, and... what's the third one's name?)
Okay, Pete. You all make Russian more and more appealing. Maybe I need to take some classes.
Oh, yeah--Steinbeck.
The dictionary--Pat, we had to look them up too! And if we acted like we know what a word meant (when dad knew we didn't), we still had to pull out the dictionary. Or the globe, to look up countries. Or an atlas, Pete. And my dad STILL pulls out an atlas when we hear news reports. "Where exactly is that?" And that leads to another country, and "I wonder what products they could possibly grow in xyz" and "Why do suppose they'd be fighting over that piece of land" and so on.
Myanmar. So exotic. Madagascar. Burkina Faso.
I love the idiolect, too, and the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis. I can believe that language and thought have tremendously strongs connections. I know, too, that even in the same household, individuals "see" words differently. Five children less than 6 years apart in age in my family--went to the same schools, watched the same TV, same parents--yet I know we don't perceive meanings the same. I marvel while sometimes I also want to scream. Why are we so different?
And Gaelic too! Gina, do you speak and read it? My mother got back from her first trip to Ireland yestereday and was tickled by a store where they purposely spoke no English. She said she couldn't understand any of the signs in the shop, either, but found it wonderful.
This is a fantastic lesson in language appreciation, everyone. I am awestruck. Thanks for contributing!
There was a terrible problem with auto accidents for the longest time after the road-signs were switched from Gael to English, but, after awhile, people adjusted..and Gael was reinstated so, that helped too ~
O, Karen- I forgot to leave my translation! 'Go medai Dia thu' means: "Go with God"
The sound of the expression I used is this : Goe - m' die Di-ah Thoo (with a whisper of "t" at the end of "thu"...
I am no writer, but I have always loved words. They make more sense than people do. For a long time, I was the only person I knew of who would read the dictionary for pleasure, and I do just love the way words look and sound, the way they feel in your mouth. I read out loud to myself just to have that mouth feel.
I have never spelled alphabetically, but much of the time I do think in text format - being an artist I also think in imagery, but I do tend to spell words as people speak. Can't help it.
Gina, I would love to hear you speak. How beautiful the words must sound. I understood most of your Go with God, but how is medai translated?
Ivy, thanks for the heads up. I'll definitely check out the language guy, as will others here I have no doubt. Would love to read your own reflection on words when you write it.
Thanks Becca. Are you sure you're not a writer? Those who love the written word and love to play with words make wonderful writers. Just ask Pat S. We only recently got her started on the writer's path--pulled her into it, if truth be told--and she's marvelous. I'll encourage you to just write. Share a glimpse of your life and do it with the passion and love for words that you have. I'm sure it will be something we'd all enjoy.
Kathryn, do you think our parents read to us too much as children? ;-) I have another mental word game I play, but it's too complicated to explain. I readily admit that I find myself playing it when I should be listening to someone!