This could be really mesmerizing.  A new meditation technique?  

 

Vocabulary

by Jason Schneiderman

 

I used to love words,

but not looking them up.

Now I love both,
the knowing,

and the looking up,
the absurdity

of discovering that "boreal"
has been meaning

"northern" all this time
or that "estrus"

is a much better word
for the times when

I would most likely
have said, "in heat."

When I was translating,
the dictionary

was my enemy,
the repository of knowledge

that I seemed incapable
of retaining. The foreign word

for "inflatable" simply
would not stay in my head,

though the English word "deictic,"
after just one encounter,

has stuck with me for a year.
I once lost "desiccated"

for a decade, first encountered
in an unkind portrayal

of Ronald Reagan, and then
finally returned to me

in an article about cheese.
I fell in love with my husband,

not when he told me
what the word "apercus" means,

but when I looked it up,
and he was right.

There's even a word
for when you use a word

not to mean its meaning,
but as a word itself,

and I'd tell you what it was
if I could remember it.

My friend reads the dictionary
for its perspective on culture,

laughs when I say that
reference books are not really

books, but proleptic databases.
My third grade teacher

used to joke that if we were bored
we could copy pages out of the dictionary,

but when I did, also as a joke,
she was horrified rather than amused.

Discovery is always tinged
with sorrow, the knowledge

that you have been living
without something,

so we try to make learning
the province of the young,

who have less time to regret
having lived in ignorance.

My students are lost
in dictionaries,

unable to figure out why
"categorize" means

"to put into categories"
or why the fifth definition

of "standard" is the one
that will make the sentence

in question make sense.
I wonder how anyone

can live without knowing
the word "wonder."

A famous author
once said in an interview,

that he ended his novel
with an obscure word

he was sure his reader
would not know

because he liked the idea
of the reader looking it up.

He wanted the reader,
upon closing his book, to open

another, that second book
being a dictionary,

and however much I may have loved
that author, after reading

that story
(and this may surprise you)

I loved him less.

A retired minister in my congregation loaned me his copy of the 1947 Evangelical and Reformed Book of Worship.  Looking over it today, I enjoyed the language in the "Prayer for Social Righteousness."  The paragraph in particular was interesting.  I didn't like its resignation in the final phrases, but the language, particularly in the opening phrases is evocative:

For those who have been worsted in the battles of life, whether by the inhumanity of their fellows, their own limitations, or the fickleness of fortune, that they may contend against injustice without bitterness, overcome their own weaknesses with diligence and learn how to accept what cannot be altered with patience.

As to that acceptance of what cannot be changed, the similarity to the Serenity Prayer should not go unnoticed as Reinhold Niebuhr, the author of that prayer, was E&R and his brother H. Richard was on the committee that drafted this edition of their book of worship.

Reading in Belden Lane's Ravished by Beauty, 

It isn't accidental that the English word "true" derives from the Old English treow, meaning "firm and dependable, like a tree."

truth, nature, imagination, affection, love, hope, beauty, joy. Those words are hard to keep still within definitions; they make the dictionary hum like a beehive. But in such words, in their resonance within their histories and in their associations with one another, we find our indispensable humanity, without which we are lost and in danger.

George Lakoff, once again, reminds progressives not to cede the public discourse to radical conservatives and to quite strengthening the radical conservatives by using their language.   Rather, develop one's own based on progressive values.  Lakoff made these points after John Kerry's defeat and progressives got better at following his advice, which is one reason I think that they did well in 2006 and 2008.  

Liberals tend to underestimate the importance of public discourse and its effect on the brains of our citizens. All thought is physical. You think with your brain. You have no alternative. Brain circuitry strengthens with repeated activation. And language, far from being neutral, activates complex brain circuitry that is rooted in conservative and liberal moral systems. Conservative language, even when argued against, activates and strengthens conservative brain circuitry. This is extremely important for so-called "independents," who actually have both conservative and liberal moral systems in their brains and can shift back and forth. The more they hear conservative language over the next eight months, the more their conservative brain circuitry will be strengthened.

This choice sentence from an article by Hilton Als in the New Yorker on the South African playwright Athol Fugard (why has he never won a Nobel?):

Language not as a tool of self-definition--who am I, and what can I be to you?--but as an instrument for categorizing others, and thus shaping them for one's use.

On another note, the essay opened powerfully.  I wish I could write an opening sentence as good as this one:

The two men look as though they'd crawled out from under a rock into a landscape of broken glass and shit.

Saying it out loud is even more fun.  The sounds of the words have evocative appeal.

A post on Lindbeck & Whitehead (I really need to read me some Lindbeck), the limitations of language, and the implications for pluralism and interfaith work in the 21st century.   An excerpt:

We live in an era where the realities of inter-religious education, cross-denominational communication and trans-national citizenship are going to challenge all of our inherited traditions and conceptual frameworks.

If we are unwilling to do so and insist on simply repeating the same rote answers week after week under the misguided impression that we are being faithful to the tradition … we are in danger of an irrelevance that leads not only to extinction but ultimately failure to accomplish our great commission.

 

A provocative essay on not only the language of the Occupy Movement, but how we should occupy language itself in order to remove the colonial, racist, discriminatory practices that currently exist in common American English.

Occupy Language, as a movement, should speak to the power of language to transform how we think about the past, how we act in the present, and how we envision the future.

An excellent piece by George Will (sounds like Andy Rooney).  I couldn't agree more.  Here's my favourite bit (before the ending, which I won't post but allow you to discover on your own):

Solemn warnings about nonexistent risks, and information intended to spare us the slightest responsibility for passing through life with a modicum of attention and intelligence — these express, among other things, an entitlement mentality that the nanny state foments: If something bad or even inconvenient or merely annoying happens to us, even if it results from our foolishness, daydreaming or brooding about the meaning of life, we are entitled to suesomeone for restitution.