The Wonder of Words

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I have a friend with a literary bent who once asserted that the use of profanity was merely the mark of limited vocabulary.  Over the years I have come to realize that she was right.  Mind you, I’m not saying that I have abandoned swearing altogether. It is not as if, when heading for the bathroom at 2 AM and smashing my overly-sensitive foot against the door jam, I shriek,  “Oh, most high creator of the universe, if you would, please consign this copulating architectural feature to Dante's nethermost circles! Such exquisite agony!" No,  like many of us, I still burst out with the more prosaic: "GD f-ing door! Damn, that hurts!" But that is an expletive, not a conscious linguistic choice - not many considered synapses firing there. 

On the other hand in everyday, and certainly in professional conversation and composition our vocabulary is an indication of our education, our credibility, and more than we realize, our nature and personality. So we should choose our words carefully, with specific intent. In my field we speak of linguistic accommodation - adjusting vocabulary, sentence structure, speech, vocal patterns, gestures, etc., to accommodate the expectations of others.  In truth, in the academy we often take the practice to rather absurd extremes, peppering our conversations with the latest jargon to make it perfectly clear that, yes, I have read Professor Fuzzywort's latest work on the bandersnatchian dynamics inherent in the evolving, but still underrepresented, jabberwocky.

The point is this: words are tools and the more tools we have in our toolbox the better we can express our, initially inarticulate, feelings to a variety of audiences. There are certainly enough tools out there.  The Oxford English Dictionary flirts with 180,000 entries while the Global Language Monitor asserts that English acquired word number 1 million back in 2009. One shudders to think of the academic cat fights fueled by those wildly varying numbers. But that is not where I'm heading. I am more interested in how we acquire and use whatever words we do have.

For example, let us consider poetry.  And here I must admit a bias.  I am well aware that poetry can easily be a language of rage, a voice of the powerless against the powerful. A call to battle against injustice, bigotry and hatred. And, often, it should be.  Consider Bob Dylan, a wandering, renegade, youthful, troubadour whose calls to conscience bounced back decades later bearing a Nobel Prize for Literature. Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes, and the Gutheries, Woody and Arlo - rough-edged poets to stir the blood and raise the banners of resistance.

But no longer for me. Once, perhaps. In years gone by - pre-Internet days - a colleague and I engaged in a contest of "columns of righteous indignation." The idea was to craft an essay of overt confrontation on issues of social consciousness, but to do so with sufficient grace to allow the editor of our local paper to actually publish it. My partner in aggressive sarcasm has, sadly, passed on, but even were he about to egg me on, I think I would pass.  As I wander into my 7th decade, the call to vindictive prose grows faint. It is simply not worth the inevitable anger, the stomach acid, the spikes in blood pressure, the restless nights wrestling with the Furies of "Damn! What I should of said was .  . "

Instead, in what I hope will be my first full decade of Distilled Harmony, I think I prefer to explore the role of an agent of calm.  That role carries unique demands if one seeks to create not only prose, but also poetry of calm. When it comes to poetry, I tie myself firmly to the first and  second tenets of Distilled Harmony - Foster Harmony and Enable Beauty.  And that effort demands emphasizing a vocabulary of the calm; a tall order in this age of cyber bullying, internet trolling, and policy debates conducted in angry bursts of 146 characters or so.

Fortunately, the more gentle portions of my vocabulary hail from previous centuries.  It is mostly my mother's fault.  You see, in the basement of the modest home in which I was raised, stood a large green bookcase filled to overflowing with books. Books of all shapes and sizes, books that were already "golden oldies" in her childhood. Novels from the late 1800s, the early 1900's. Books written when grammar still held sway and when the rough edges of life were written gently. James Oliver Curwood, Gene Stratton-Porter, Harold Bell Wright, maybe a touch of Zane Gray. These were not, mind you, Dickens or Austin - though they did prepare me for later encounters with those more complex voices. Rather, they were in many ways the pulp fiction of their era. The plots utterly predictable, the stereotypes would curl your hair. But these were my earliest composition tutors; purists when it came to the rules brought to parsing prose.  Remember diagramming sentences?

And the words! Oh my, what a surfeit of words! Consider this conclusion to Curwood’s The River’s End (1919):

"He looked away into the shimmering distance of the night, and for a long time both were silent. A woman had found happiness. A man’s soul had come out of darkness into light.”  

OK, so it scores off the chart on the “sappy scale,” but for me, a youngster who would polish off a couple of the far more prosaic Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew mysteries before lunch it was, well, mysterious. Multisyllabic, with the sentence construction just a shade askew.  And then, not much later, I wandered, leaning heavily on Longfellow’s even older shoulders, along the  "shores of Gitche Gumee, Of the shining Big-Sea-Water.” So, while Dickens and Austin were lurking just around the corner, if you held still and listened ever so closely, there - did you hear it? It might have been the faint echo of an approaching Melville.

