Those of you who clicked on this diary story to read a diatribe on the garbled garrulousness of Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, George W. Bush, or Miss South Carolina will be sorely disappointed (but you might like the caption above). My musings here are not about that kind of word salad. I do enjoy the verbal machinations of the truly ignorant, but tonight I just wanted to talk about words and language somewhat randomly. There is no overriding theme; it’s just some stuff tossed together—like a salad. I suppose I could have called it “Word Stew,” but that doesn’t sound appetizing to me, or “Word Gumbo,” but then it would have to contain okra. I figured “Word Salad” would draw more readers, even though it is misleading—kind of like an AP headline.
Anyway, please check out my drivel concoction below and add your own ingredients to the salad in the comments. Bacon is always a good choice. First, a word (but not a word salad) from our sponsor:
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One of the things that I really enjoy about the English language is its wide variety of synonyms. Because English draws from so many different languages, different words for the same thing emerged. As time went along, those synonyms began to distinguish themselves from one another. I especially enjoy the connotations and nuances that separate them. For example, what are the differences between path, trail, track, by-way, footpath, and lane? They all mean basically the same thing, but they each suggest a different image in my mind. Or we can look at the paved version of that list: alley, road, street, avenue, boulevard, freeway, parkway, etc., and see similar nuances of meaning.
Which brings me to unanswered questions: Why do we park in a driveway and drive on a parkway? Why is it butterfly instead of flutterby? Why is phonics spelled with a ph? Shouldn’t “politically incorrect” mean the same as impolitic? Why are certain words considered obscene while their synonyms are not? These are mysteries that will probably never be solved.
Speaking of word salad, I like precision in language. Since language is communication, clarity is the most important feature. Samuel Taylor Coleridge once said, “Prose: words in their best order; poetry: the best words in the best order.” Trump claims he has all the best words; it’s the best order part that seems to baffle him. He thinks syntax is what his failed casinos used to pay. Personally, I tend to write in a very direct style, but to maintain interest I try to vary my sentence structure. I like easily digestible, complete thoughts; my favorite punctuation mark is the semicolon.
However, if I have a really complicated idea to communicate, one that requires a much deeper and more exhaustive explanation than I am able to convey in a single simple sentence, I can always put together coordinate and subordinate clauses as well as various phrases and modifiers (a process known to linguists as recursion) to form a very long and intricate compound, complex, or even compound-complex sentence, as did William Faulkner, the famous Nobel Prize-winning Southern writer who was known, in books and short stories, to compose entire pages that consisted of a single grammatically correct English sentence in order to show that the past is never really past and that the present is directly connected to, flows from, and is a product of all that has gone before, as exemplified in his acclaimed novel Absalom, Absalom!, which contains the longest grammatically correct sentence in the English language (if there is such a thing) according to Wiki, which records its length at 1,292 words, far beyond the length of this sentence, which is only 220 words long if you count the numbers 1,292 and 220 as one word each both times and all the hyphenated words as two words each (and if you include the one parenthetical appositive phrase and the two parenthetical subordinate clauses, including this one). Okay, I’ll stop now, but you get the idea. No wonder I hated reading Absalom, Absalom! when I was a freshman in college.
Archaic words are fun, too. Entire websites are dedicated to listing and defining them, like The Phrontistery. These are the places to go if you want to learn the sooth, the whole sooth, and nothing but the sooth about outdated words. Believe me. I plight thee my troth.
Right here at the Great Orange Satan, The Geogre recently used the word ruth in a comment. All of us use the word ruthless, but how many of you have ever used the word ruth in a sentence when it wasn’t about your aunt or a Supreme Court justice? I don’t think I have. And Murfster35 entitled a diary story Whither NOW Donald?! and talked about the word whither:
Whither is an old word, and it basically means “where” or “to what place.” The media picked it up in the 70’s and 80’s and for some reason the word always stuck with me. The media used it to make them look like they didn’t get their degrees from a university off of the inside of a matchbook cover; it made them sound all deep and thoughtful and shit. Hell, I like to be thought of as deep and thoughtful and shit too!
Don’t worry, Murf, we do think of you as shit deep and thoughtful.
I could go on and on about words and language, but I won’t. You’re welcome. Instead, I’ll let you spice up the salad with your own useless mundane ridiculous profound linguistic thoughts in the comments. Or you can just talk about your pootie if you’d rather.
TOP COMMENTS FOR SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2016
From Tara the Antisocial Social Worker:
In her excellent diary For the love of all things holy, stop hating on the poor, fisknp adds a comment with a great quote.
Be sure to follow the link in the comment for the rest.
From Avilyn:
In elenacarlena's Aminal Nooz diary, sidnora laments about getting everyone to use their brains, and 2thanks had the perfect response that had me actually LOL.
From your humble diarist storyteller:
I loved this informed, grounded comment by wvmcl in jburtonprod’s rec listed diary story Why has a Secretary of State Been Forced to Answer I.T. Department Questions?
If you enjoy a good mini-rant, try this one by Finnegan05 in Pence’s definition of ‘Americans’ apparently doesn’t include non-whites by Kerry Eleved.
In the recommended White Supremacists Hold D.C. Press Conference To Discuss Their Plans And Their Love For Donald Trump by Dartagnan, Black Max offered this sobering comment.
TOP MOJO FOR FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2016
TOP PHOTOS FOR FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2016