Henry Ford

Wordsmithing

I love words. What’s not to love? There appears to be a never-ending supply of them. If you Google “How many words are in the English language?”, you get answers like this one: “There is no single sensible answer to this question. It’s impossible to count the number of words in a language, because it’s so hard to decide what actually counts as a word.” (oxforddictionaries.com)

Good writers have an almost cosmic-size vocabulary.  Mine’s pretty limited in comparison, especially going by some of the words I’ve been noting down in a couple of books I’ve read recently; words I either loved the beauty of – the way they form in the mouth, or the sound they make – or had never seen before and had to look up the meaning of. Here’s a selection of recent ones: sophistry, alembics, capricious, palpebra, crepitation, eidolon, astrakhan, lachrymose.

But the difference between a good writer and a great writer is not the size of their vocabulary, it’s the way they use words.

Great writers bring words together, extra-ordinary and very ordinary, in ways that enlighten our minds, imagination and our hearts. They create new worlds, challenge us to think differently about our existing one, or simply make us discover parts of ourselves buried deep under layers of years, routine or mass media messages.

They understand the power of grammar.  The subtle, but no less impactful, way it alters meaning or sets the dynamic, tone or pace of a message.

They wield metaphor, alliteration, onomatopoeia and other literary devices taught in high school English like a maestro guides a symphony orchestra.

In W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, for example, the conversations Philip Carey has with the drunk poet Cronshaw are a case in point.  They are the very essence of the book, even the name of the book reflects them.  Maugham is clever, his writing smooth, weaving simple words to guide the reader through complex ideas of philosophy, faith, dogma and politics.  He’s also funny, “You’re not a bad fellow, but you won’t drink.  Sobriety disturbs conversation“.

It’s why I love great books and advocate, in my small way, for a world where we celebrate intelligent writers and voracious readers rather than tolerate dumbed-down, lazy, mediocre writing.

But don’t mistake it for wordsmithing.

I was thanked for wordsmithing a proposal for one of my teams at work recently.  While well-intentioned, this really bothered me.  Wordsmithing carries with it an implication you’re just superficially micromanaging some words. That’s not what I had done.  The author’s ideas were completely buried in awful syntax, dreadful presentation and complete ignorance of grammar. I did not play with some wording, I rescued his ideas, pulling them out of quicksand. His ideas deserved to be rescued.

Francis Bacon once said “knowledge is power”.  It’s seductive in its simplicity and apparent self-evident nature.  But I’ve always thought it was hogwash.

Acquiring knowledge and doing nothing with it is intellectually anaemic. The use of knowledge is power. Until then it is no more powerful than ignorance.

It’s the same with words.  On their own they are nothing more than letters on a page.  But an idea well articulated can be the most powerful thing on the planet.  So here’s to a world where words are combined with intelligence and grace presenting ideas that make our minds leap and hearts soar.

Bed-time stories for world leaders

I have a couple of children, and one of the things I’m distracted by from time to time is a nagging worry about what sort of world they are growing up in; a world of superficiality (Kardashians, “Big Brother”, pop music) and where a large percentage of people didn’t buy or read a book in the last year (some often quoted stats in the interweb suggest up to 80% of US families).

Just consider for a moment some of the stupid/scary/evil/comic people who actually run our little planet – Kim Jong-un ( North Korea); Bashar al-Assad (Syria); Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe); not to mention the likes of Islamic State.  It drives me nuts that they are so driven by myopic ideology that they fail to comprehend something Henry Ford eloquently said, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”  It’s ground hog day; it’s like watching a car accident in slow motion. The comic caricatures of these people are sometimes so accurate it makes you cringe – if you haven’t seen Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Team America: World Police, then you must if only for the depiction of Kim Jong-il.

In Western democracies governments are often hamstrung by self interest and ideological point scoring.  Whatever your political affiliations, what most people I talk to just want is a government that is allowed to get on with delivering for the benefit of the community … if they do a bad job, we’ll let them know at the next election.

We are a world of bad news and pessimism where only disasters (natural and man-made) and mistakes of policy makers are news; if you can find news that isn’t about celebrities’ dating or dieting habits.  Are we really a world on the brink of climate destruction, economic malaise, Ebola, war, a widening gap between rich and poor? Perhaps, but we do seem to be a world of leaders totally incapable of visioning or communicating a future of hope and optimism and thus paralysed from acting gently and with grace.

Arrghh!

But there are moments of stillness when these thoughts are swept away. For example, when my children were young, each evening pessimism was swept away when I sat down with them and read a bed-time story – sometimes chosen by my son, sometimes by my daughter and sometimes by me.   The choice of book was not as important as the ritual itself.  The ritual of getting ready for bed, gathering the family around, staring at the bookshelf, choosing a book – sometimes at random, sometimes with much forethought – sitting on the floor or the bed and then enjoying the story – the flow, the illustrations, the humour, the moral and the pantomime of reading it out loud playing the various characters.

The ritual had a restorative effect.

It provided me the opportunity to bond with my kids, which was so valuable given I work full time and don’t get the chance to spend a lot of time with them during the week.  It gave me insight in to their developing personalities and gave the kids an appreciation for my sense of humour and that adults are allowed, and in my world, encouraged, to be silly.  Aside from this there is so much evidence that reading to children is amongst the single most important things you can do to improve your kids chances for success in school.

Imagine what we could achieve if we could replicate this ritual with our political leaders; if we could read a bed-time story to the presidents, prime ministers, sultans, premiers, chancellors, Taoiseachs, kings, queens and princes of this world.

All this got me thinking one day years ago, and an image popped into my mind; there I was sitting on my daughter’s bed with Vladimir Putin propped up on one of my knees and Barak Obama on the other (an impossibly comic image).   In my mind both men were listening in rapture as I read Hunwick’s Egg by Mem Fox (possibly the greatest illustrated children’s book author of all time).

I have often fantasised about the power of this simple act over the years.  The power to fundamentally sweep away ideology and dogma, if only for a few minutes, so they can share and contemplate a story with a simple universal moral – the power the imagination has to change the way we see the world – in just the same way the ritual of reading a book with my kids restored my faith in an optimistic future.

My kids are independent readers now; which means I’m just one step closer to that redundancy all parents inevitably face.  They no longer need me to read with them.  But I still find that stillness when I pick up a great book at night … sometimes annoyingly sharing passages with my patient wife that have particularly inspired me with their poetic beauty or astonishingly ambitious syntax and sometimes as I quietly absorb a simple, clever story.