Words, Words, Words

Act II, scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The prince enters stage left reading a book. Polonius asks of him, “What do you read, my lord?” and Hamlet replies: “Words, words, words.”²

There was a time when I was sick of words. I could not make them do a thing I wanted. I wanted to be a painter or musician. I wanted a wordless medium.

In the writer’s art, words are our paint, our clay, our chords. But when we are not practicing the art of writing, we are still using words—to scream at each other, to promise, lie, compliment; words come at us from the TV, from menus, billboards, tax returns; they are present in the most unique literary achievement and the most mundane transfer of information. So: as a writer, how to keep words fresh? A good place to start, I think, is to consider their origins, to wander around the topic of words, beginning with their histories.

Words can be broken down into their component parts: letters. The written letter is sound translated into graphic symbol. A (say) is A (draw). Letters and the learning of them are especially important to writers. In her autobiography, Eudora Welty wrote, “My love for the alphabet, which endures, grew out of reciting it but, before that, out of seeing the letters on the page. In my own story books, before I could read them for myself, I fell in love with various winding, enchanted-looking initials drawn … at the heads of fairy tales.”³

Poet Anne Carson says, “Think how much energy, time and emotion goes into [the] effort of learning [to write]: it absorbs years of your life and dominates your self-esteem; it informs much of your subsequent endeavor to grasp and communicate with the world. Think of the beauty of letters, and of how it feels to come to know them.”⁴

Learning a language is a transformative experience; it changes you deeply, like fear or being in love. In her book, Eros, the Bittersweet, Carson explains how, in the early eighth century, the Greeks modified the Phoenician sign-system, introduced vowels, and thus invented the Greek alphabet, which is the root of the modern English alphabet. Imagine the eighth-century Greeks and their new alphabet, the powerful change wrought by the act of an entire culture—adults, children, all at once—learning the alphabet for the first time. There are several scenes from ancient Greek tragedy where letters and the act of learning them are dramatized. Here’s a section of Euripedes’s play Theseus in which an illiterate man looks out to sea and spies a ship with writing on it. He “reads”:

I’m not skilled at letters but I will explain the shapes and clear symbols to you. There is a circle marked out as it were with a compass and it has a clear sign in the middle. The second one is first of all two strokes and then another one keeping them apart in the middle. The third is curly like a lock of hair and the fourth is one line going straight up and three crosswise ones attached to it. The fifth is not easy to describe: there are two strikes which run together from separate points to one support. And the last one is like the third.

The man spells out, or rather describes, the six Greek letters of the name THESEUS. It must have been a scene that proved dramatically effective; other Greek tragedians imitated it very closely. Sophocles is said to have staged a satyr-play in which an actor danced the letters of the alphabet, and the Athenian playwright Kallias produced a play known as “The Alphabetic Revue” in which the twenty-four members of the chorus performed in pairs of vowel with consonant.⁵

This is the runic power of the written word. But it is not all pleasure. One can be cut on the edge of a word. As the Kiowa-American writer, N. Scott Momaday says: “Make no mistake, we are at risk in...