The Pleasures of Language: From Acropox to Word Clay

A provisional title for this collection was “Fifty Stabs at the Truth of Language,” which despite its weight, I remain fond of because of its nod to Montaigne’s Essais, which the French master thought of as stabs at the truth of his experience. In some ways, that title is a better description of the book you are holding than “The Pleasures of Language,” for the subject is so huge and complex all anyone can do is to take a stab at it in an attempt to unpeel the slippery onion of our tongue. Whatever I choose to call it, this is a book for the general reader who still consults a hardback dictionary and does an occasional crossword. Having never been a glib speaker, despite forty-two years in the English classroom, I turned to the written word long ago. Schopenhauer thought most of us spend forty years preparing the text and thirty on the commentary; with me it’s been more of a sixty-ten split. But I come to the commentary phase well prepared. Laying out the text for me largely consisted of taking notes on 3x5 cards and filing them away for the final phase if I was fortunate enough to last that long. Hart Crane wrote that he needed to be “drenched in words…” in order “to have the right ones form themselves into the proper patterns at the right moment.” With me, before writing short essays like these ranging from pornography to prayer and concision to tautologies, I immerse myself in the ideas summarized on my cards. Then I try to teach myself something I didn’t know before. I trust, gentle verb-adores, I have a few things to teach you as well.