And with that, hello there! Welcome to "Senseless Twaddle," my little armchair linguist project. I started this blog to actively expand my own vocabulary, because frankly, I felt myself getting dumber and less articulate every year after leaving high school. If your grammar school experience was anything like mine, you probably had to learn "vocab lists" of new words each week. I don't know about you, but I actually miss those lists nowadays. So, through this blog, I'll be making up my own lists of vocabulary words - hopefully one or two new words per week, or as time allows. (Update: that goal is way harder that I anticipated when I originally wrote this post.) It'd be cool to create my own nerdy niche in this small corner of the internet, where fellow language and literature nerds could find informative posts, leavened with irreverent humor and pop culture references along the way. Hopefully the tonal cocktail will come out to about 3 parts Webster's Dictionary, 1 part Cracked Magazine. That's the idea, anyway. I'll focus mostly on rarely-seen, interesting words, and archaic or unusual phrases or idioms that have fallen out of common usage in speech and writing. At some point, I hope to dip my toe into the rogue's lexicon of 19th century street crime, just to sample some of the colorful terms used by unsavory types back then. Interesting, no? And yes, the Rogue's Lexicon is actually a thing.
When beginning a blog about words, it's hard to find a better inspirational starting point than Leonard Cohen, the aforementioned poet and songwriter. He interweaves everyday human behavior with a cosmic mysticism; he mentions sacred texts in the same breath as vulgar jokes; he chuckles wryly at the tragicomedy of the human condition while offering up his sage, poetic lyrics like some secular musical priest. The spirit of Cohen's title quote, emphasizing the power that imbues even the crudest of words, subtly resurfaces again and again in his best songs. On film, though, he delivers his thesis with such bluntness that we're obliged to stop and think on it for a moment.
See the quote at 00:30; watch the rest for an overview of Cohen's illustrious career.
After reflecting on that quote myself, I assure you that I didn't go gleefully screaming obscenities through schoolyards at my first convenience (as fun as that would've been). But I did turn a corner in my thinking about language. My ah, shall we say "extended" vocabulary - previously relegated to locker-room-status unfit for dinner-table discussions - suddenly appeared equal in rank to all other "respectable" words in its ability to communicate a thought. I realized that "swear words" sometimes convey a specific meaning more serviceably than any other word, and that they can be useful or even admirable in the proper context. Looking back through history, it's evident that some words once considered "bad" have since become dulled by time, stripped of their shock value. As children, we're taught not to use certain words; and yet, as we grow up, they often lose their sense of scandal, becoming casual and commonplace. (But maybe we're just jaded because our list of gross and offensive terms in English seems to have grown exponentially.)
So why the obsession with words? Why devote an entire blog to them?
Maybe it's because I find words equally magical and practical. Having a mastery of vocabulary is impressive, but one rarely needs to understand the exact definition of a word to sense its general meaning - its color, its connotations, its message. The mere sound of certain words can help us piece together a feeling or an image otherwise unexplainable. We may not understand every single word discretely, but in their proper contexts we feel their meanings. THAT is the closest I can get to articulating my love of words.
To illustrate my point, consider the fact that even total nonsense is capable of stirring some sort of meaning in our minds. Take Lewis Carroll's famous poem, Jabberwocky. Sure, he was probably a tad more blitzed on his opiates than usual when he penned, "'Twas brillig..." that particular day. But don't tell me the sound of "slivy toves" and "borogroves" being "mimsy in the gabe" doesn't conjure up some kind of pastoral scene in your own (presumably opiate-free) mind. Without question, the verses of Jabberwocky evoke sound-scenes that you can't quite put your finger on. The words are complete codswallop, yet they're still connotative of... something, in spite of their meaninglessness. Isn't that fascinating? Those "slivy toves" could easily have been "sighing doves," had English evolved slightly differently, Ray Bradbury-style, a la the eerie butterfly effect in A Sound of Thunder. But I digress.
The existence of this artistic image is proof that the fearsome Jabberwock - a creature described in almost complete gibberish - can still stir something tangible in the human mind:
But seriously, Mister Dodgson, you need to lay the hell off the opiates...
