Bombarded as we are with words upon words written, spoken, chattered and electronically generated effortlessly spent as if we are dropping small change on the ground, we easily become blind to the profound magic of speech. It becomes simple to treat words as so much blather to be expended in the run of a day. Yadda, yadda, yadda. It s occasionally worthwhile to take the measure of words, to listen to them and roll them about in our mind, to hear how we shape the air with our mouths and lips and nose and cut it with our teeth and produce something that gives birth to an idea in the world or unleashes storms of response. When I studied grammar in school, it trained me to think of language as a pre-constructed entity with rules to be followed, rather than as a dynamic act that both follows rules and makes the rules as it goes along.
Words are an ongoing consensual creation that spark and snap in each new usage.
They have shape, but they move and evolve. Their meanings cannot be pinned down in a dictionary. A good dictionary can paint a picture or point in a particular direction, but definitions are themselves made of words, so as we seek to find the definition of a word, we follow a path of synonyms into infinite regress. Having gained some appreciation for the wonder of words and their liveliness, I took up the pastime of searching for the roots of a word and contemplating the ideas and images that gave it birth. In English, the roots of many words can be found in Latin and Greek and in the language that most likely predated them, called Indo-European, the mother language also of Sanskrit, German, Russian and a variety of other languages.