Words

I received a comment on an earlier post (you get so few comments on posts yet to be made) which pointed out that I had written a sentence of 94 words. That amazes me. Its no where in the league of the seriously loquacious -- Henry Kissinger, for example, whose doctoral dissertation was so long that the college thereafter imposed a maximum on the number of pages, or the all-time champion, Marcel Proust -- but its still a lot more words in one row than I would have guessed. And many of those have, y'know, actual meaning.

I have a minor interest in semantics. My knowledge is almost entirely of the Sunday Parade magazine or Readers Digest variety (I get to read the RD every so often when my mother's Large Print edition shows up, complete with ads of cheerful people using video systems to combat the effects of macular degeneration; now, thats a scary image. I notice that RD seems to have stopped publishing articles such as I am Joe's Heart or I am Jane's Ovary, which were just about the right speed for me; I guess they got tired of the jokes about doctors consulting those more than their own texts. Though, proof of the concept that you can find someone to defend anything, I recall reading an article years ago which said that for all their simplicity, the RD articles had the advantage of being digestible quickly, which was what a busy doctor sometimes wanted). I am not so much interested in how languages work -- there are people with blogs that go into incredible depth on that, and I'll bet they're just being casual; not doing, you know, serious writing on the concept -- as in how they're used, how they affect the way you think. I guess I put that badly; though language does affect the way you think (and even what you can think about; thank you, George Orwell), I would bet its a side effect of how you think to begin with -- ie, your comfort with words is a reflection of your ability to cogitate, not the other way around.

At least, thats what I think.