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capri0mniStill working on that poetry collection* I drafted during July's Camp NaNoWriMo... And a good quarter of them, so far, are etymological-- often snagged directly from dictionary pages, rearranged for the purposes of scansion.
Right now, I'm writing a longish poem on the word "Cripple," and trying to explain why I love the word, even though it is most often used in hateful contexts. And this simile / analogy popped into my head: Etymology is to cultural beliefs what fossils are to biology. People choose words to convey their thoughts, and the meanings of those words change gradually over time as people's attitudes change. So by tracing the meaning of a word, through its different language roots, you can find evidence of what people were experiencing a thousand years ago, even if they weren't writing them down explicitly, in a "Dear Diary" format. Just like the fossils of tiktaalik tell us about how we are related to ancient, bony, fishes, words themselves can provide evidence of the people whose lives and experiences are otherwise not recorded at all
*or "short essays that just happen to be in iambic pentameter"?
Right now, I'm writing a longish poem on the word "Cripple," and trying to explain why I love the word, even though it is most often used in hateful contexts. And this simile / analogy popped into my head: Etymology is to cultural beliefs what fossils are to biology. People choose words to convey their thoughts, and the meanings of those words change gradually over time as people's attitudes change. So by tracing the meaning of a word, through its different language roots, you can find evidence of what people were experiencing a thousand years ago, even if they weren't writing them down explicitly, in a "Dear Diary" format. Just like the fossils of tiktaalik tell us about how we are related to ancient, bony, fishes, words themselves can provide evidence of the people whose lives and experiences are otherwise not recorded at all
*or "short essays that just happen to be in iambic pentameter"?
no subject
Date: 2014-09-09 07:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-09 11:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-15 01:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-15 09:50 am (UTC)The problem is, I'm having so many thinks and feels about my relationship to the word, the people who've used it, and the ways they've used it, that I'm getting bogged down in a veritable ball pit of metaphors.
I think I'm going to have to split it up into several different poems, and trim each one down, or I'll be lost inside it forever (cue mashup image of the Minotaur's Labyrinth with an Escher staircase).