Language is one of my favourite things God has created, something so magical and beautiful and yet so confining. I love the shape of words as they meander across a crisp page (I keep a journal with all of my favourite words in alphabetical order!)...and I love the way words feel when you form them in your mouth, when you alter them with inflection or intonation or an accent. I absolutely devour words whenever they come my way--especially quaint words or words that look/feel/sound exactly like their meanings. And naturally my soul simply sings when words are linked together in a manner that perfectly and beautifully expressed some noble thought or lovely image or intense emotion...
As someone who loves words and language so dearly, modern literature and poetry are disconcerting! I am continually shocked by the lack of excellence in modern vocabulary and verbiage. With few exceptions, the beauty and excellence of verbal expression seem to be waning...it is as if a luminous and glorious moon were nearing complete eclipse. I certainly do not want to live in the darkness of prosaic, base, ignoble utlization of language. Without a proficient understanding of language, how narrow, how insipid, how unimaginative, how contstrained, how limited would be the "shorelines of wonder" amd the "waves that break upon the idle seashore of the mind"! How frightening and dismal to not merely lose sight of the beauty of words, but to relinquish even the desire to see that loveliness...to have part of your mind shriveled, stagnant, and small...
"I am concerned that our reading and our writing is gravitating to the lowest common denominator so completely that the great themes of majesty and nobility and felicity are made to seem trite, puny, pedestrian...I am concerned about the state of the soul in the midst of all the cheap sensory overload going on today. You see, without what Alfred North Whitehead called "an habitual vision of greatness", our soul will shrivel up and lose the capacity for beauty and mystery and transcendence...To write pedanticaly about radiance or infinity or ubiquity stunts the mind and cramps the soul. To find the right word, to capture the perfect image, awakens the spirit and enlarges the soul."
"The true purpose...is to cherish and unfold the seed of immortality already sown within us; to develop, to their fullest extent, the capacities of every kind with which God who made us has endowed us." --Anna James
"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them." --Mark Twain
"A large, still book is a piece of quietness, succulent and nourishing in a noisesome world, which I approach and imbibe with "a sort of greedy enjoyment"." --Holbrook Johnson
"Here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron...in reading great literature, I become a thousand men and yet remain myself...I transcend myself; and I am never more myself than when I do." --Clive Staples Lewis
"What is well-written...it is the very blood of thought!" --Gustave Flaubert
I have many of my favourite poems hyperlinked at the lower right on the homepage of this blog...go read some :)
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Then you're part of a long and noble tradition of language worriers. : )
ReplyDeleteTry reading the Introduction to the first edition of Machen's Greek some time (here online, http://www.bible-researcher.com/machan.html). You'll have to do the re-applying of that information to English and language in generally yourself where it's specific to Greek's history, but the parallels between what happened with Greek, and other languages that began isolated, cultivated literature in that isolation, and then spread-outwards, is one of the more interesting phenomena that re-occurs throughout history! (The relevant background is not fully contained in that introduction, by the way, it's just my observation about languages that spread from noble, cultivated, languages in isolation to vernaculars used broadly.)
Check-out these links too (lead to the same site):
1. http://www.bible-researcher.com/linguistics.html
2. http://www.bible-researcher.com/language-quotes.html
Here's a new word for you. "Multivalent". It has a lot of definitions and uses, and it doesn't seem to be listed under a dictionary with this sense, but the way I've seen it used by literary-lovers is as "a single word having multiple words at the same instance and context" (my words). Thus, one example of this phenomena is when a word is "pun'd", indicating several meanings simultaneously; it's one of those things I think is discernible at certain places of the Bible that drives exegetes nuts with having to investigate, and reductionists mad because they cannot keep affirming that words always have only a single meaning at each place they're used, or even when a word is used in a string in the same context, (something I want to write about in regards "Towards and Exegetical Theology" by Kaiser); I have to study that phenomena more carefully as I become capable, but it would be very fun to write-up a "why Kaiser's wrong" to stir-up some cries of heresy and get the teeth gnashing to hinder those who'd flatten language (and thusly deny sheep their due food) in order to stymie heretics that abuse such phenomena to make texts say what they wish).
Note that it is very difficult to have precise, crisp, noble verbiage when a large number of people speak a koine: grammar develops in locales, but the entire world is become mobile, not only making "good" grammar universally utilized possible, but it contributes to the multiplication of senses for the same words far beyond what is really proper or acceptable, and few people have access or care to read historical literature carefully and broadly enough to establish their vocabularies in something grounding. If we were all less mobile, each location would probably begin settling usages and grammar more fully, and each would look down upon others' uses, but at least it would likely be more intelligible (it's like "Italian" in Italy, when really it's quite common for a city to have its own language altogether!).
Besides, words are constrained and ennobled by the ideology of those who employ them: diversity of ideology and neglect of understanding others' means that there little "canon" against which their use is compared and set these days. Not always good or bad, just the way it goes.
And after all that, however, here's another fellow that think much the same thing, however even try to write noble and complete thoughts these days, and often the reply will be "don't write so much".
above edit, read "nearly impossible". My mistake.
ReplyDeleteYes, I am a "fellow" that attempts to write as eloquently as I canb(unfortunately I'm not as eloquent as I wish)...and attempts to continue learning to write yet more eloquently. Some people have the same reactions to me--"don't write so much", "gosh you use too many big words", and "it sounds great but I don't really understand it".
ReplyDeleteI always LOVE finding a kindred spirit, someone who shares the same love of language and words that I do!
"How frightening and dismal to not merely lose sight of the beauty of words, but to relinquish even the desire to see that loveliness...to have part of your mind shriveled, stagnant, and small..."!
ReplyDeleteHow lovely.