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Sunday, September 11, 2005
Covington: Looking in Jabberwocky
By Gary Covington
Looking In
FUNNY how words get around, isn't it? I don't know about the rest of you scribblers out there but usually, tucked away in a corner of my mind, I have a word of the week, a word of the moment.
It's a word another writer has set down and which I've picked up. Quite unconsciously some part of me has liked the look of the word and its sound and has filed it away to be used at any opportune moment which happens along.
Nor am I alone. Ram Maxey in his column of August 31 used the word huff. It's one of those interesting words which imitate a sound, a not particularly common word. Most people would write puff.
Yet, in last Sunday's Weekend here's columnist Bong Aportadera huffing along and on the opposite page our Stella huffing (and, admittedly, puffing) her way up some stairs to a restaurant.
Coincidence? Surely not. I'd make a bet that the two of them read Ram Maxey's piece and picked up huff in exactly the same way that I tend to notice (and retain) appealing words.
My words of the moment fall into two groups. There are the fleeting words which are in vogue for only a week or two and then fade away to be replaced by another. Not so long ago I went through a splendid phase, deciding that splendid was well, er, a splendid word. I was even using it in conversation as an exclamation!
Then there are my frequent flier words of the moment which I've favored for years and which I trot out, quite unconsciously, whenever I can (unconsciously at least until I look back through previous articles!).
Such a word is astonished. I stole this from the great naturalist David Attenborough. He too is an astonished fan and has used the word liberally ever since writing about his first animal collecting forays in the 1950s. But he writes the word with such enthusiasm that his astonishment transfers itself to the reader and so it did with me. Here was a marvellous word--a cut above amazing and certainly superior to flabbergasted or hornswoggled. Say it out loud--with the correct inflection the word itself sounds astonished.
The sound of a word is important. It's how we read. We look at some symbols on a sheet of paper and our brain translates them into sounds which we "hear".
The most effective way for a writer to test his prose is to read it out aloud because he (or she) is then hearing what an audience or another reader will hear. If it doesn't sound right then chances are it isn't.
The Victorian author Lewis Carroll understood the importance of sound to the extent that he invented words to fit the occasion. Perhaps the most well-known is chortle--a combining of elements of chuckle and snort.
(Another beauty, not Carroll but a place name, is Mporokoso. The leading m is pronounced mmm, the rest of the word as it looks. Try it out loud. Mmmporokoso. What a stunner.) Carroll again--Jabberwocky. Jabber. Hmmm.
For Bisaya stories from Davao. Click here. (September 11, 2005 issue)
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