We Are What We Speak.

The Man Who Would Be King but is totally cool if the official term is “president” has said that the most beautiful word in the dictionary, and his favorite, is “tariffs.” (I’m surprised he didn’t choose “deportation” or “retribution.” Or “ratings.”)

TFG (which used to mean “the former guy” but now means “the future guy”) has an odd definition of beauty. Not coincidentally, he also has an odd definition of “truth.”

But this got me thinking about beautiful words and what makes them so. It may be what a word symbolizes, such as “mercy,” or the sensory images it evokes — the way it sounds as you utter it, or looks on the page, or feels as you write it, or the smell and taste that come to mind just by thinking it.

I think this last is most true during the months between the arrival of autumn and the start of the New Year. The season has a generous, abundant vocabulary.

In a notebook, I have a long list of words compiled by author Robert Macfarlane in his book Landmarks to describe natural phenomena. Among them:

“apricity” — the sun’s warmth in winter.

“winterbourne” — an Anglo-Saxon word that means an “intermittent or ephemeral stream, dry in the summer and running in winter.”

“dimpsy” — in southwestern England, a folk term for “dusk.”

Macfarlane is also the author of The Lost Words, a requiem for nature words deemed obsolete by a recent edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary. Don’t blame the OJD — dictionaries, I learned in college, are descriptive, not prescriptive; they report on usage and don’t aspire to be ironclad arbiters. But it is precisely the lack of usage of certain words (“bluebell,” “kingfisher,” “pasture”) by the modern child that found them banished from the OJD and replaced by the mainstays of techspeak: “blog,” “cut-and-paste,” “voicemail.”

I doubt the words “buggy-whip” or “courting-chair” are in the OJD, or any other reference work today, except maybe The Complete Lexicon of the Forgotten and Quaint. (Not a real reference work, to my knowledge. But I’d get a copy if it were.) Like all books, reference guides must be kept current and bow to space limitations.

Though some words understandably fall out of usage, we can preserve — and elevate — others by preserving and elevating what they refer to: in nature, “bramble,” “lark,” “willow,” all casualties of the OJD revision; and in life, “truth,” “beauty,” “mercy,” all casualties of the present day.

We are what we speak. This just came to mind as I’m writing, and now I wonder if anyone else has previously coined the phrase. But for the moment I’d like to think it’s my contribution to “beautiful words.”

#truth #beauty #words #lexicon #dictionary #vocabulary #robertmacfarlane