Words As Little Miracles

I suppose this “writing thing” was inevitable. 

Paper and pens were my preferred toys when I was little –- for drawing, scribbling words, making large bubble letters that were strung together into nonsense sentences.  While other little girls played with dolls, I fashioned a stationery store in my bedroom, complete with a desk as a counter, a partitioned box as a cash register, and displays of supplies that I’d gathered from drawers and shelves all over the house.  When my forbearing father wanted to use a stapler, he was forced to buy it back from me for the exhorbitant sum of a nickel. 

I never cared much about the money. The real gift was getting to write out the receipt –- a piece of paper on which I’d painstakingly drawn straight lines with a ruler, and could now fill in with item, price and even some sort of tax.  I’d take the nickel with all the solemnity of a shopkeeper, and then cheerfully say, “Thank you for coming in today, sir!”

I can’t tell you how many times my sweet father bought that stapler from me. 

Those low-tech times gave me the opportunity to decide that I was going to read the dictionary from beginning to end –- and I’m aware that this puts me firmly into some sort of “club,” as I’ve heard the same thing from many other writers since.  But if I close my eyes, I can still feel the fragile pages with their gold-painted half-moons, just the size of a child’s thumb, each with a letter.

And like many others, after a stab at “begin with A, and go through Z,” it became a sort of metaphysical scattershot method of tightly shutting my eyes, opening the book, and dropping my finger onto the page.  I began to imagine that the word thus randomly chosen could inform and direct my day.  “Voyager” meant a walk around the block, “mottled” indicated I should spend time in the garden peering at leaves, “kabob” meant searching out skewers and stringing Cheerios on them for breakfast.

I think I’ve never looked up a word in a dictionary that I didn’t also learn another one.  As I scanned the columns, reading aloud, my forefinger traced a line from top to bottom of the list of words -- I was like a puppy, “What’s this?  What’s that?”   It took forever to look up a word, because “neophyte” would yield “necromancy,” “nefarious,” “negligent,” and “nemesis” on a path to the definition. 

I thought words were little miracles, really.  Sets of letters that meant something.  I was fascinated by “The Miracle Worker,” and that moment when Helen Keller realizes that letters make words, and words have meaning.

All this is not to say that I believed the best words were the most complicated or obscure.  My college Communications thesis was a “readability study” of the university’s catalogue, a book sent out to high school seniors, hoping they’d enroll.  Through in-depth counting of the types, sizes and clarity of the words used in the catalogue, I determined that you needed to be in your second year of Graduate School to properly understand it.  My professor sent the study on to the Admissions Department with a wry smile.

And my love affair with words continues today.  Dictionary.com has a “popular searches” column, a word of the day, and a new Beta program called Word Dynamo that estimates your vocabulary.  The website functions for me in the same way those delicate pages did so long ago –- you can even “Browse Dictionary” randomly -- it’s the best of technology, I think, when it mimics the real thing in spirit.

In the end, I can imagine myself in the last moments of life, trying to describe it, saying, “What’s the word I’m looking for….?”  Ah, yes…“transition…that's it...”

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