'Word Should Be Looked Through'

Carpenters work in wood and welders in metal -- raw materials. Extend the logic just a little: writers work in words. An obvious point but one often forgotten or never learned, especially by those who think they work in ideas. It’s a phenomenon I first encountered while working as a newspaper reporter. Many colleagues, in particular sportswriters, used words as though they were a foul-smelling substance needing immediate disposal. I knew reporters who took pride in writing badly or at least indifferently. Paying attention to language and weighing word choice and rhythm was somehow effete.      

Robert Francis (1901-87) was an American poet probably best known as a protégé of Robert Frost. In 1980, Francis published Pot Shots at Poetry, a collection of brief prose observations and aphorisms. One is titled “Wordman.” Francis tells us he would be happy not to be called a “poet” because the word is used to describe “not just people who write poems, but special people.” In other words, it’s a self-aggrandizing honorific, like El Jefe. Francis seeks a “stubbornly plainer” word and suggests “wordman,” a man or woman who works with words: “So let me be called a wordman and let what I write be called word arrangements.”

 

Francis is not coining a neologism. The OED reports the first known occurrence of wordman dates to 1610 and is defined as “a man who deals with or has command of words; a master of language.” Flattering but at least occasionally deserving. Francis writes in “Glass” (The Face Against the Glass, 1950):

 

“Words should be looked through, should be windows.

The best word were invisible.”