Love of etymologies and dictionaries

"I love the dictionary. Perhaps a love that only English majors can fully appreciate. When I was teaching, I always made my students carry little dictionaries, and we would often spend an entire class period trying to figure out what things like 'existentialism', 'modernism', and 'caucasian,' actually meant."

I found the above statement somewhere online, written by a woman who understands what it is to love words, and their meanings. To go back to a word's original source, its earliest recorded usage, is to connect with something more important than the quotidian use we've assigned it. I feel like I better understand not only the word itself, but the people and the time the word derives from. I have also told students, when they're resistant to this process of looking up words in the dictionary, that if they do not understand where a word comes from, the language is using them, they're not using the language. 

To become more consciously aware of the language we're using, it is crucial to look up the origins of words. To know that a word comes from Old English, for example, is to begin to trace its development over time, and to see how it has changed, how meaning and social values have changed too. There are also people who enjoy looking up phrases, to see where and how its vernacular usage began (when, for example, we began to call a low-hanging orange-hued moon a "harvest moon").

If you ever try to explain a phrase you're accustomed to, to someone from another culture, you begin to see the insularity of a phrase; how it didn't travel to someone else's country, how instead it stayed home, and might, in fact, be something only said in your "neck of the woods." It isn't until you begin thinking about the language from someone else's perspective that you're most likely to really, truly question each individual word. Those who are not familiar with your words might be the very people who spur you to try to understand where the word 'furze,' an Old English word of "uncertain origin" according to the Oxford American Dictionary, comes from.

I remember trying to explain to someone once what "trimming the verge," a line from J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, meant. Having someone question a word, and not only when playing Scrabble, is a valuable occurrence. It makes you think much more about the language you'd otherwise use unthinkingly. You also discover what the word refers to, what it alludes to, what metaphor it's relying on. If you're used to thinking of the word 'verge' as 'on the edge of' something, you might not know that for the English, it refers to a herbacious border, a piece of vegetation that gets trimmed with cutting shears. However, once you know all the ways in which the word 'verge' can be used, it adds dimension and depth to your comprehension of one simple word. 

Once you begin to question the origin of words, you run into a bit of a sticky wicket, in that you then have to determine if your source is reliable. Since there are so many dictionaries now, I tend to only buy those that are capable of giving their readers the most accurate etymologies. I eschew (related to 'shy,' a word deriving from  Old English scēoh [(of a horse) easily frightened,] of Germanic origin; related to German scheuen ‘shun,’ scheuchen ‘scare’; compare with eschew. The verb dates from the mid 17th century) dictionaries that cannot tell me where a word comes from, its perambulations from place to place, its visits through time, the ways it has changed, the new clothes it wears each time someone decides to use it differently than they did before. 

I think to want to know where a word comes from is a lot like wanting to understand one's genealogy. It is genealogical research for word-lovers. Think of a word you'd like to know better, and go look it up!

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In Pursuit of the Unattainable: The Quest for Perfection

Having been deeply absorbed in the spurious pursuit of the unattainable these past few weeks, I have been reminded how entirely obnoxious people are when they focus on individual trees rather than the entire forest. Okay, you're thinking, where is this going? I understand. Where this is going, of course, given the tone, is in the general tilt of a rant. I get into ranting moods when I am confronted by situations that do not permit me to express a sense of humour about things I don't think are terribly important. When my sarcasm has to be contained, it leads to rants.

Correction, editing, and sentence-level grammar are of very little intrinsic interest to me. These tasks are considered, rightly, the final stage of the writing process. Think of it as the clean-up phase that comes long after inspiration, invention, creation, production, etc. In other words, only appropriate when the words you're mostly happy with have already been created. Too many writers, however, focus on this step in the writing process, which has the effect of truncating their thoughts. Now, thoughts, from my perspective, are precious commodities. They are the hardest part to come up with. Invention of a new thought is one of those things I take very seriously, and adamantly resist any force that comes close to interfering with it.

The clean-up phase requires a fair amount of attention to detail, but it also attracts obsessives and perfectionists. There is a mentality that focuses on error that is positively annoying, but it's also dangerous for some students, especially those who are marginalized. Mina Shaughnessy's Errors and Expectations deals with this subject. The politics of error correction has the effect of limiting what students are allowed to say, and how they are allowed to say it. There are not-so-subtle social expectations that there is one "right" way to say something, and when we force this on writers (and students, especially) we squash their creativity and tell them they are deficient the way they are. We tend to shut down their communicative abilities, as we attempt to reform them in "our" image.

Correcting error is a tricky path to walk. It is extremely difficult to correct someone without employing criticism, or implying the other is a flawed being. Very few people are so self-confident that they have learned how to ignore the psychological and emotional affect of having been corrected. Most people feel it very keenly, and if the act of criticism is handled badly by the person in power who is authorized to do the correcting, the person who is being corrected might shut down completely and stop writing entirely. There is no error that makes taking this risk with a student's creativity worthwhile.

