If
you love books and words, as I do, you’ll enjoy All In A Word: 100 Delightful
Excursions Into The Uses and Abuses of Words by Vivian Cook. Though the book first came out in 2009, I
just discovered it at Strand, the amazing independent bookstore in New York
City, where new, used, and rare books are featured.
One
essay, What Does A Word Mean?, explores how different languages treat the same
words or concepts. For instance, each
language confronts the same physical world, and thus, needs to account for
similar things.
She
wrote:
“The fact that all human beings share a particular meaning still does not explain why they need it. Why should we all want to talk about I and live? It could be our shared human situation; we all live and die so we all need to talk about the experience. Or it could be hardwired into our brains; we say kind of and part of because our brains work by dividing things up, just as underlying the most sophisticated computer routine is a binary sequence of “0”s and “1”s.
“The fact that all human beings share a particular meaning still does not explain why they need it. Why should we all want to talk about I and live? It could be our shared human situation; we all live and die so we all need to talk about the experience. Or it could be hardwired into our brains; we say kind of and part of because our brains work by dividing things up, just as underlying the most sophisticated computer routine is a binary sequence of “0”s and “1”s.
“It
is almost impossible to decide whether we can think without words. For we necessarily have to turn the thoughts
into words to be able to handle them better or to talk to other people. Even if there is a stratum of the mind where
concepts are separate from language, how could we tell other people about it
without passing through language?”
A
fascinating essay, Gender and First Name, noted that:
“Men's
names typically have fewer syllables than women's.”
“Men’s names are typically stressed on the first syllable, women’s names on the second.”
“Women’s names tend to end in a vowel, men’s names in a consonant.”
Very
interesting stuff.
Here’s
an amazing stat, according to the book:
“About
45% of the running words in any piece of English writing comes from the top
hundred. In other words, knowing a
hundred words lets you recognize nearly half the words you meet in English.”
One
essay pointed out how some common words come from people’s names. For instance, sandwich is from Earl of
Sandwich. Boycott comes from Captain
Charles Boycott. Hoover comes from the
Hoover vacuum cleaner. Pasteurize is
from Louis Pasteur. A sadist originated
from Marquis de Sade.
Other
essays explored things like:
·
Can
apes use words?
·
Can
sounds and letters have meanings in themselves?
·
Words
and multiple meanings
·
Aphasia
(the loss of the ability to use words)
·
Malapropisms
·
Word
associations
·
Word
games with letter arrangements
·
Pig
Latin
·
Forming
new words
Cook
also points out that Shakespeare coined some 700 words, including obscene,
priceless, unsolicited, savagery, and compulsive. In his writings he used 31,543 different
words, a very high number, especially when considering how few words existed in the language at
that time.
“If
thinking depends upon language, then controlling people’s language is a way of
controlling their thoughts,” wrote Cook in a chapter entitled: Warning Words
Can Damage Your Health. She really
makes you think about the language in a way you may not normally. For instance, she has an essay entitled:
What is a word?
She
notes that one working definition of a word is a unit of language that can be
said on its own, such as “door” as opposed to just “y.”
There
are many ways to look at the power of words and language. I’ll conclude with a few quotes featured in
the book:
“Words
are magical in the way they affect the minds of those who use them.”
-Aldous
Huxley
“A
word has the meaning someone has given to it.”
-Ludwig
Wittgenstein
“The
meaning of words, in law as in life, depends upon their content.”
-Mr.
Justice Tugendhat
“A
synonym is a word you use when you can’t spell the word you first thought of.”
-Burch
Bacharach
“People
use thought only to justify their wrong-doings, and words only to conceal their
thoughts.”
-Voltaire
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Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog
are his alone and not that of his employer. You can follow him on Twitter
@theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more
important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by
BookMarketingBuzzBlog © 2015
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