About

I love words, and I mean that in a similar way to how I love my husband, parents, God, and dear friends. I am steadily freeing myself from the culturally imposed, thoughtless use of many words ("love", "literally", "awesome", etc.), and my first target in this endeavor is "love".

Love.

What does it sound like to you? What does it look like to you? I am writing this near Valentine's Day--does it look like a red and pink box of chocolates, roses on special for $9.99 a dozen, almost-diamond earrings in a red velvet box presented over a candlelit dinner? Does it sound like Sinatra, the finale of an opera, a modern ballad, the song on the radio for the sixth time today? Your BFF's parting words after a phone call?

Or does love sound like a birdsong? Does it feel like a sunrise? Is it heavy with the reverence of a thousand thousand lives before, committing themselves to a person or thing or religion as to no other, for better or for worse? Is it light with the joy and revelation of delving enthusiastically into who-knows-what, but what will surely bring you experiences you have never had before? Is it dark with the mystery of the unknown and volatile, simultaneously bright with the potential epiphanies? Is it weak with the timorous necessity of being reciprocated, yet strong with the mutual vow of returned friendship and mutual nourishment?

Oh, that we would always love like this!

This is what I mean when I tell you that I love my parents, and this is what I am coming to mean when I profess that I love God. This is what I vowed to my husband when we first began our lives together.

And this love, in all of its expanse, is also what defines my connection to language. For is not language the essential connection of all of us to each other! Is it not the anchor to all our history and lives that have finished but still cast their echoes, and our capsule for the future and everyone who is yet to be? Is it not the means be which we describe our exploration of the mysteries of the smallest molecule all the way out to our theories about what's happening twenty million light years away? What wonder! What power! What vastness!

And what responsibility I feel because of this love for such a marvelous aspect of humanity. Words are the means by which we think, by which we relate, by which we exist. Let us not pervert such a gift, and by such abuse each other.

This is where I would do my part to return words to their due respect.