`Language is the Dress of THought'

Last month I loaned a copy of For a Modest God to my youngest son’s preschool teacher after he read something I had written about Eric Ormsby’s poetry and thought it sounded interesting. Earlier this week, Mr. Johanson mentioned his wife had complained about Ormsby’s vocabulary. He used too many “big,” obscure and ostentatious words, and isn’t that precisely why people don’t read poetry in the first place? Obviously, she hasn’t read much contemporary American verse, most of which draws upon a desiccated lexicon of a few hundred words. Shakespeare used 31,534, and 14,376 of them he used only once.

Call me sesquipedalian but I enjoy encountering unfamiliar words. Any excuse to visit the dictionary is a good one. This happened just the other night as I was reading the first volume of The Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters. George William Lyttelton (1883-1962) taught at Eton for 37 years, and among his students were George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, J.B.S. Haldane and Cyril Connolly. Also among them was Rupert Hart-Davis (1907-1999), who studied with Lyttelton in 1925-26. In 1955, after Lyttelton had retired and Hart-Davis was an eminent publisher, editing the voluminous letters of Oscar Wilde, the friends began a weekly exchange of letters that continued until Lyttelton’s death.

Between 1978 and 1984, Hart-Davis published their correspondence in six volumes. They document a loving friendship between two enviably bookish men. Hart-Davis is always respectful and admiring of his former teacher, and Lyttelton is forever reminding him to ignore the teacher-student imbalance. Between them, they seem to have read everything worth reading, at least in the English tradition, and known many of the best writers and scholars of their time. Both are very funny. On November 30, 1955, Lyttelton writes:

“One sentence in your letter brought me in M. Twain’s words a `spell of the dry grins,’ viz your apprehension that when we meet we shall have nothing to say. My dear, these weekly outbreaks of epistolary elephantiasis on my part – well they are like imposthumes or furuncles (and I shall be disappointed if you don’t have to look out that one!). They are proofs of over-fulness. The only not wholly pleasurable thing about your letters is that after one we can’t settle down and tire the sun with talking.”

Five days later, Hart-Davis started his reply like this:

“I certainly did have to look up `furuncle’ and am delighted to add such a specimen to my vocabulary.”

Both “imposthumes” and “furuncles” were lost on me. The Oxford English Dictionary spells the former “imposture,” and the first definition is “a purulent swelling or cyst in any part of the body; an abscess.” The first citation is dated c. 1400, and the last is from 1841 – a fading but useful word. The second meaning, described as “figurative,” illustrates how word mutate metaphorically: “With reference to moral corruption in the individual, or insurrection in the state: A moral or political `festering sore’; the `swelling’ of pride, etc.” In other words, from the body to the body politic. Subsequent definitions, also metaphorical, are “Applied to a gathering cloud or its contents,” and “Applied to a person swollen with pride or insolence.” That’s vivid: a cloud or ego likened to an abscess swollen with puss.

Shakespeare uses “imposthume” twice. In Troilus and Cressida (Act V, Scene I), Thersites delivers a memorable curse:

“Why, his masculine whore. Now, the rotten diseases of the south, the guts-griping, ruptures, catarrhs, loads o’ gravel i’ the back, lethargies, cold palsies, raw eyes, dirt-rotten livers, wheezing lungs, bladders full of imposthume, sciaticas, limekilns i’ the palm, incurable bone-ache, and the rivelled fee-simple of the tetter, take and take again such preposterous discoveries!”

In Hamlet (Act IV, Scene IV), the prince, who often uses vividly corporeal imagery, says:

“Two thousand souls and twenty thousand ducats
Will not debate the question of this straw:
This is th’ imposthume of much wealth and peace,
That inward breaks, and shows no cause without
Why the man dies. I humbly thank you, sir.”

The OED defines “furuncle” (from the Latin for “little thief”) as “a boil or inflammatory tumour.” When I saw it in Lyttelton’s letter, my first association was “nuncle,” which the Fool uses six times in King Lear. The first citation for “furuncle” is from 1676, the last from 1872, and all are strictly medical. The same goes for other forms of the word – “furuncular,” “furunculosis” and “furunculous.” Ormsby, I suspect, knows these wonderful and probably has used them in a poem. In an essay, “Shadow Language,” he writes:

“When I read a poem new to me, I always looked at once for the feel and texture of the language, even though it may have been the subject matter that first drew me. If the poem was uninteresting to my mouth, I stopped reading it; that is, if it did not in some way seduce me into saying it, into forming and re-forming its particular aural configuration, I immediately lost interest in it. I was looking for lines like Milton’s wonderful:

“`their lean and flashy songs
grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw.’

“That was undiluted pleasure for the ear, not only because of the infinitely interesting collocation of syllables, but because of its perfect aptness for its subject.”

Of course, when I learn a new word I want to use it. When I worked for a newspaper in Indiana, another reporter and I used to challenge each other to successfully work arcane words into our copy. I once described a county commissioner as “freaming” a comment. The OED defines the verb “fream” as “to roar, rage, growl: spec. of a boar.” A cautious copy editor changed it to a pallid “said.”

A blanket dismissal of odd or obscure words, often as part of a misguided campaign to bolster “accessibility,” is wasteful of our dearest birthright – English. A new word is a new world, or a new window on the old one. Language is too precious, too much fun, to always be served at the consistency of gruel. Recall what Samuel Johnson writes in his Life of Cowley:

“Language is the dress of thought; and as the noblest mien or most graceful action would be degraded and obscured by a garb appropriated to the gross employments of rusticks or mechanics, so the most heroick sentiments will lose their efficacy, and the most splendid ideas drop their magnificence, if they are conveyed by words used commonly upon low and trivial occasions, debased by vulgar mouths, and contaminated by inelegant applications.”