“To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the music the words make.”
- Truman Capote
Words are everywhere. The spoken and written words that we use everyday is the basis of how the world functions (and I’m ignoring ABBA’s claim that it’s money that makes the world go round). Imagine, just for a minute, if we had no words of any kind; it seems like too impossible of a reality to comprehend.
I asked the question on Twitter about what words people liked best, not for what they meant, but for the word itself, and the response was fascinating. ‘Inadvertent’, ‘augmented’, ‘iridescent’, ‘snuffle’ and ‘apocalyptic’ were just some of the many words that were tweeted to me, and it got me thinking about the way that we – and here I mean the English speaking world in general – use words, and where they come from.
At university I had a linguistics professor who, when he wasn’t propositioning the boys in my class, told us that words were the currency by which we earned our living, no matter which career path we took. In this great age of technology, and the ease of access to information spawned by its development, words have become increasingly central to how we live. Words are powerful – put enough of them together into a cohesive unit, and you have yourself an idea, something infinitely more dangerous.
From a linguistics point of view, the English language in all of its ridiculous glory continues to amaze and annoy in equal measure. English has had as many transformations as Whoopi Goldberg had outfits at the Oscars, and it is full of invented words that baffle non-English speakers. Words like ‘ameliorate’, or ‘specious’, or ‘plethora’, or ‘mellifluous’, are both meaningful and utterly nonsensical, and yet they are all used in the middle of sentences spoken or written by very normal people.
The history of the English language is as rich and colourful as the language itself, which I once heard described by a non-native speaker as “some mongrel language that should collapse under the weight of its own contradictory rules”, and I would certainly agree with that. The origins of words are probably only interesting to word nerds like me, but take, for instance, the word ‘carpet’ – we get it from Turkey; on the other hand, the word (or phrase) ‘casualty ward’ was made up by Dickens, of all people.
We tend to think of people like Chaucer and Shakespeare and the translators of the King James Bible as wordsmiths, but in our own way, we all are. These days, no-one says they’re going to search for something any more – they’re going to google it instead. Or hoover the living room, rather than use the vacuum cleaner. As the English language continues to be one of the main languages of the world, so it will add more strange and wonderful words to its ever-expanding vocabulary.
In the meantime, I’ll content myself with trying to fit words like ‘dichotomy’, ‘sequester’, ‘belligerent’, ‘cadaver’, ‘aerodynamic’, ‘magnanimous’, ‘judicious’ and ‘poltroon’ into a sentence (possibly in the same sentence), just because I can.
