Words - Perennial Wisdom with Judith Fetterley

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Words
JUDITH FETTERLEY

NOV 28

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November 28, 2023
Words
When asked to share what I was thankful for this past Thursday, I surprised myself by including “words” in my list. I have been chewing on that choice since turkey time.
In one sense, it is a no-brainer. How could I share the many things I am grateful for – friends, family, partner, good health, the ability to walk – if I did not have words? A rose might smell as sweet by any other name but if I did not have a name I could not share that sweetness with others.
Of course, “plants” appeared on my list. I am grateful for plants in good part because they exist outside of words, signaling a world beyond the human, one that has been around much longer and is more fundamental. They provide a blessed relief from my own self-importance.
Still, I am wordy with my plants. I share with them, as carefully, as I can, just what delights me as I touch, smell, see, listen. I take particular joy in telling them their Latin names. Latin feels good in my mouth and on my lips. It’s a sensory experience, as rich as that of touch or smell. Try it out. Say Cladastris lutea, the Latin name for my Kentucky yellowwood tree, out loud. Of course it is a form of love. Yes, lutea means yellow in Latin, though cladastris goes back to the Greek for fragile branch. But my sensory appreciation of my tree’s Latin name, my sense that some part of knowing it lies in its formal name, goes beyond this translation.
I delight in the English names of plants as well. Consider, for example, Prunella vulgaris. Translated, this means “common little plum.” “Common little plum” tells me nothing about this plant. Compare this to some of the English names of Prunella vulgaris:, self-heal, heal-all, woundwort, heart-of-the-earth, carpenter’s herb, brownwort, blue curls. There’s history here, and usage, and most certainly love.
George Orwell, in a 1944 essay, lamented the disappearance of these common names – “red-hot poker, mind-your-own-business, love-lies-bleeding, London pride” – into names based on Greek and Latin.
“Forget-me-nots are coming more and more be called myosotis,” he complained.
Why complain? Why not relish the profusion of possibilities to express our response to plants?
And, of course, let’s remember that we need the Latin names if we are to be sure we are talking about the same thing. I rarely lose my temper in the garden, but once, when a client of my small perennial design business returned from the nursery with Juniperis squamata ‘Meyeri’ when I had specified Juniperis squamata ‘Blue Chip,’ I lost it.
“What’s the difference?” he said. “Both are blue, and both are junipers.”
“Try five feet, maybe more,” I snapped. “Try fast-growing and weak, as opposed to slow-growing and sturdy. Try leggy liability as opposed to attractive, bushy, and manageable. Try learning the names.”
Coming home from Meeting this Sunday I noticed the message on a local church’s message board:“Thank God for gifts too wonderful for words.”
I was shocked to discover how angry this message made me.
I wanted to shout, “Nothing is too wonderful for words. Such a message is just an excuse for us not to do the hard work of communicating.”
I wanted to shout, “Give thanks for words.”
We have words. It is our job to use them to do the work of describing and sharing wonder. Too often we slip into the laziness of “I love you more than words can say,” or, as per the message board, “This gift is just too wonderful for words.” Nonsense. Do the work. Try to describe the way you love someone; try to share the wonder of a good gift. Isn’t that why we honor great writers – they have done the hard work of articulating wonder?
Of course, I cherish the words of Isaac Penington, an early Quaker, who wrote, “The end of words is to bring men to the knowledge of things beyond what words can utter.” True enough, but a knowledge decidedly rare, a wonder if you can get there but most of us don’t.
I prefer to invoke the ancient Chinese saying, “The beginning of knowledge is knowing things by their right names.”
Perhaps my love of words began with my father, an inveterate punster, a creative wordsmith, a passionate puzzler. Coming home from work, he would immediately lie down on the couch with a crossword puzzle.
Crossword puzzles are for me, as perhaps they were for my dad, a form of meditation. I work them to clear my mind, settle my soul, relax my body.
Working a puzzle, however, I am surrounded by love objects that excite me and break the meditative state. I keep a list of words I encounter in puzzles that intrigue me and delight my palate. Perhaps at some point they may do some work for me as I try to express the wonder I experience in the garden.
I get discouraged, though. Rejections abound and years accumulate. I am writing this on my 85th birthday and I wonder how long I can or should keep playing with words. Couldn’t my remaining time be better spent in work of more immediate benefit to others?
Perhaps I was still engaging with a quote from Toni Morrison when I jotted down “words” on the piece of orange paper my granddaughter handed to me as we paused between dinner and dessert to express thanks. I had encountered the quote two days earlier on a visit to the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture.
“It is the thing that black people love so much – the saying of words, holding them on the tongue, experimenting with them, playing with them. It is a love, a passion. The worst of all possible things that could happen would be to lose that language.”
She did the work. Who am I to stop trying?

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