Word Origins and Diction
Layers in Meaning
Happy National Poetry Month.
“April is the cruelest month, breeding/ lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/ memory and desire, stirring/ dull roots with spring rain.” —T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land.”
As I've mentioned in earlier posts, I studied Latin from junior high through high school, which was when I fell in love with words. I love knowing from where words come (i.e. their word origin or their etymology); the original meanings and how those have changed is fascinating to me. Take the word, “awesome,” for instance, which now, as we know is a slang phrase (maybe even outdated a bit) that means outstanding, great. But the origins of that word are more complex, stemming from “awe,” which connotes a mix of emotions, like reverence, and its original, archaic meaning, stemming from the Old Norse word “agi,” or dread. Something that is “awesome” is not simply outstanding, but also inspiring of dread. I think about that word when I remember the day I saw a tidewater glacier calve into a fjord in Alaska. The chunk of ice that fell off the sheer white wall was a big as a warehouse; I saw the splitting, tearing, falling, splashing for several seconds, in slow motion, before I heard the roar of the sea and felt the swell of waves rise and rock our boat. Awesome.
When reading or hearing a poem, we want to look at which kinds of words a poet chose— what myself and many others used to call high-brow or low-brow, until we understood phrenological terms to be mostly racist, sexist, and ableist. Now I would ask are the words concrete (tangible things) or abstract (ideas that cannot be seen)? Is the diction (vocabulary) simple, monosyllabic, plain, and Anglo-Saxon (as is usually the case of concrete things) or is the language more difficult, multi-syllabic, and Latinate (usually in the case of abstract ideas)? In general, the more syllables in a word, the more difficult and abstract an idea the word tends to be. More "conversational" words are often offered in one or two syllables. We will talk more in an upcoming metaphor post about why concrete object do more for a poem’s argument than abstract ideas.