Words are cheap

 

So I stumbled across this number yesterday:

The GLM [Global Language Monitor] estimates that in the modern world a new word is created every 98 minutes (approximately 14.7 new words per day). Each year, an estimated 800 to 1,000 neologisms are added to English language dictionaries.

That’s a lot of words, and English is already admitted have the largest vocabulary by far of any language. Maybe because languages like French, German and Spanish only average 200 neologisms a year. So what effect does this have?

Well, according to the law of supply and demand, words inevitably lose their value. The invention of new words, pressed out like license plates in the prison shop, floods, cheapens language as a whole. It’s been said words are cheap. They’re getting cheaper.

It’s been estimated that there are a million words in English, though the American Heritage Dictionary lists only 350,000. Which makes for a huge chunk of words that are floating around in the ether and could blink out like phosgenes any second, never even recorded or cast away like old ichthyosaurs. Moreover, the number of words one needs to know to be fluent in English is estimated at between 3,000 and 10,000, so English can be thought of as the iceberg that sunk the Titanic. We’re only seeing the tip on our cruise.

And all those obsolete and unused words? They can be thought of as lost or undiscovered species in the Amazon rain forests, species which may hold miracle cures if we can only catalogue them before clear-cutting wipes them out.

So many words lost in the shuffle. And more, the weight of so many words must inevitably over-run the silences, which like rests in music, impart the language its form and power. Light a candle for St. Harold Pinter.

Now I know that English’s Latin-Saxon agglutination is considered one of its glories, the source of its agility. And its thievery of words from other languages like a mad mynah bird is looked on fondly. And a living language must grow or die, just like a cancer or any capitalist economy. I don’t want to take away English’s rizz,

Just…search the garden before you plant a new flower. And take a favorite word to dejeuner today, huh?

Cover Reveal: The Strange Case of the Pharaoh's Heart

 

     Okay…here it is, the cover reveal for The Strange Case of the Pharaoh’s Heart. 

Sherlock Holmes travels to Egypt to take on the curse of Tutankhamun, along with the indefatigable Dr. Watson and the mysterious medium Estelle Roberts. 

Releasing March 19th from Seventh Street Books. Available for pre-order Amazon and a host of other places now.

Cover by the inimitable Jennifer Do.

Oh, and that’s an Egyptian scarab on the cover, not a flying cockroach.

That’s my story anyway. 

Eudora Welty on characters

“Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.”

                –Eudora Welty

Favorites:

Losing Battles

The Robber Bridegroom

The Ponder Heart

Plus, a bonus quote:

“I am a writer who came from a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.”

Robert Graves on story-tellers

The Devil’s Advice to Storytellers 

 Lest men suspect your tale to be untrue, 

Keep probability – some say – in view. 

But my advice to story-tellers is: 

Weigh out no gross of probabilities, 

Nor yet make diligent transcriptions of 

Known instances of virtue, crime or love. 

To forge a picture that will pass for true, 

Do conscientiously what liars do – 

Born liars, not the lesser sort that raid 

The mouths of others for their stock-in-trade: 

Assemble, first, all casual bits and scraps 

That may shake down into a world perhaps; 

People this world, by chance created so, 

With random persons whom you do not know – 

The teashop sort, or travellers in a train 

Seen once, guessed idly at, not seen again; 

Let the erratic course they steer surprise 

Their own and your own and your readers’ eyes; 

Sigh then, or frown, but leave (as in despair) 

Motive and end and moral in the air; 

Nice contradiction between fact and fact 

Will make the whole read human and exact. 

 

                                      —Robert Graves

Favorites:

Collected Poems

The White Goddess

Goodbye to All That

And a bonus quote:

“To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.”