Words to That Effect

Two of the finest writers in the English language have been dead for hundreds of years, their work and their reach living on, DWMs to be sure, but remarkable dead white men, each of whom had an eye, an ear, and an empathy. Yet another who reaches out to me has been out of circulation since Halley's Comet orbited by in 1910. All three have had an enormous effect on the way we talk, think, and read. They are respectively Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, and Samuel Clemens.

No slouches either are those who put forth the King James Bible, which, along with Noah Webster's Speller, had a direct influence on the better angels of American English and of the better still angels of a DWM who is not so much celebrated for his writing as his politics, which is to say Abraham Lincoln.

Add to this roster the least known of language mavens, William Tyndale (1494--1536), a man who rendered a English version of the New Testament and was at work on a rendering of the Old when Henry VIII put a stop to his work and his life. But the damage was done and, as was the case with Chaucer, Shakespeare, Webster, and Twain, his words live one.

It is certainly plausible to link Shakespeare to having read Tyndale, not just in passing but repeatedly, influencing him much as Webster's finger prints are visible on Lincoln's words.

Persons who profess a love for words and language should have their visas checked at the border of our indulgence; some of these have love only for their own words, coming from them. We must make them earn their keep, just as we must earn our own keep by understanding the ways in which men and women of words have shaped us and our cultures. Since I have been leaning on DWSs, allow me to even things up a tad with women alive and gone from us who have caused more variations and eloquence in our language than all of The Great Vowel Shift that came after the Norman Invasion. In no particular order or chronology, we have Sarah Orne Jewett, Amy Lowell, Jewell Parker Rhodes, Mrs, Wharton, and Joan Didion, each of whom is worth a blog posting or two. We must keep memorial candles burning for those who use language to unite, to inform, and to ease the transition from one color on the spectrum spread of life to the next, leaving behind the memorial of clarity and insight.

At the end of his remarkable Adam's Diary, Twain gives us a flash of Adam at Eve's tomb, possibly thinking of his own Livvy when he wrote from Adam's point of view of Eve, "Wherever she was, there was Eden." We need language and its use to transport men, women, children, and even Republicans to an Edenic connection with the humanity that links us.