Words
By Gerry Wisdom, East Sierra Branch
I have always been fascinated with words, and the bigger, the better. I nearly gave my Sunday School teacher a coronary by insisting I needed to know what fornication meant to understand the Bible reading for the day. He finally convinced me I needed to ask my father that question. Daddy solemnly explained it to me.
Our local library in Hollywood allowed me to check out books in the adult section, with my mother’s permission. Roaming around the dusty shelves, I discovered a shelf, very sparse, of banned books. The librarian explained that I couldn’t check them out, but my parents could. How I longe to be grown up! After much pleading, as my father always encouraged curiosity, he bought Lady Chatterley’s Lover for me. And so, I learned three asterisks could stand in for a world of words. I was so taken with the story, the history, the language that I never noticed those missing words or remembered to ask why the book was banned. I just put it down to the oddities of adults, much like the fact that in the movies all the parents had twin beds and mine didn’t. After all, the movie The Outlaw was banned, but National Geographic wasn’t.
I went to a high school that was 97 per cent Jewish and what was offered there was a classical education. Period. One dance only a year, the prom. Latin classes provided root words, and they had a giant dictionary. All the joy I required was English classes where every Friday there was a spelling and vocabulary test. Words Words Words.
When I was an Office Manager for a bunch of physicists at NWC and had to proof and pre-edit their reports, it became clear that while they were brilliant scientists, writing reports was not the forte of most of them. Every day I posted “The Word for the Day” on my bulletin board to help them improve that one skill. It was a great hit, and soon they were challenging one another.
Have you guessed by now I am a voracious reader? I usually have three books going: one history, one mystery, and one informative. Right now on my bedside table are: A World of Curiosities, by Louis Penny; Crazy Horse, by his descendants; and Fear and Trembling, by Soren Kierkegaard translated by Alastair Hannay. Kierkegaard was Norwegian and Hannay Scottish so I don’t know if anything is lost in translation.
Kierkegaard himself quotes extensively from Aristotle, Homer et al. In Fear and Trembling his subject is Abraham and his sacrifice of Isaac, his son. But in the end, the book can be distilled into ONE WORD: Faith. That amazed me and caused me to wonder about when homo sapiens first used a word that another of his/her kind understood to stand for something.
Anyone for quotidian?