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I won’t have them exposed to the epidemic of onomatopeia, ravished by aneamic pernicious all-iteration germs. Snuffed out by Punditsters. Bitten by churlish word-lice. Punned over cloddishly by Pierglass Ploughboys. I simply can’t stand to see them honorificabilitainilatin-type-ized into humdrum bores. I prefer them exactly as they are, happy, hedonistic thoughtless drumhums.

And yet somehow I want words to be made free. I only shudder at the thought of their being made free with.

The right of the writer to have his will with words is obvious. Words have always been defenceless and never wholly virginal. But I fear rotting, tumorish bad words may be slipped in (again, I don’t mean curt, cute four-letter classics but fourteen-legged lecherridinous, centipedicular, ampapfibsimian enchondromatas) among my butter-cup-eyed innocents.

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In a word — — Oh, my word.

I have never felt cynical about the individual and collective helplessness of all m o t s. In my youth, ironing things out for myself I wrote ironicall y (following Carl Van Vechten’s advice that the word irony should be carefully underlined):

Always my soft heart has beat with adulation
For people who edit and criticize writing
Worthy folk, going about wiping the noses of croupy phrases;
Tucking exclamation points into strange beds
Picking moth webs out of warm, fur-bearing sentences
And on top of that splitting cords of infinitives
To get up an appetite for a book review
I hold my breath when I come into the presence of these people
I feel highly humble

I’m still holding my breath and being humiliated; fearing what will happen when writers are let looser.

I’m afraid I’ll lose my life-long companions, my play-mots of the dark glowering pause that is known as the laboratory hour; I fear something untoward will behap them:

I play with words
Tossing in the air an armful, as a child reveling in autumn leaves
Loving the crisp rustle as they cascade about my ears

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Again picking them up as wet pebbles, aglisten on a cool sea beach
Making patterns of them — pictures — filling spaces with words as artists do with paints
I pet and fondle a sentimental word until it purrs and clash with a rough one till it growls
I am as human with words as I am with you
Never exploiting them
Never giving them an inch of advantage over me
I know words
And they seek me out
We are together
Important, both of us
And entirely useless
Unless you need the thing we give.

I repeat (having been set the example by our recentest writers) that I love every lovable Dublintender word James Joyce ever wrote and I gurgle with delight in the joyous jugfuls of Gertrude Stein (As a Wife Has a Cow — a Love Story, is a brimming pitcherful title). I know words can do anything, become anything, all I hold out for is more and better reading of the words we’ve got. With more modern methods of reading, words would take care of themselves, the fittest would survive and bear fruity normal new ones, with velvety fuzz covering the soft spots in their heads and collicy didy smiles lighting up their heavenly blue faces.

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Source:  OpenStax, The readies. OpenStax CNX. Aug 21, 2009 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col10962/1.1
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