Man uses tools to build and shape his world. As a wordsmith who grew up in an illiterate and indigent family in the rural South, my tool of necessity was and remains language.
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. – Mark Twain
Grunts, gestures and cave paintings could only go so far as a means of describing the world and our fit into it. Quickly, by necessity, we created words. One by one, each with a different meaning. We codified them by usage, by mutual agreement. Tribe by tribe, nation by nation.
We went from basic words like ‘root,’ ‘dig,’ ‘fire,’ and ‘arrow’ to more complex, abstract terms like ‘multitask’ and ‘irreverent.’ We combined words together into stories passed down orally that helped us describe and understand the world and the meaning of life, and we formed communities around our common history. We refined those communities through common social, economic and political interests.
We created the printing press and made our stories available to the masses. Now the sharing of ideas, thoughts, history and every other nook and cranny of the human experience was no longer the exclusive parlance of the rich and privileged.
To paraphrase Richard Brautigan’s “I Was Trying To Describe You To Someone”: We were like farmers living in the country without electricity, using lanterns to see by at night for sewing and reading. We didn’t have appliances like toasters or washing machines, and we could not listen to the radio. Then electricity came like a young Greek god to take away forever the darks ways of our lives. “Suddenly, religiously, with the throwing of a switch, the farmer had electric lights to see by when he milked his cows in the early black winter mornings. The farmer’s family got to listen to the radio and have a toaster and lots of bright lights to sew dresses and read the newspaper by.”
Even in the squalor of rural South Carolina, books — language, words — introduced me to Aristotle, Plato, Faulkner, Twain, science, beauty and art. I even discovered new religions that struck a chord deep in my soul that my fundamentalist fire-and-brimstone evangelical upbringing could never ignite. Like Marcel Proust, the art of language allowed me to get outside of myself and my situation and know other views of the universe.
My reverence for language has served me well. My facility with words has helped me earn a good living as a marketer and seller (or from the perspective of a wordsmith, as a storyteller), enabling me to travel and experience elements of the world members of my immediate family and geographic community never enjoyed. More importantly, it has helped me help others take what they look at every day and elevate it out of the ordinary, to look at things in a new way that enhances and enriches their lives.