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...shapes, colors, and textures; swished them around in my mouth; lingered over their many tastes; let their juices run down my chin. During my adventures as fly-by-the-roof-of-the-mouth, user-friendly wizard of idiom, I have met thousands of other wordaholics, logolepts, lexicomaniacs, and verbivores, folks who also eat their words. You are almost certainly a verbivore, or you wouldn't be reading this thirtieth-anniversary issue of VERBATIM.
What is there about words that makes a language person love them so? The answers are probably as varied as the number of verbivores themselves. There are as many reasons to love words as there are people who love them. How do we love thee, language? Let us count the ways.
Some word people are intrigued by the birth and life of words. They become enthusiastic, ebullient, and enchanted when they discover that enthusiastic literally means 'possessed by a god,' ebullient 'boiling over, spouting out,' and enchanted 'singing a magic song.' They are rendered starry-eyed by the insight that disaster (dis-aster) literally means "ill-starred" and intoxicated by the information that intoxicated has poison in its heart. They love the fact that amateur is cobbled from the very first verb that all students of Latin learn--amo: 'I love.' The poet William Cowper once wrote of:
philologists who trace A panting syllable through time and space, Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's ark.
Wordsters of etymological persuasion love to track down the origins of phrases. Take "sitting in the catbird seat." The expression was popularized by Red Barber, the colorful broadcaster for the Brooklyn Dodgers, who also spread the likes of "tearing up the pea patch" and rhubarb, used to mean 'an argument on a baseball diamond.' The Mississippi-born Barber once explained that "sitting in the catbird seat" was a Southern expression for which he had literally paid.
In a stud poker game Barber continually bluffed with a...
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