Words, words, words

“Words, words, words,” Hamlet complains to Polonius about some dry text he has been reading. But while Hamlet might find words to be dull and incapable of expressing truth, Ian Crouch and Brad Leithauser, both writing on the New Yorker blog, find words to be endlessly fascinating.

Crouch, speculating about neologisms (the coining of words), argues,

If neologisms seem suddenly ubiquitous, perhaps this proliferation is the result of our current pace of life. If we are expected to multitask, then shouldn’t our language have to, too?

Leithauser, meanwhile, worries about words that exist past their usefulness or are otherwise abandoned:

Words become unusable for all sorts of reasons. Though “niggard” and “niggardly” have a rich pedigree running through Chaucer and Shakespeare and Browning, they’ve recently fallen out of currency as the result of being near-homonyms to a hateful epithet.

Pet words

Brad Leithauser has an entertaining essay on The New Yorker’s blog site about pet words. As he points out, a writer’s pet words can reveal a great deal about his mind works. In Joseph Conrad’s fiction, for example, the word “impenetrable” crops up again and again, which makes sense because, for Conrad, much about human nature remained inexplicable.

For Leithauser, one of his own pet words is “level”:

The word “level” belongs on the own list of my twenty favorite words. I love it because it so fittingly embodies its own definition. Could any word possibly look more level than “level”? It’s not merely a palindrome. It’s also all but bilaterally symmetrical—legibly itself if written on a pane of glass and read from the other side. In its perfection, it’s hard to believe it was arrived at through the random evolution of everyday speech and wasn’t an architect or engineer’s construction: it’s a Logos that might serve, in its balanced stolidity, as a firm foundation for a philosophical system, and I felt that I was off to an auspicious start when I snuck “level” into the first paragraph of this essay.

I suppose one of my own pet words is “undoubtedly,” which seems to give some certainty in an uncertain world. Or maybe I’m just especially conscious of this word because, for years, I confused it with “undoubtably.”

At any rate, I use it frequently. Undoubtedly.