Word Nerd
WRDNRD
By Terryl Warnock
We are inclined to define things by their opposites in these splitapart times. Me, I’ve been noticing the cleavage between number people and word people. I am number literate enough to, say, slog through reconciling a checkbook or reading a P&L. And I did survive a career in auto parts where the whole world rests on the part number. I had committed thousands of part numbers and industry benchmarks to memory, each one of which vanished overnight when I left that job.
But it’s words I live for. They are deeply magical symbols that both enslave and liberate me. In the wake their passage cuts through me, the cosmos is created. To paraphrase Karen Armstrong: (Karen Armstrong, The Bible, a Biography, pg. 1-2)
“When a word is spoken, the ethereal is made flesh. Speech requires incarnation—respiration, muscle, tongue and teeth.”
To speak or write words Casts them, as a witch’s spell, into reality. Watch what you ask for, you might make it manifest. To Enchant requires just the right words, clean and sharp.
Some words captivate merely by their musical presence and interesting, alien appearance. Actinopterygii, for instance (the clan of the ray-finned fishes), or discombobulate. Flabbergast. Hornswoggle. Gobsmacked. What they mean is less important than how they are, and how they are is fun! Interesting. Mysterious. Lyrical.
The life history of some words fascinate and amuse me. Fundamentalist (or ism) comes from the root word fundament, which is the base of a pillar. But before it was the base of a pillar, archaically, fundament meant rectum. Think about that with a straight face if you can the next time somebody proudly proclaims themselves a fundamentalist anything to you.
Creepy was coined to describe the feeling of insects crawling on your skin. Spiders, I gotta figure.
Haggard comes to our language from medieval falconry, which much preferred to train birds stolen from the nest as fledglings. A bird trapped as an adult—an apex predator, it should be noted—was called a hagard and was notoriously difficult to work with. Bird and trainer were both rendered significantly tattered by the process. Haggard.
Docile came from a Latin root meaning to teach, and originally referred to someone who was easily taught. Other words from that same Latin root are doctrine, document, doctor and docent.
Hive is one of the oldest words in the English language to have remained essentially unchanged in usage since the first written words in the patois we might recognize as English today.
Mom thought she was punishing me when she sent me to my room when I was in trouble as a kid but I had a dictionary to play with. I was happy. And when I encounter words, I have to try and read them. I can’t help myself. I make myself dizzy trying to decipher the graffiti on the train as it passes, and spend far too much attention on bumper stickers.
It’s the right word for the right job, spoken or written in a powerful sentence that makes me weep for the beauty, power, and majesty of language. This is why it is so extremely disconcerting for someone like me to start losing their words. I never did have a good memory, but I did, once, have a fair command of the language. That is waning now that I’m in my dotage.
There are categories of failure. There is the basic whiff, reaching for one word and getting an alliterative other. Grabbing for dimensions but coming up with directions. I look for drink and get sink.
Sometimes the whiff doesn’t get close enough to fake its way through, and makes for an amusing interlude in conversation.
“I can’t be around smokers much anymore. I’m not trying to control anyone’s drug habit other than my own, but I am terrified of falling off the dragon.”
“I think I have a science infection.”
“Pull the vines, will you, Tina? So we can see the movie better?”
My sister looks askance at me when I tell her I have to have my daughter sign a form because she knows I don’t have a daughter. We’re meeting for lunch at our favorite Mexican food place as I’m on my way to the doctor.
It’s like grabbing for 2 + 2 and not coming up with 4. It’s disorienting and it just won’t do.
Sometimes the departures are intentional. I reach for tenacious and, not finding it, substitute stubborn. They are not the same thing. Dammit. Tenacious doesn’t come to me until later in the day and then I can’t remember why I was looking for it.
Sometimes I regress to the juvenile and get creative if the word I’m looking for isn’t there. “I’ve just got to get a batch of soap,” I tell my sister, “I’m down to the dregs. I’m even almost out of store-boughten.”
Tongue-tied when I unexpectedly encounter a crush I stammer and stumble and can’t come up with so much as a coherent greeting. “Oh, uh, hi. How’s yer whatcherdoin?”
Sometimes I don’t know the correct insider’s term, so I make one up. “If we get to the camp ground early enough we can save a space for those Colorado River goin’ downers.”
In another intentional departure, I delight in appropriating good words, even if they’re words an editor would most certainly take a red pencil to. We really do need a better word than you for multiple you’s. The accepted non-word here in the west is is y’all (multiple, alla y’all). They say ‘youse’ in N’Yawk, but I like the rural Pennsylvania ‘you’uns’ I stole off the Blue Knobbers I worked with at Wolf Creek much better (pronounced y’uns).
Sometimes these days I miss the right word because my vision is so poor. I misread destiny as density and have to stop—a hard, cold stop in an engaging read—to try and figure out what the sentence might mean. I take my glasses off and put the book up to my nose and finally—finally—get it. I have lost the cadence in what I was reading. Tripped over a single word and did a face plant in the mud.
Sometimes my whiffs and course corrections are amusing and I don’t mind making people laugh. But not so funny sometimes. Have any of us not instantly regretted a word? Once spoken or written, they have escaped the confines of an individual consciousness and become a worldview. They construct us and implicate others. Offered in the wrong tone they can shame that which should not be shamed, or laud the unworthy.
Offered in the right tone—proud and proper usage—they can salve wounds and stop wars, bear and implement instructions from God.
Franz Kafka who is thought to have been pretty handy with words (I haven’t read much of him myself) famously wrote in his diary “when I can’t chase the stories through the nights, they escape and get lost” (diary entry 1-4-1915).
A diary, ahem, is supposed to be a private conversation between a writer and themselves. But he’s right, not only do words escape and get lost, they can escape in the break-out-of-jail sense and undertake journeys under their own volition. Doesn’t matter if they’re literally etched in stone tablets on the mount or not, once you write a word and let it go out into the world, it’s written in stone. Haven’t we all instantly regretted hitting the send button?
I write this by way of explaining to you number people why us word nerds are so persnickety about it. We laugh behind our hands at each other, but we are as meticulous about our words as you are about your numbers. Meticulous comes to English from the Latin noun metus, which means fear. By the 19th century meticulous had lost its fearful meaning and gained one of ‘overly and timidly (painstakingly) careful.’ Remember when they used to call both of us meticulous in a complimentary way? Now they call us anal retentive in a derogatory way.
I am also writing this by way of asking your forbearance now as I fumble about to find the right word. They aren’t as accessible as they once were and that’s a deep sadness for this word nerd geezer (a corruption of guiser , originally a mummer, now a queer old man, sometimes an old woman.[Contemptuous, slang.] The International Collaborative Dictionary of English, v.0.48).
This is an excerpt from Terryl’s forthcoming book Saturday Morning Cartoons.
Terryl Warnock is an eccentric with a happy heart who lives on the outskirts of town with her cat. She is known as an essayist, proof reader, editor, maker of soap, and proud pagan. A lifetime student, she has pursued science, religion, and sustainable communities. This, plus life experience from the local community service to ski instructor, from forest service worker to DMV supervisor, from hospitality to business owner gives her a broad view on the world.
Terryl is the author of:The Miracle du jour, ISBN-10: 0989469859, ISBN-13 : 978-0-9894698-5-2