This artifact, the English word,
Logically formed, but sometimes absurd,
One way written, another heard:
Why is my imagination stirred?
Vocabulary, he was saying, was the core of his problem. He couldn't remember words for a more than a short while, then he'd have to commit them to memory again. They don't make sense, he explained, and I can't remember things like that.
Sense? When has that been requisite for memory? What arbitrary moments or facts picked up at random from the bookstalls of our experience lurk in the library of our memory, ready to work their way out and fall on our heads unexpectedly as we pass.
But okay, I'll give you sense. There's the systems of cognates: reduce, produce, conduce...; the system of synonyms: extend, lengthen, elongate, prolong, protract; the Latin/German duplications: freedom and liberty, and the system of ancient lineage: whir and worry; in addition to words associated with stories attached to people: boycott, lynch, and historical events:waterloo. There are the words cavalierly chosen for their sound and aburdity: google, quark. Shorn words: shrooms, and compound words: onepercenter. We can look sort the many words of English into a typesetters tray of different categories, each of which has a sense and a non.
Like Terry Tempest Williams writing on the geographical term, nose: 'Like the mouth of a stream, finger lakes, an arm of the sea, the crotch of a rock, the brow of a ridge, rock nipples, elbow canyons, a neck of land, and les grands tetons of Wyoming, another reminder of how we see ourselves in the places we inhabit.'
How would you like your words served? Braised, baked, blended, battered, brisketed, broiled or burned?
But then, you with a shy smile started to share with me some of the layers of intricacy in which even simple syllable words like he can be embedded. One word, one sound and thirty meanings; same word, different sound, innumerable more. Then words in combinations, both phonetic and graphic. And many of these words with famous associations: love affairs, wise emperors...
I'm not learning Chinese as you are English (more sorrow mine), but clearly we revel in our word hoards. Rather than making too little sense, there are too many ways words work. Nothing that humans use is ever simple; we are incessant multipliers of complexity, impellers of implication. Perhaps, to love words is to love mankind.
Logically formed, but sometimes absurd,
One way written, another heard:
Why is my imagination stirred?
Vocabulary, he was saying, was the core of his problem. He couldn't remember words for a more than a short while, then he'd have to commit them to memory again. They don't make sense, he explained, and I can't remember things like that.
Sense? When has that been requisite for memory? What arbitrary moments or facts picked up at random from the bookstalls of our experience lurk in the library of our memory, ready to work their way out and fall on our heads unexpectedly as we pass.
But okay, I'll give you sense. There's the systems of cognates: reduce, produce, conduce...; the system of synonyms: extend, lengthen, elongate, prolong, protract; the Latin/German duplications: freedom and liberty, and the system of ancient lineage: whir and worry; in addition to words associated with stories attached to people: boycott, lynch, and historical events:waterloo. There are the words cavalierly chosen for their sound and aburdity: google, quark. Shorn words: shrooms, and compound words: onepercenter. We can look sort the many words of English into a typesetters tray of different categories, each of which has a sense and a non.
Like Terry Tempest Williams writing on the geographical term, nose: 'Like the mouth of a stream, finger lakes, an arm of the sea, the crotch of a rock, the brow of a ridge, rock nipples, elbow canyons, a neck of land, and les grands tetons of Wyoming, another reminder of how we see ourselves in the places we inhabit.'
How would you like your words served? Braised, baked, blended, battered, brisketed, broiled or burned?
But then, you with a shy smile started to share with me some of the layers of intricacy in which even simple syllable words like he can be embedded. One word, one sound and thirty meanings; same word, different sound, innumerable more. Then words in combinations, both phonetic and graphic. And many of these words with famous associations: love affairs, wise emperors...
I'm not learning Chinese as you are English (more sorrow mine), but clearly we revel in our word hoards. Rather than making too little sense, there are too many ways words work. Nothing that humans use is ever simple; we are incessant multipliers of complexity, impellers of implication. Perhaps, to love words is to love mankind.
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