There's even a rich history behind our most crass expressions. To this day, people cannot come to a consensus over the etymological root of the word "fuck," which has been around for hundreds of years. (And no, it's not from "Fornication Under Consent of the King.") By virtue of its mystery, that so-called "dirty" word glows with the wealth of cultural information we can glean from the history surrounding it (scholarly dissertations have been attempted), not to mention the varied and entertaining forms it can take today. It functions as a verb, noun, adjective, adverb, and a whole range of interjections, spanning the emotional spectrum from rage, frustration and disgust to humorous emphasis, excitement and even intense joy. Because it may be used solely for emphasis, devoid of any additional meaning, "fuck" and its related forms often become filler for purposes of scansion, e.g., as syllabic placeholders in rap lyrics. Thus, the F-Bomb and its progeny can be dropped nearly anywhere for emphasis or humor, rendering them almost as meaningless, and yet just as real, as Carroll's "slivy toves." The cringe-inducing F-word is indeed so ubiquitous in pop culture now that its shock value has significantly diminished, and its actual meaning has faded. Yet its origins and history continue to provide fodder for discussion (e.g., this very blog entry). So, there's significant truth to Cohen's claim that all words, no matter how ugly or taboo, contain some kind of beauty, inasmuch as we're willing to investigate them.
On the lowest (scientific/utilitarian) level of analysis, what are words worth? They're simply lifeless tools for a species' communication and, by extension, survival. On a slightly higher, philosophical level, words may amount to something more than just tools, but at best they are still mankind's inadequate attempts to grasp at the Forms and to convey their essences to each other. But at an aesthetic level, words may finally attain the exalted status of Art. Used deftly, they can burn original, haunting, painful, glorious, iconic images indelibly into our memories. And at a theological level, words can transcend even Art, affording mankind a noble means of imitating the divine; they allow us to "recreate," or take some small part in Creation with a capital C. After all, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, Creation involved God "speaking" the cosmos into existence. In Genesis, Adam speaks to give names to all the animals of the garden, thereby signifying mankind's dominance over them. The opening of the Gospel of John states, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." The original "Word" in Greek (λόγος or Logos), was fraught with layers of meaning for the ancients that our English translations can never hope to fully capture. In the Christian tradition, the Logos is equated with God himself - the divine Truth and the very meaning of life.
Similarly, our words have the power to cause being - to beget the existence of things - even if only in the mind. To participate in the work of Creation is the highest of honors, and it may help us at least partially understand Leonard Cohen's near-religious reverence for all words.
At this point, if this all sounds a bit long-winded or pretentious, you're probably right. I apologize, and I don't expect my future posts to ramble quite so much. But hey, I'm allowed to wax a bit grandiloquent in my mission statement, am I wrong?
So now, at last, comes the point of all this rambling - the reason behind my idea for this whole blog. I'm constantly fascinated by language. I'm curious about the origins and intersections of different dialects; the separation points between a dialect and a fully different language; the idiomatic phrases used by foreign cultures; and even those discontinued colloquialisms glimpsed in near-extinct pockets of my own American culture. There's a library's worth of such hidden words just waiting to be uncovered and brought back into common knowledge, even if only as novelties. If I can blow the dust off of archaic terms and present them in my own little trove to a new group of readers, however small, then I guess I'll have accomplished my goal with this blog.
To that end, I hereby put forth my intention to form a compendium of English words and phrases seldom encountered in modern speech and writing - words orphaned by time and neglect, buried under generations of non-use, or shunted into ignorance and obscurity alongside the forgotten trades and obsolete industries that birthed them. I want to mine the rich vocabulum of old-time crooks, criminals, critics, saints, singers, sailors, robbers, cowboys, pirates, farmers, merchants, clergymen, highwaymen, artists, gamblers, carnival barkers, and countless other colorful characters in the changing historical landscape of the modern English language.
Right now I'm reading a truly staggering novel by Cormac McCarthy, a master wordsmith who at times almost requires a thesaurus and a dictionary to understand, thanks to the breadth of his vocabulary. But that's the kind of bog in which I'll gladly struggle. Or even wallow. So, I'll begin this catalog with some of the more unique words that Mr. McCarthy employs in his work.
If you've read this far, then I hope you'll join me again in my pursuit of words unusual, challenging and arcane. Although blogging feels to me like a minor exercise in narcissism (or maybe a major one, considering the amount of time I've spent rereading and editing this post), I do hope to add my own, hopefully worthwhile markings to the already graffiti'd walls of The Internet. And if you have a word you'd like to learn about, please don't hesitate to let me know in the comments... Hopefully we'll both learn something here.
Thanks for following!
Coincidentally enough, I'm starting a blog about blogs which discuss odd words. Would you like to be featured?
ReplyDeleteAlso, G-d told me he doesn't care for the profanity, but he's happy to see you writing again.