And speaking of words, there might be a few too many in this post already so let me close with an analogy [which started out shorter - but, oh well .  .  . ]:

When I was a kid in maybe 3rd or 4th grade, part of the Fall ritual was buying school supplies. My buddy Dan and I would hop on our bikes and pedal down the alley to Patton’s.  I don’t know if there was anything further to the store’s name, for us it was always just "Patton's." It was in many ways a remnant of the old general store era, as was Mr. Patton himself. He was, in our callow eyes, ancient - so, what, maybe 40? Slight of stature, with hooded eyes that would follow you suspiciously around the store. There was an old open-top soda machine. The bottles were suspended in icy water and you would put in your money and slide the bottle along a serpentine track to the open spot where you could pull out the bottle. YooHoo Chocolate Soda! I vaguely remember notions - thread and stuff.  And candy - lots of candy. Baseball card bubble gum.

But in the Fall it was school supplies. Somehow, no doubt as a result of a list distributed by the school board, Patton’s carried “pre-packaged school supplies.”  What this meant was that there were paper bags labeled - 1st grade, 2nd grade, 3rd grade, etc., into which Mr. Patton, or one of his minions, had sorted the various tools we would need to confront the challenges of the coming year. Tablets, rulers, pencils, etc.  Starting in, oh, maybe 2nd grade, nestled among the tools was a tin of Prang watercolors. A black metal case with eight basic colors and a brush.  Those eight colors, and whatever soup we could make by mushing them around, defined the palette we employed in "Art class." If you couldn’t make the “right” color with that limited palette and our even more limited abilities - well, it just wasn’t going to happen. After “Art" we would move on “English” and the dreaded spelling/vocabulary test. The comparison to our Prang watercolors is direct and accurate. Here in “English” we began to construct the linguistic palette with which we were to describe the physical world unfolding around us and the emotional world bubbling within us. And, for the most part, we got the linguistic equivalent of those 8 basic colors.

Now, let us jump ahead 50 or 60 years. According to Google Earth the alley still runs north from my old house, but there is now a State Farm Office where Patton’s used to be.  Prang still sells an 8-color watercolor set, but as we edit our contribution to the roughly 1 billion digital photos uploaded to the Internet daily, or create original works in any digital paint program, the idea of having anything less than "millions of colors" is absurd. We click our cursor over a portion of an image and the ubiquitous color wheel appears, inviting us to select the precise shade we desire from a palette limited only by the resolution of our screens. However if, upon completing the image, we want to move beyond simply sharing it, and tell our friends what we were thinking or feeling, why we composed the image the [way we did, we access our Twitter account or some other text app usually limited to 146 characters and/or spaces. Not words. Characters or spaces.] - that is the number of characters between those brackets that intrude upon the preceding sentences.

Consider for a moment the radical difference between the chromatic palette provided for the most basic visual computer program and the extreme restrictions placed on the texting applications; those applications that keep my students' eyes endlessly affixed to the glass rectangles attached to their palms. With their linguistic options so crippled, is it any wonder that “texters” have reverted to extreme contractions or modern pictograms aka emoticons or emojis? Those unique constructions speak well of texting creativity within severely limited communication spaces. Yet those same linguistic accommodations give me pause concerning the future of the more arcane genres of poetry and prose.

There really is only one way to build a rich, functional, linguistic palette.  You must read. You must read a lot. Novels, biographies, non-fiction works, histories - all of it. Oh, I get a number of “word of the day” emails. I enjoy crossword puzzles. But neither of those linguistic “vitamin pills” empower our own expressive skills. To jump back to the visual palette analogy - words of the day and crossword answers are like color swatches. They provide colors in isolation but say little about composition, about communication.  Similarly films and videos slide swiftly across our consciousness, requiring multiple viewing or a visit to the "quotes from" Internet site to add that awesome bit of repartee to our personal, functional stash of words

So we must read, and be especially thankful for the authors who make that an enriching and enjoyable experience, for ourselves - and for today's "teched-out" children.  I suppose one should be Catholic to nominate someone for Sainthood, But, if permitted, I would like to nominate J.K. Rowling for that, and any other relevant honors. 

It was approaching midnight on the night of July 7th, 2000.  When the clock struck 12 it would be July 8th and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire would be released to the public - all 616 pages of it. I was pretty far back in the line, my lack of costume marking me as a muggle of the first order.  But it was a magical night, so I was less startled than I might have been otherwise to see a copy of the book floating toward me through the hazy southern night.  It was not until the book came to rest a yard or two in front of me that I realized it had feet, and behind the open book was the intense face of a little girl. She seemed not much larger than the book itself. Yet, you could almost see the words being sucked off the page into her enchanted eyes. Thank you, Ms. Rowling.

So writing well, conversing widely, articulating - for ourselves and for others - those thoughts that define us, requires words, lots and lots of words. We also need to practice slapping them up against each other in unique sentences to explore which have natural affinity and which rasp against each other - fingernails on a literary blackboard.

All the images in my coloring book - Color Me Chilled Out - began as doodles, and eventually grew into more complex and colorful works.  Every post here on SchragWall started life as a verbal doodle, an “I wonder .  .  .” moment.  A phrase that eventually acquired more words, longer sentences, analogies of varying clarity, until finally - at long last - I stop and send them winging off to you.   

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