For The Love Of Words!

By Author: Peter James
Total Articles: 37
Comment this article

Where would we be without words? How could we ever convey beauty or sorrow or loss without calling upon this careful arrangement of fine lines connected to thought and inextricably tied to the rawest of human emotions... those things that we feel?
Words assist us in our very human business of recollection and reflection. They help us to be unapologetically mortal.
From the time we first parroted our parents by repeating their pronouncements to wide, delighted eyes... words have been our reward. From exclamation, to action, to description... we learned to communicate with these rehearsed sounds that would become the connective tissue of language and thought.
Words are our dancers in a mournful ballet. They are our singers in an inspiring libretto. They are our strings, our woodwinds, our brass and rhythmic percussion. They are old friends that visit and sit in a favorite chair. They are gifts on a page, trapped in a memory with a turn of tone that makes them unforgettable. Words are Christmas morning!
Words are the native utterances of those we have lost; the inhaled echoes that once filled a room and ...
... curled inside our ears. We can still hear them drumming up the clatter of the past and tapping out the tone of the familiar. Those private words have come to define us and form the resonance of our lives.
From Aristotle to Shakespeare... from Hemingway to Sylvia Plath, from Orwell to Ayn Rand... writers are thieves of experience and encounter. And, words are their glimpses of immortality.
Today's words go where none have gone before. Whether scratched from a pen, tapped from a key, or bounced from a cursor... they are an electronic shadow of their former selves. Now resigned to Google around in Cyber prisons and wink from character-limited fields of acronym... our new fast-thumbed alphabet runs the risk of truncating thought and short-changing meaning.
It is interesting that human language has always changed technology but now it appears that technology is profoundly changing human language.
For those of us that write, that re-construct idiom that adorn human communication with the care of an assiduous artist and the precision of a tireless sculptor... nothing has changed. We remain the same craftsmen of lexicon and the consistent journeyman of terms. We shall always toil into the night searching for the right piece of speech, the ideal slice of expression, and the optimum serving of syntax. We shall forever carry the banner of the sublime and raise the flag of reverence. We shall eternally light the torch of transcendence and forever play with words... full sentences, gorged narrative, complete stories... in a virtuoso of vowels, a symphony of syllables, and an opus of unending dialogue.

online essays