In Mrs. Meyers’ 6th grade class, we played a vocabulary game. 4 or 5 students had dictionaries on their desk. Mrs. Meyers would say a word, and we had to call out what we thought the definition was (I don’t think we even needed to raise our hands). After I called out a definition to one of her words, Mrs. Meyers said, “that’s almost exactly the dictionary definition!” Then she said, “oh, but you have a dictionary on your desk!” Mike Thornton, sitting next to me, yelled out, “he’s not even ON that page!”
My infatuation with words may have begun before 6th grade. In 3rd grade, I won the class spelling bee several weeks in a row. Since I was the youngest of four kids, I probably developed some language sense early on with all the different influences that peppered my brain: the language of sports; my mother, the nurse, and medical language; my father, the blue-collar worker; siblings who were fifteen, six, and three years older.
But the dictionary game is a milestone in this love affair. I wish I could recall the specific word that Mrs. Meyers called out that morning. Maybe, in some ways, it’s more meaningful that I don’t. I remember the sense of pride in knowing words, in being curious about words.
When I was 22, the Yankee great, Thurman Munson, was killed in a fiery plane crash. His death was really a sad day for baseball fans, and as a Yankee fan, myself, I really felt it. In a Sports Illustrated article after his death, maybe the press conference announcing the tragedy or a report after his funeral, the writer used the word ashen to describe the mourners’ faces. I felt the word choice was awful considering the plane burst into flames. I wrote a letter to the editor to express my consternation at the word. I never had a response, and my letter didn’t appear in a future issue. I wasn’t expecting my letter to be printed, but I would have appreciated some response. Was it an inappropriate word choice or not? Maybe I was more interested in knowing the writer’s choice to go with that word. It struck me as wrong then, and it seems wrong today.
My oldest brother, Steve, and I had a long discussion once about the word “short-lived.” He said that most people pronounce it incorrectly. The “lived” should not have a short “i” as in “livid” but a long “i” as in “life.” It took me a minute to be convinced, but I came around to agree. Common usage vs. traditional. Sort of sums up the difference between my brother, who is fifteen years older, and me, too. (I won’t mention our conversation about the pronunciation of “forte” here, but it was a doozy.)
I did a paper once on e.e. cummings’ poem “next to of course god america i.” I was working in a factory at night and taking an intro to poetry class in the morning. It was 1977 and a handful of my co-workers on the assembly line were Vietnam vets. One of them, Jimmie, became a friend. After our shift ended at midnight, we would go to the Tam O’Shanter until 2:00 a.m. and then head over to the truck stop near the highway for breakfast.
One night over bacon and eggs, I asked him if he would re-enlist in the Army if America went to war. He exhaled a long drag from his Newport. He said that he would. “We’re warriors, bro. And you’d go with me.” I laughed and said probably not. “I’m a poet.” He gently pointed his cigarette at me and said, “We’re all warriors.”
In cummings’ poem, he says
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
I remember digging into an old, red Webster’s dictionary and looking up each word. “Gorry” is an archaic word for “God.” It’s also a homophone for “gory” which seems right for a poem about war. Its more modern use, though, is as an interjection, similar to “by gosh.” “By gee” and “by gum” serve a similar function. Stringing together five interjections emphasizes the speakers’ mindset — shallow as it may be.
But cummings’ use of “by jingo” drew my attention then and stays with me now. At first blush, it is one more interjection emphasizing the speaker’s religious fervor for America. But, of course, “jingo” also is used satirically in the poem. cummings’ use of the word highlights the speaker’s unthinking, empty rhetoric in this string of interjections to reveal his own superficial, jingoistic “patriotism” which is really an underlying nationalism.
(I don’t know if Jimmie was patriotic, nationalistic, or just held the belief that men were, innately, warriors. I would lean toward the latter. I mostly was intrigued by this juxtaposition of talking with a Vietnam vet, twice my age, an African-American, a very unlikely closest friend on the assembly line while I was a twenty-year-old studying poetry, falling in love with language.)
I think of the power of words to shape, and to share, our understanding of the world around us.
cummings’ last line is “He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water”
I think of how we face this barrage of language–in Oval office speeches, in Congressional hearings, in Executive Orders, in podcasts, in media, in social media–and it becomes almost too much to process. This relentless, rapid fire onslaught of words doesn’t allow us the opportunity to pause, to underline, to write notes in the margin, to question, to interrogate for meaning. We get hammered with the phrase “common sense” while almost sacrificing “critical thinking.”
But we have to. We have to pay attention. We have to be that 6th grader in the dictionary game. We have to be that reader who questions, right or wrong, word choice. We have to be that young adult pondering language over breakfast at an all-night truck stop.
I think of how words matter. Literally.
I love your writing style and reading your stories, Vince. Hope you and Jannetta are well 😊