`Speak Again'

Words are tools but also toys. If their job is communication, their avocation is amusement. Not every writer and reader would agree. I admire George Orwell’s best essays (not the fiction) but his sense of humor is vestigial. When he says that “the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes,” he’s only fractionally correct. People choose to enfeeble language out of laziness and an eagerness to sound like everyone else. Linguistic distinction (that is, precision, concision, color and music, not necessarily profanity or gibberish) is discouraged. Thus: awesome, cool and the poetry of Mary Oliver. The late D.J. Enright thought otherwise. He advises in the first stanza of “First Words, Last Chances” (Old Men and Comets, 1993): “Words you’ve never used / And have always wanted to – / Get them in quickly.” What follows is a tour-de-force of rare words teetering on the cusp of nonsense, A Clockwork Orange or Finnegans Wake. For instance:

“It fell on your head

Her old boyfriend’s framed photo –

Fearsome xoanon!”

I didn’t know that Scrabble-friendly xoanon. From the Greek for “to scrape, carve,” it means “a primitive rudely carved image or statue (originally wooden), esp. of a deity.” Apparently the ex-boyfriend is still idolized. This stanza is particularly good:

“Vox angelica

(Voicing vale or ave?)

Or vox humana?”

I learned what a vox humana was in 1967 from “The Intro and the Outro.” This stanza can be decrypted with a dictionary handy:

“Jalousies muffle

Criminal conversation –

Discalced and unfrocked

Ithyphallic, perforate –

A case of jactitation.”

That last word I learned from Tristram Shandy: “After much dispassionate enquiry and jactitation of the arguments on all sides,—it has been adjudged for the negative.” Such games, indulged unrelentingly, grow tiresome. Some occasions call for plain speaking and sobriety of manner. But limiting our words to one narrow frequency, as advised by the more humorless among the language police, spells tedium. Monotonal words stripped to utilitarian starkness come to signify nothing. Remember Lear’s contemptuous command to Cordelia: “Nothing will come of nothing: speak again.”