How right does the error-corrector need to be? Writers need to know when they've made a mistake, yes. However, there are people who correct writing who carry this need to convey wrongness to extremes. Think about the effect your need to be right will have on your student, or on the basic writer—or even on the published writer who is, nonetheless, insecure. The quest for perfection, and forcing correctness on others (especially students who cannot defend themselves, due to the inherent power imbalance in the student-teacher relationship) is redolent of the Victorian era, when the English dominated the planet and were allowed to tell everyone, in judgemental tones, how to conduct their business. I keep wondering when students will rebel against this treatment.

The Myth of the Lone Genius

Think about this as it relates to what you believe is true about writing:

If interpersonal skills and sensitivity to others is valued in some cultures, in America, the individual’s ability to overcome adversity on one’s own and emerge successful against competitors is considered a virtue. Combine this idealized image with the “modern view of creativity [which] has venerated the artist or genius as a cultural hero,” and it is understandable “why the popular image of the lone genius or solitary artist is romanticized” (1). The creative individual is worshiped when she has “forged something new and original by struggling against and rising above the limiting, stultifying forces of the conforming masses” (2). Most importantly, the achievement of this struggle represents a mythic role for the individual, a role that is ‘larger than life,’ which further separates the Self from the Other, especially when the Self is exalted and the Other is made up of ‘the conforming masses.’ Creativity becomes “hyper-individualistic” in this model, which, as researchers Montuori and Purser discuss, must be understood within a sociohistorical context of creativity studies that delineate the development, over time, of the exaltation of the supreme agency of the individual, and the rise of the notion of Authorship. The Author might be dead in theory, but in practice he is very much alive, as I will discuss.

Montuori and Purser trace the historical development of concepts of creativity and who is therefore sanctioned to be considered an Author. Central to constructions of creativity are definitions of self and world; the concept of an autonomous self, for example, does not become part of the definition of creativity until quite recently. Stating that “[c]reativity is, among other things, the function of a judgment made by people, and these judgments are influenced by trends, traditions, and the social, political, economic, and aesthetic perspectives of their time and place,” (3) the researchers contextualize individual creative expression in the West. During the ‘mimetic’ or theocentric phase when early medieval artists did not often sign their work, the self was subsumed and sacrificed to the “greater whole or God”; the mimetic period is associated today with collectivist societies “where art serves as propaganda and the state takes the role of deity” (4). In contrast, creativity as poiesis—to make anew—is a recent Western cultural invention. It is during this Modern period that the self emerges as an autonomous, creative individual. The notion of originality also emerges during this period, when “artistic creation is idealized as the paradigm for the achievement of self-discovery, self-expression, and self-definition” (5). A perceived need for originality and innovation requires the creative person to “disengage him- or herself from the environment. The resulting psychic isolation, along with what are perceived to be the “deviant” “schizoid” behaviors of the creative person, is romanticized or even seen as being synonymous with genius” (6).

In America, the ‘cult of the individual’ is threatened by collaboration, and is even more threatened, ironically, by the dissension found in the postmodern notion of the group ‘mind,’ whose agency seems amorphous and chaotic. Collaboration subsumes the supremacy of the individual, which threatens the individual’s idealized subject position of authority and autonomy. In America, a society in which the “self is socially constructed to believe it is not socially constructed,” (7) the individual is always at risk of being demythologized. Even when the romantic myth of the lone genius is resisted by those who believe that writing is an act of social construction, the society referred to has been enculturated to believe that ‘real’ writers do not rely on one another for inspiration, and that ‘real’ writing takes place in isolation. A correlative of this belief is that writers can be studied in a laboratory setting, a belief that further reifies the isolation from society the writer inherits. Further, to say a piece of writing is created as a process of dynamic verbal, intellectual and emotional exchange amongst one’s peers or classmates does not remove the writer from the influence of myth. The power of myth lies in human willingness to acknowledge its illogic and to believe it anyway, because the myth reinforces a value system so deeply embedded as to be unmoved by mere logic or persuasive research.

The myth of the isolated writer is seductive, even in the face of experience. Professor of English Linda Brodkey, for example, who acknowledges that her life as a writer functions because she is overtly connected to others, still finds it necessary to “exorcise the image of the writer-writes alone” which she identifies as a modernist construct “where the metaphor of solitude is reiterated as the themes of alienation in modern art and atomism in modern science” (8). The modernist ‘scene of writing’ is a narrative of inescapable isolation and alienation, “the “fact” of life that modern novels set out to articulate” (9). In this scene of writing, the writer functions solely as an amaneuensis: “in such a freeze frame, the writer is a writing machine, as effectively cut off from writing as from society” (10). Brodkey questions the “unexamined assumption that this and only this moment counts as writing” (11). And yet, the romantic contradiction at war with the logical outcome of extreme alienation, nihilism, reinscribes the individualism of the writer. At the same time that the writer is alone, he is fully an individual, observing, not participating. Romanticism will not permit the writer’s nihilism to erase the writer’s identity, which is fundamentally exploratory, revolutionary, masculine in expression, especially when it reifies the agonism of ancient Athens.

Quotes 1-7: Montuori, Alfonso, and Purser, Ronald E. “Deconstructing the Lone Genius Myth: Toward a Contextual View of Creativity,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 35:3, Summer 1995. 69-112.
Quotes 8-11: Brodkey, Linda. “Modernism and the Scene(s) of Writing,” College English, 49:4, 396-418.

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