Words

1.
Mandarins & Mangolins
Mandolins & Panjandrums
Ampersand
Pencil in penicillin

2.

Ce qu’on conçoit bien
S’annonce clairement
Et les mots pour le dire
Arrivent aisément.

Art Poétique, Boileau

3. Words are used as verbal tools and as expressive signs. In the former case, our vocabulary is shared with all common speakers – it is intended to have simple meanings and is generally thoughtless in its application. The latter case includes art, but can generally stretch to include any occurrence of emphasis.

A verbal tool has nothing to be emphasised. Therefore to provide this accentuation, the word must be invested with more complex meanings and associations. These can be literary, comic, personal etc, but are not necessarily communicated to the reader. Their effect is to raise the word to the status of sign, and the reader is anyhow encouraged to look for complexity.

In written texts, a word cannot be elevated unless it gains a mark of its elevation, eg italicisation or underscoring. Alternatively, the word can be replaced. An unusual or foreign word will immediately have the status of emphasis as the reader will have to hold their focus on this word in order to recall or guess at its meaning or translation. But which word is now being emphasised? The original, which has been emphasised by its replacement? Or the replacement, which emphasises itself by the eccentricity of its use? Is the ghost of the original word still held within the context?

This approach can lead the reader to make associations and discover meanings that are quite unrelated to the writer’s intent, either in the emphasis of the original or in the presence of the replacement.

4.

Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right sense.

Collected letters, William Butler Yeats

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