William Shakespeare added thousands of words and phrases to the English language such as "too much of a good thing" from As You Like It. I think we can all relate to that phrase after coming off of the food frenzy of the holidays.
I appreciate that language is a living thing that evolves over time in response to its changing context and the humans that shape it for better or worse. And, I can't think of a greater human legacy than adding to our English lexicon with phrases as poetic as to "wear one's heart on one's sleeve" from Othello.
The ESPN sportscaster Stuart Scott died on Sunday at 49 after three bouts with cancer. I have come to appreciate the barriers he broke with his work of exceptional quality not only as a black man but also as a contributor to our expanding lexicon. "Booyah!" was his signature expression. I may not use the exclamation, but I do appreciate his poetic turn of phrase, including "Cool as the other side of the pillow." You know exactly what he means literally and figuratively, don't you?
Scott reached the viewer with words that provoked a visual image in common vernacular which seems to me to be the most worthy of achievements. Every day, we string together letters to make words, and string words together to make phrases, and string our thoughts together to move others toward some greater or deeper understanding.
I certainly attempt to do this very thing here with every post on A Measured Word. And, I try to pay close attention to words as I read and go about my daily life. I may notice a word new to me that completely hits the nail on the head in a given situation or words that speak truth and beauty to me or a turn of phrase that touches the heart and stays in the mind. Each returns to me repeatedly afterward even as I move on with my day.
Three words I have come to love recently and have added to my personal lexicon are automagically, confuzzlement, and parkma. Perhaps, I will one day add a word or phrase to our native tongue, too. Until then, I can keep playing with the nuts and bolts of language right here, word by measured word, and just appreciate where language leads in these most fleeting and precious days.
"We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse: we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard." ~ Penelope Lively in Moon Tiger
