Word of the Day

I didn't have a particular subject in mind when I started my writing day this morning, so I tend to get time-sucked by the Internet on such occasions. I do actively look for something though. I try Stumble, or the random page on Wikipedia. Sometimes I actually turn to the English homework I'm supposed to be doing to see if anything catches my fancy there.

Today, good old English came to my rescue. I love words. I like to collect them and pin them up on my office cork board in pretty fonts because to me, words are art. I also like being the smart aleck I was born to be by learning any kind of new and/or hard words that I can actually sneak into daily conversation.

My favorite word is obstreperous. It means being a pain in the a**, basically. I identify with that word. Today though, I was reading an essay about Poe and stumbled across two words that I had heard before, but they somehow struck me in a different way. You know how you can pick a word, say it over and over until suddenly, it doesn't mean anything anymore? Did you ever do that when you were a kid? Well, if you did, then you may have some understanding of why "indefinitiveness" struck me funny today. Not haha funny, funny strange. Both that word and "suggestiveness" were used in the same sentence describing Poe's writing.

Sometimes I love Poe, and sometimes I think he's a weird dude. I love The Raven, but The Tell-Tale Heart is messed up. So for this literary reviewer to say that his writing has "suggestiveness" and "indefinitiveness" in the same sentence gave me the giggles. Why can't we just say it's weird? Why do we go to the big words and use them in such a way that no one knows what we are talking about? I mean, of course, the collective "we."

I like scholarly essays as much as the next girl (which is not that much), and sometimes I get a lot out of them. But for this one, I wanted to yell at her after fourteen pages of using language this way (snooze worthy), and implore her to "just say he's weird and we don't know what he meant half the time!"

Which brings me to my current thought - what if I do this sometimes? What if, because I like words and enjoy showing off that I love them, I write stuff that makes readers want to yell at me? I certainly hope that is not the case. In fact, I would say that my style of prose is rather spare and simple. I like to move the reader with the idea, the thought behind the words, and not necessarily the powerful words themselves.

It is an odd realization about myself, that my current style belies my vocabulary. I think this is a good thing. I can learn to weave a fabric of language that is more precise, more intense. I'm not sure anyone can learn to have the intent of writing. Once I know what it is I want to say, the entire language is at my disposal to convey it. If I have nothing to say in the first place, no thought, or stance, or invocation unique to me, then all the words in the language could not fill that void.

Funny how far you can go from finding a word of the day, to realizing something about yourself you never thought of before. Thought, language. I'm very glad to have both.

Peace,

Jo Taylor

Reading With Older Eyes

I'm going to post a few of the blog entries I did for my last English class, none of which are that profound, but they relate directly to my reading or writing, so I guess they are germane to my own blog.

I have to say I LOVED the short story "Say Yes" by Tobias Wolff. The thing I loved about it most was the realization that now I am older (a very wise forty-four), I interpret things differently than when I was younger. This is an obvious statement, one I have heard many times, but it is just now beginning to sink in. I really do. In my last class, I re-read J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye." I read it previously in high school, and again in college. This time, I got different things out of it. How can that be? I can certainly understand different people interpreting fiction differently, but the same person - years later? Apparently, it is true.

I do not think I would have liked "Say Yes" when I was younger. I would have thought it was weird, pointless: no action in a simple argument. But I read it when I was older, and have been married for 18 years. This gave such a familiarity to their argument and the undertones of how well they did or did not know each other. It takes on a new dimension of understanding when those long years have passed for the reader as well.

I think I am surprised I noticed this. I certainly don't mean that a younger reader won't understand it or enjoy it. I'm not really talking about age or youth being the filter, but more of an experience subset. Does the idea of theme, what the story is about, come from a different place when you've lived something similar? Maybe war stories are this way. Someone who's never experienced war can still read and comprehend and understand the complexities, but read by someone who HAS been in a war . . . perhaps they glean yet another layer hidden from the rest of us.

Peace,

Jo Taylor

Reading

I like to read and most of the time it's ghost stories or something about ancient times, like the 1900's. Ghost stories inspire me the most though because I've had a few things happen to me that might even be ghosts trying to talk to me. Sometimes I hear things but Honey can be standing right there with me and she doesn't hear it. She's my best friend though, so she doesn't think I'm crazy.

I wish that books would be a little less formal, let the characters speak for themselves. I don't really like reading all about how the street looks or what the weather is like. I want to know what they are thinking and how they are going to get out of whatever mess they are in, cause that's my situation half the time.

I get to stay up late on Friday nights and watch TV with Daddy. He usually watches some dumb show, but I like eating popcorn and getting to drink a Coke. For some reason, it's always hard to fall asleep afterwards, but I read my book or write something in my journal that I throw out the next day. Someday I'll write something that doesn't make me want to barf when I read it again.

Peace,

Margaret