⩩ 35
We tend to forget that words can be made. We sleep on the fact that we can not only use words that exist but also words that don’t exist, don’t exist yet, by using them bringing them into being. We have our traffic in the long-settled interior and seldom go to the frontier.
How often do we go a whole day without hearing a newly made word, some piece of slang? Not if we are around children, centers of living and growing language. But it is different for us adults. How often do we read a whole book without being surprised by a still-green word? Not if we are reading a poet, and not if we are reading William James.
James writes that “these speculations must, it seems to me, be classed as over-beliefs, buildings-out performed by the intellect into directions of which feeling originally supplied the hint.” He’s talking about how religious and intellectual beliefs are grounded in feeling, rooted in personal experience, but it is not the content of the sentence per se that is important at the moment.
Rather the coinages themselves: “over-beliefs” and “buildings-out.” How many would trust themselves to this act of spontaneous creation? Again, James says that “one fire kindles another; and without that over-trust in human worth which they show, the rest of us would lie in spiritual stagnancy.” He makes words by using them. I think that such occasions, first uses, are a spiritual gift. They are moments of revelation, opening our eyes and renewing creation in front of us.
Reflect that “first use” or “original usage” — these phrases are actually a paradox, a riddle to unravel, stemming from the inherent tension between “originality” and “use.”
The things we use we use habitually, over and over again, and they are not familiar to us, while new things, really new things can’t be used, because they are unusual, unfamiliar, unknown, out of place. If a thing is really new, you don’t know how it works, what it does or what it means. To use something, on the other hand, is to integrate it in a system, to set it in a chain of consequences, to know its effects and its limits. Using a thing requires having its outline, knowing where it begins and ends. A new thing – we don’t know where it ends.
James’ coinages are not fully new. Language that is fully new is fully unintelligible and we are indifferent to it. It bounces off of us, a foreign tongue passing over our heads.
James’ creations, on the other hand, are words we know put together in a new way. They can be illuminated by comparison with the coinage of another writer who is cited in the pages of Varieties. Talking about a state that is the opposite of taking interest, faith as a described it, the author writes, “the state of anhedonia, if I may coin a new word to pair off with analgesia, has been very little studied, but it exists.” Analgesia and anhedonia comes from the Greek for painlessness and pleasurelessness.
James does not have the dictionary open when he creates. He invents the words he does effortlessly, as if it were nothing. Like a child, spontaneous and uninhibited, he tosses the yoke of convention aside and creates.
Over-beliefs, buildings-out, over-trust: these are humble words, common words, spatially embodied words. That is, they are exactly the kind of words you would expect someone to spontaneously put together. For the same reason they are immediately understood by all and require no formal introduction, no definition. Without warning, they are put to work. They are simply used. And they have this advantage: they are obviously recycled, and so obvious in their approximate and metaphorical quality.
When we see a word made, a first use, we come face-to-face with the original and living in language, standing at the frontier of language. Seeing a word created, we are reminded that all words are created, that all language is slang. Beneath all parts of language, beneath even the oldest and most used words there are original and creative uses. This train of thought runs through my head when I hear a previously unheard-of word and contributes to my surprise and delight. I feel I am coming to my senses.
That’s why I love being surprised with a word. In her book on whales Rebecca Giggs writes, “Animals embiggen our existence; they enliven our sense of mystery.” As it turns out, she didn’t coin “embiggen,” but the word is very young. It’s why we love Melville, Shakespeare and Joyce. They retain into adulthood the verbal plasticity of childhood and start a thousand seeds.
In its essentials inventing a word is, I think, not different from other kinds of invention, whether in technology or music or religion. Look at the life cycle of religion and the tension between the new and the usual and established. The road to widespread adoption and official acceptance is long, many travelers do not make it to the finish, and at the start all are weak and pathetic.
As James writes, “a genuine firsthand religious experience is bound to be a heterodoxy to its witnesses, the prophet appearing as a mere lonely madman.” That’s a pretty good description of most innovators: lonely madmen. They seem so strange and talk such nonsense the powers that be can usually simply ignore them. But if, as sometimes happens, the ideas catch on and attain some modest circulation, then they become labeled as heretical, criminal, dangerous. If the movement is fated to live on, if it grows, if it proves spreads more still, it becomes a respectable, “correct” religion in its own right. From then on its correctness is used to smoother fires on the fringe, to stop all later bubblings of the fountain.
All of our words, just like all of our religions, were new, interesting, dangerous, genius, but we lose the ability to see them in this light because they have been successful and become established, correct, usual. That’s why we need coinages and first uses and not-yet-words, to open our eyes again.
I wonder how much we should trust anyone who does not occasionally startle us by her own mint. Who would you trust more to lead you in a wilderness when your life depended on it: someone who is confined to the paths others have made, or someone who also lays down her own path where she needs one and doesn’t find one? How could someone who didn’t still have this independence be a reliable guide? How could someone who didn’t still have this spontaneity and humility and youth be a choiceworthy friend?
You are reading Footnotes, by Garrett Allen, a series of philosophical-ish short essays. You just read ⩩ 35, the third installment in a chapter on William James’ use of language in Varieties of Religious Experience. Here are some highlights from what came before.
Fruits for life
⩩ 26 Interest
⩩ 24 Fruits for life
Retreat
⩩ 21 Review
⩩ 19 Storytelling
⩩ 17 Retreat
Firsthand
⩩ 16 Revelation
⩩ 14 Yourself
⩩ 12 Learning
⩩10 Habit
⩩ 9 Firsthand
Stagestranger
⩩ 7 Mistake
⩩ 6 Whim
⩩ 3 Speechless
⩩ 1 Headsup
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