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The recent passing of Vivian Cook was a shock and sad news. He had a British “kookiness” that served him well academically. I spent the other day looking at his old-fashioned webpage, his electronic cupboard where he kept all his articles, thoughts, and reference material. A gem.
One page of his truly piqued my interest - Letters With Meaning. Truly heretical for a linguist to even think this notion and challenge the law of language that words are arbitrarily assigned units of sound and a subjective collective. We could call a dog, a “fork” - just that we decided on “dog” and went with that collectively. Words are arbitrarily assigned to things and thus by default, the sounds which make up words have no meanings, in and of themselves.
I’ve always railed against the arbitrary, clinical view of sound-letter correspondence. Language is a human artifact. It is not a clinical object born of a science lab. Us humans have created complexity in language through time and ownership. I do think we’ve embedded bias into the sound-word dynamic.
Cook’s page brought back my many debates with linguists and teachers throughout my career in Anthropology and Linguistics. My theory that sounds themselves have meaning. Thus, words are bound to the meaning of sound and thus aren’t arbitrary. You can’t call a “fish” - “dog”. Even if you were Webster Hitler and commanded it. Not in any universe containing man.
“All thought is a feat of association.” - Robert Frost
William Blood wrote the treatise on this subject in the mid 19th century. The Poetic Alphabet. It’s a wonderful essay and he lays out the argument against Fromkin & Rodman’s law of language that the nature of sound and meaning is arbitrary. I have an old pdf copy of the essay - it isn’t available anywhere on the web at all.
Blood suggests that sounds have meaning. The guttural “u” is almost universally used around the world to detail disgust. Fuck. Yuck. Suck. Ugh … and he goes on and on for every letter/sound combination of the alphabet. All having a particular emotional and deeper semantic meaning. That is why he suggests that you could never call a “tub” an “icicle” - there are phonological rules that make this impossible (though Fromkin and Rodman would protest).
I once wrote a whole dictionary! It was done to show that dictionaries are subjective and not written by the hand of god. But it was also written to share the hidden, alchemic world of sound meaning that is embedded in our words. Poets know this. Fit uses an “i” and fat uses “a”. Perfect. Fit is slim, fat is wide. Check out my Idiot’s Dictionary if you have time.
“The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.”― William H. Gass, A Temple of Texts
My pet theory is that the poet is one who is very sensitive to the embedded sound meaning in words. William Gass I think would agree with me. A word is not just a word, a dry, soulless thing. It is deep in meaning, a meaning not just dressed by a dictionary but dressed in the garb of sound. A poet is sensitive to this. It’s the hidden rhyme and meaning that makes poetry so powerful. We intuitively, subconsciously connect with this.
A poet’s sensibility can even get so extreme and in touch with this deep sound meaning that it leads to a medical condition. I’ll write more about that, about my own Foerster’s Syndrome next time. An essay on the nature of “the pun”.
Thoughts
"Often we have to get away from speech in order to think clearly."
— R. S. Woodworth, Experimental Psychology
to two too =s 3
no thinking thin king
run on sentence life sentence
le mot juste
Ommm Ahhh Oh! Yeah shhhhhhhhhh
says the tired tire
wee wee wee all the way
to the small home hole
Ole Ole Ole cafe au lait O! Lay
lady lay……
springs sing
in the flower bed
every year why ear?
we’re here weir
damn it! damn it! damn it!
aswants the tin mad!
steeling a way
anyway,
something like that
3 eees
with ease
we do as we please
stuckkkkkkkkkkkkin
bloody place body face
two faced the mirror
or rathOR
saw themselves in two
two pieces suits you
ewe moo you and who
who who who who
hoots the unfoul owl
Ough! aaaH! Ouch!
we too two wake up
at a wake
who who who who
died? Lewis
carolled
no question to mark
the grave
question a quest
ask again, request
Hark! who who who
goes there
any way or
somewhere like that
cuz THAT
is how it goes
goes goes ooooooooos
around
another round please
the wait ‘er is over
we have time to
two all ready drunks
drink up get down
kup after hiccup
to ketchup
words aren’t enough
but they’re all
we hal ve
ah!!! So unfair there is
no fair where
we’re goinggoinggoingone
all sawn
see saw
in two pieces
who says.
An intriguing text indeed. It's the first article I've decided to read as many times as I can.