Words, words, words...

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

Words. I think a lot about words: what they mean, why they mean those things, how those meanings shift from locale to locale, generation to generation, person to person. How is it that an arbitrary compilation of letters can come to represent not only the crude necessities of life (a furry, four-legged creature that goes "me-ow"? How about C-A-T?), but the ideas and concepts that give meaning and dimension to those lives: love, honor, faith, charity, kindness; brutality, hate, jealously, malice?

I am somewhat of a writer; I write scholarly essays, blog posts, and, occasionally, fiction. It is an eternal struggle to discover the most fitting vocabulary, the most effective word order to communicate the meaning I hope to convey. Words drip meaning, they ooze implications, and bleed significance. Words are never innocent; they are never never virgin. Words are always already marked, and they have power; words do things.

In The Real Thing, a play by British playwright and wordsmith Tom Stoppard, Henry (who is a stand-in for Stoppard himself) rhapsodizes about the power of words. He explains:
[Words are] precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more.... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.

One of my mom's favorite stories to tell about me is how she used to threaten me when I was younger: if I didn't get my chores done, I would be grounded from my books. Other parents out there may not understand; perhaps you would be happy if your children deigned to pick up a book, but my parents were more relived when I would put the book down and venture among the living.P and I sometimes discuss possible disabilities: would you rather lose the use of your legs or your arms? Wheelchair or crutches? And, most importantly, blind or deaf? P is a pretty spectacular musician, one who relies almost wholly on his ears. He, therefore, always opts for blindness. I, on the other hand, always opt for deafness. The thought of never again reading words with my eyes is almost unbearably sad to me. You see, I not only love the thought of words, their sinuous connotations and denotations, I also adore the way they look, those arbitrary lines and curves filling up a blank space with thought, faith, nuance.

For some, words are merely a method of communication. For me, however, words are friends, lovers, combatants -- they can simultaneously weigh me down and set me to flight.

This, of course, is also why I love libraries: vast depositories of words, a dizzying number of sentences. When I'm feeling particularly metaphysical, I like to imagine all the words that have ever been set to paper in the history of the world: an inventory of all human thought that has been inscribed. It gives me a little vertigo -- kind of like falling through space or trying to imagine the difference in size between an atom and the universe. I am a supernerd, but even now the thought of an old, beautiful library packed floor-to-ceiling with books gets me a little warm under the collar.

Hamlet, when he pretends to be crazy, mutters "words, words, words." This is the paradox of words: they are joyous and wondrous, yet troubling and maddening. Simultaneously neutral and freighted with meaning, one could spend an entire lifetime chasing them down, trying to arrange the right ones in the right order to call forth meaning out of nothingness.

~L