Tag Archives: words

My obsession with words

A question, Craft Tuesday, Musings, Reading, Writing, , , ,

POWer of words aI love words.   I roll them around in my mouth and taste each.    When I hear a new word, it tickles my ears and delights me.   Words carry history with them and emotion.   They are not formed only of letters but of  feelings and experience and much more.

My obsession began when I was in eighth grade.  In English class, the dictionary 2teacher would leave a dictionary on the desk in front of each row so we could look up a word and check spelling while we wrote a theme.   I usually finished my theme early and would spend those extra minutes in that front desk, reading the dictionary, learning new words, savoring them.

No wonder I majored in English and Spanish in college:  new words in two languages.    I loved the study of language, the history of words.  I could go on forever talking about root word, about how, in Spanish, words that began in F centuries ago changed to the letter H.  Consider yourselves lucky that I’m not going to discuss the verb satisfacer and how it’s conjugated.

My favorite word is from Spanish:  carcajada which means a deep belly laugh.    It sounds like what it means and has such beautiful rhythm.

words I loveI understand not all people love words as I do.  When I got excited about a word in Spanish and attempted to explain its origen or uses or something equally fascinating to my classes,  students looked at me as if I were absolutely nuts.   And, yes, I may be.

Do you have a word you like?  Perhaps because of meaning or sound?  Please share that.  I’d love to know and I won’t feel so alone.

 

 

 

 

Words are magic

Writing, , ,

This is a blog I wrote very early in my blogging but it’s also one of my favorites.   I hope those of you who haven’t read it before will enjoy it.  And, to you who read this long ago, I hope you’ll enjoy the rerun.

Words have always fascinated me.  From childhood,  I’ve’ve read 200px-Anne_Frankvoraciously.  I’ve taken courses on linguistics, and, in the classes I teach, I bore my students endlessly by showing them the history of words and how words are formed.

Words!  They are amazing.  The words I’m typing now have never before been put together in this way.  Even more amazing:  when you read these words at sometime in the future, you’ll know exactly what I was thinking at this moment.

It’s magic.

The most exciting example of the power of words I’ve been part of was from 1985-87, when I taught English in a school for pregnant teenagers.  The majority of the students were African-American, most lived in poverty and many had struggled in school.  But, with the coming of a baby, each courageous young woman came to this program to complete her education and give her child a better life.

In tenth-grade English, I taught The Diary of Anne Frank.  We’d read Shakespeare, Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom they enjoyed, but they really loved this play.  Even those who couldn’t read—and there were several–listened, spellbound.  The story of a Jewish girl who lived in the 1940’s and who hid from the Nazis in a tiny attic room spoke to my students like nothing else we’d read.

Through her words, Anne Frank, isolated in her ghetto created by prejudice, reached out over forty-five years, fromAmsterdamto these minority students shut up in a ghetto inLouisville,Kentucky.  My students understood Anne Frank and were astonished to discover that another young woman had suffered from the prejudice that surrounded them.  Anne Frank became one of them and they joined her in that attic.

This is what storytelling is:  reaching out over the years and through the differences and divisions between people to touch emotions and open the reader to new ideas.

And we are the storytellers, the ones who transmit the heritage, who transport our readers beyond the barriers of time and place, who deal with the truths of our experiences, who share and interpret the struggles we all face.

As writers, we are magicians.  We create worlds that have never existed before and populate them with characters that  spring from our imaginations.  We fiddle with our creation’s lives.  They get sick, suffer, fall in love–all with a few keystrokes on our computers.

The words we write make people we’ve never met laugh and cry and think and sometimes get angry.  What tremendous power words have.  What an amazing, awesome craft this is.  To be magicians.  To work miracles.

Anne Frank and The Magic of Words

Writing, , ,

Words have always fascinated me.  From childhood, I’ve read voraciously.  I’ve taken courses on linguistics, and, in the classes I teach, I bore my students endlessly by showing them the history of words and how words are formed.

Words!  They are amazing.  The words I’m typing now have never before been put together in this way.  Even more amazing:  when you read these words at sometime in the future, you’ll know exactly what I was thinking at this moment.

It’s magic.

The most exciting example of the power of words I’ve been part of was from 1985-87, when I taught English in a school for pregnant teenagers.  The majority of the students were African-American, most lived in poverty and many had struggled in school.  But, with the coming of a baby, each courageous young woman came to this program to complete her education and give her child a better life.

In tenth-grade English, I taught The Diary of Anne Frank.  We’d read Shakespeare, Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom they enjoyed, but they really loved this play.  Even those who couldn’t read—and there were several–listened, spellbound.  The story of a Jewish girl who lived in the 1940’s and who hid from the Nazis in a tiny attic room spoke to my students like nothing else we’d read.

Through her words, Anne Frank, isolated in her ghetto created by prejudice, reached out over forty-five years, fromAmsterdamto these minority students shut up in a ghetto inLouisville,Kentucky.  My students understood Anne Frank and were astonished to discover that another young woman had suffered from the prejudice that surrounded them.  Anne Frank became one of them and they joined her in that attic.

This is what storytelling is:  reaching out over the years and through the differences and divisions between people to touch emotions and open the reader to new ideas.

And we are the storytellers, the ones who transmit the heritage, who transport our readers beyond the barriers of time and place, who deal with the truths of our experiences, who share and interpret the struggles we all face.

As writers, we are magicians.  We create worlds that have never existed before and populate them with characters that  spring from our imaginations.  We fiddle with our creation’s lives.  They get sick, suffer, fall in love–all with a few keystrokes on our computers.

The words we write make people we’ve never met laugh and cry and think and sometimes get angry.  What tremendous power words have.  What an amazing, awesome craft this is.  To be magicians.  To work miracles.