And Then There's This...When Words are Bread Crumbs

I don't know how I came to love words more than material objects. But that's how the cards fell. To me, words were palpable. I could pick them up, hold them to my ear, twist and turn them this way and that until I got just the right meaning, rhythm and mood. Words catapulted me from solid earth to a cloudland where dreams coalesced and floated free, each word emerging like a sunrise, each with mass, shape, texture, function, ancestry and embedded memories seeping from every syllable. Best of all, they were free for the taking, an all I could eat linguistic buffet.

Maybe I caught word fever from seeing my mom scribble lines into her little blue-back composition book and later bring them to life in song. Or perhaps it came from lying on my bed and watching her mouth change shape as she “gave out” words to me from “The National Speller.” (Yes, I was once a county spelling champ, at which point my fame peaked.)

On our backwoods hillside farm in the 1940s, radio was our only link to the outside world. There I heard in newscasts, songs and dramatic shows strange and exotic words that never surfaced in family or school conversations — words like “adobe,” “canyon,” ”beach,” “smog,” “freeway,” “sarong,” “tommy gun,” “carousel,” “saloon,” “nightclub,” “blackout,” “U-boat,” “sabotage,” “cocktail,” “tumbleweeds,” “Hollywood,” "Broadway.” These formed the trail of bread crumbs that led me out of the forest.

The musical “Oklahoma!” made its debut in 1943, and I recall how through the song “The Surrey With the Fringe on Top” I realized that words could simulate sounds other than their own, such as the clip clop of hooves: "Chicks and ducks and geese better scurry/when I take you out in my surrey.” In my middle years, I collected special-interest dictionaries and spent hours poring over them. I never thought about herding words into sentences as a way to make a living. That was just a delightful side effect.

Even people who are less word-crazed than I seem drawn to supposedly wise sayings (also known as maxims, aphorisms, proverbs and adages). During the late 1960s, colleges were in ferment as students protested against the Vietnam War and for women's rights. One manifestation of this turmoil was the rise of what was called the “Free University,” whereby various of us campusinos would teach a non-credit class on any subject that interested us — maybe how to play the banjo or silk screen.

I taught a class in which we examined aphorisms for their structure, logic and current applicability. Naturally, the first one we seized on was the one so often shouted at war protesters from the sidelines: “America: Love it or leave it.” We gave it points on brevity and memorability but concluded it fell short on logic since it overlooked the sensible middle ground between the extremes of acceptance and abandonment. If your car broke down, must you either accept it as is or simply abandon it? Or would you repair it?

We also judged “A picture is worth a thousand words” to be more glib than profound. You can glance at a picture and be done with it. Words require more sustained focus. As Sherlock Holmes told his friend Dr. Watson, “You see but you do not observe.” Then we considered the contradictory sayings that only context could resolve. “Look before you leap” or “He who hesitates is lost.” Which is it? My class was too unattached to render a useful opinion on “Marry in haste, repent at leisure.”

I'll confess I sometimes get carried away with wordplay and become the Archbishop of Annoyance. Take the time my oldest daughter was driving me home from a long trip and happened to mention that the campaign for one of her publicity clients was “gaining momentum.”  What if the campaign were losing motion, I asked, would that constitute “slowmentum”?  She was polite enough to ignore me. But I persisted. If the campaign suddenly died in its tracks, I queried, would that amount to “nomentum”?  That she continued to acknowledge my presence counted as one of nature's wonders. But by now, I was on a roll. The speed of bread fermenting, I mused, must be “doughmentum,” the trickling of a stream “flowmentum,” kicking a ball “toementum” and the movement toward gender equality “womentum.” I could have gone on, but it would have been child abuse.

OK, so here's the deal: If words fail you, learn more words.

(Please send your comments or questions to stormcoast@mindspring.com with “And Then There's This” in the subject line. And thanks for reading.)