My Word!
(a word about words)
By Wendy Hall

"Words fail me...". What? Words don't fail. Whoever heard of such a thing? We fail words, if I can put it that way. We fail to recognize words, really. We slip over them so fast to get to our point that we hardly recognize them at all on our way to the end of a sentence! We trash them and litter them all over the highways of our consciousness. Some macho guy grabs a hapless word, squeezes it like an empty beer can and thrusts it into the face of some cowering recipient while at the same time scaring the word into forgetting its definition. Such is the fate of words. No wonder they appear to fail. They shrink in horror from imminent and impending torture.

"What is that?"
"It's a Word!"
"Really, where did you get it?"
"I found it lying, half out of a dusty dime novel that had been cast away. Frantically gasping, it had literally exhausted itself in an attempt to escape."
"Ah,...pity."

There ought to be a law for throwing away perfectly good words. Frequently found huddled and quivering in darkened corners, are they, poor things. Do your bit. Pick one up, take it home, dust it off and make it comfortable. Ask it to tell you where it came from. Offer it some hot tea and sit back and relax, for it will tell you a long, sad and fascinating story, I promise. He'll tell of how he and his compatriots once performed in the service of Shakespeare, for instance; how poets kept them busy for centuries with meaningful employment. "In the beginning was us ", they would say with pride. And confess, too, that while working with a Joyce or a Miller, those dizzying, delicious times spent in Chaucer's employ would spring back into mind.

“We, of course, had tremendous responsibility then”, they would say. “We had to represent sailing to sailors, skirmishes to soldiers, loving to lovers and sadly, shame to sinners. But in our protected cloisters where we worked intimately with poets...ah, these were some of our most cherished moments.”

But now, alas, in these modern times, they're a sickly lot, these words. They've been bent, hammered, contracted, truncated and hyphenated. Suffering from grave misuse, they are hard-pressed to adequately adorn the silly concepts they must clothe, and fully proportion the garments they are forced to wear. Hod carriers in a glassy, flickering medium are they. Mispronounced by those newsreaders whose careers seem to exist only to suffocate us in an air of fabrication. Words abhor being slaves to the lie. Those same newsreaders with their pathetic, 6 o’clock smiles invest them with legends and bend them into submission in a most shameful way. On the one hand, word, you are forced to debase yourself in the insulting gyrations of the rappers, but on the other, you hang gracefully onto musical notes and undulate gently as you are intoned in the patinas of those who write the beautiful songs.


I always loved artichokes! The leaves dipped in mayo, the hearts, and...the word, art-i-choke! Does it do for you what it does for me? I mean, in a way it really sums up what I've always felt about most art. I really hate that word. (Forgive me, word; it's not your fault.) But you were so kind. You let a lot of incorrigibles slip in under your tolerant gaze. You gave them all a chance. And what a reward. You were betrayed more often than not. Art-I-choke! I'm not even going to explain it. You really do it best.

Say a word; any word. Say it over and over until it clicks or pops, and suddenly it's GONE. Now say it over and over some more until YOU are gone. Don't worry. It will bring you back. You've just been initiated into the mystery of the word. When you come back, you will find a new friend at your side.

"Oh, how nice," you say. "But there are thousands and thousands of words. We can't..."

Wait! Let me tell you what your new friend is going to do for you, or have you guessed?

Wendy Hall a lover of words and language has many other interests including Ham radio, music and poetry.

###
Go to Top