Otherways- Fiction Fanatics

I love words. Practically every room in my house has books in it somewhere. They line my walls, frequently litter my coffee table, and teeter in unread stacks on nightstands, the kitchen table, and even the bathroom counter. I almost always have a book stashed in my car, and never leave home without a couple stashed in my overnight bag.

I have to admit, though, words can be just plain bizarre. Take for example the pair flammable and inflammable. Logically, these ought to be opposites, but for some unknown reason they have come to mean the same bloody thing. Then we have words like torturous, a word whose meaning again seems pretty clear, and just plain isn’t. Torturous sounds so much like torture, that it seems to be screaming its own definition. Technically, that is its primary definition, but you rarely see it used that way. Generally, it seems to come up most often in connection with roads, using its secondary definition of painfully difficult or slow. Ask people to describe the “torturous road” and most seem to conjure up a twisting switchback road on some mountain.

The thing is, words aren’t usually absolute. They are completely malleable, changing over time to reflect culture, common usage, and even history. Sure, some words, especially those referring to specific simple objects, seem to remain fairly stable barring invasions that shift the entire language. Tree, hill, and sky probably aren’t going to suddenly mean something completely different in twenty years, but they certainly can. Apple used to just be a fruit, rock didn’t have much to do with music in the 1800’s, and gay meant carefree, which has of course been usurped by a feminine hygiene company.

Cultures tend to have lots of words for the things that either they value or that are important to their survival. Smila’s Sense of Snow by Peter Hoag, which I very much enjoyed, draws on this point in referencing arctic cultures and their many words for snow. Where I live, we also have many words for snow, but most of them are four letters long and not considered very polite.

For us, snow may be pretty, but it precedes ice storms and electrical failures and makes feeding livestock more difficult. In short, it’s a nuisance. In the arctic, knowing the difference between types of snow wasn’t an idle scientific curiosity, but concept that must be passed on clearly to others to ensure they survived.

Words aren’t shapes on paper, they are ideas, weapons, survival, and even immortality. Each culture and generation shapes them to suit their needs, giving them the nuance and depth they can only acquire over long use. We will be celebrating a few of those awesome words here, in a weekly featured blog.

Cheers,

Michelle