Language

Wyrd

Fate, event

Modern English “weird”

Language is a playful thing. Words are decorated with connotations hanging from their branches, each one arranged differently by each speaker, who covers their Christmas tree, or Yggdrassil of language, with the pepperings of what they know and have seen and to which they have borne witness.

Words are historically rich: they have their own intricate histories, etymologies, which also express a variety of diverse and complex – and often interpenetrating – meanings.

Words are phonetically beautiful: they make sounds that weave into each other, which create songs and rhymes and alliteration and a music particular to themselves which creates a world.

Words are imaginative and brimming with imagery: the worlds they create through connotation and history and sound form a tapestry – a so often abused metaphor; perhaps even a cliché – which is made up of these parts and which also mixes them together, creates a blend of colour and sound and language, fundamental and primal and beautiful, which roars and smokes and steams red and bright like fire, like humanity’s first tool: for of all our tools, of all our customs and cultures and symbols, words are the finest. They shape our lives, animated and vigorous and deeply emotional, and breathe into us, with the care and sensibility of a stern creator, the breath of life.