Precise words

I started mulling over the theme of this post during the NVSA conference a few weeks ago.  As with most conferences, the presenters had approached the theme ("Victorian Senses") from an impressive diversity of directions.  Sometimes, to be honest, their highly articulate vocabulary had the effect of making me feel thick-headed.  If you don't regularly work on phenomenology and can barely even remember what the term means, if the word haptic is new to you, if you have difficulty absorbing by ear a densely theoretical essay about a work of literature you've never read -- well, there were moments of NVSA when the universe gave you an opportunity to make peace with your littleness.  Don't get me wrong, I'm sure much of the material I couldn't soak up was brilliant.  But if nothing else, it demonstrated the sheer number of words in academese which I simply don't have in the rotating drum of my word-hoard.  (Incidentally, word-hoard is a term I lifted from Beowulf to become the theme of one of my chapters.)

At the same time, I found myself jotting down words that might be useful someday: perhaps something is germane to my argument; perhaps I could call Tennyson's group of college friends a coterie; and I really should look up what it means to deracinate something.  [It means 'to pluck or tear up by the roots, to eradicate, exterminate'.  Just try to imagine the daleks crying, 'Deracinate!  Deracinate!']  It's just so satisfying to fit exactly the right word to something.  Like the old skill of building dry-stone walls, you find the contours that fit snugly together, and temporarily collapse the gap between thought and speech.  I think it's part of what people love about Shakespeare: he can describe common emotions with such eloquence.

Then there's the fun of happening upon something in my research reading that corresponds eerily well with what's going on in my life at that moment.  The day after I'd sent a very incomplete chapter to my supervisor, I read a letter from Tennyson saying that he had given up his latest book draft to the editor with many remaining flaws and he was very annoyed about it.  The last day of April featured a glorious spring afternoon in Cambridge, during which I was reading some of In Memoriam and found the lines,

          Can trouble live in April days,
          Or sadness in the summer moons?

Fortunately, the answer seems to be "no".  Work must proceed, preferably faster than it has been, but spring is banishing sadness and trouble -- at least for those who don't have exams.  The iridescent leaves, the trilling birds, and the strolling Sweaver thrill to the returning scent of life in the air.  If only I could think of better words to fit the shape of what I mean by that.