Praise Song for the Day: In Praise of Building Blocks // A Word A Day
Monday, February 1, 2021
What are words worth? That was a pun that my freshmen year roommates made every time we were in the midst of cranking out a major essay. Between the six of us, it meant we were producing thousands of words each week. Certainly “what are words worth” was a corny way to get us out of park and into drive. Plus, our silliness never got old. Back then, we came from different backgrounds, parts of the country, and had various ideas about words and what they meant. One of my roommates who hailed from a boarding school in Northern California thought that words were puzzles to be pulled apart and pieced back together. The era before word processors had him cutting and pasting his essays, moving texts around with scissors, tape, and glue. I loved standing in the doorway of his bedroom, watching him cross things out, writing in phrases, and circling and highlighting before typing the whole damned thing over again. Another roommate from Manhattan who graduated from one of the name-brand boarding schools in New Hampshire would talk our ears off, get down to work around 1:00 a.m., all while blasting the group Chicago’s “25 or 6 to 4,” tap-tap-tap-tapping away until the break of dawn. While another roommate got stuff done so far in advance that he was often in bed every night before 9:30 p.m.
Truth be told, I had no method going into college. I learned to write and to think and to refine by watching them closely. All of the major papers I wrote in my big public high school were completed by hand a night or two before they were due. When I had a “term paper” to produce, my mother who took typing in high school deciphered my chicken-scratch note cards laid all over my bedroom as I stood by at her elbow, watching Johnny Carson bid good night to his final guests from his desk. These words got me into and through Yale.
Yet through it all, my roomies and I had our own way of doing things taught to them by their English teachers, history teachers, or parents even. Learning to write had everything to do with learning to read. And, learning to read, had everything to do with acquiring a love of language and the individual words that occupied our thinking and the rest of our lives.
To be sure, words are worth a lot. Not just the silly pun about the famous English poet Wordsworth, but what we parse over words’ heft, weight, shape, and power. What words mean and how they connect are the most powerful tools in any person’s writing kit. More than reading, more than speaking, and more than writing, the understanding of what particular words mean powers thought. In fact, new brain research bears this out. Reading — and as a matter of course thinking and writing — come from recognizing individual words, how to use them correctly, and what they mean in context. In other words, the more words you see, hear, and use, the better at reading you become.
This praise song focuses squarely on the work of a man named Anu Garg who has put together an impressive website where he highlights five words each weekday to share with his readers. The website is called A Word A Day, or A.W.A.D. I have been a subscriber for over twenty years and have found A.W.A.D. to be like my roommates in college. Each teaches me about how words work and, in some ways, their power. The beautiful thing about Anu Garg’s work is that you can share in his magnificent way of looking at the world through words. To get a subscription to A.W.A.D., go: HERE.
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Like a daily gratitude practice, Praise Song for the Day will be a way of appreciating what we know we know in a different and perhaps even profoundly deeper way. This column takes its name from a poem of the same title by Elizabeth Alexander called “Praise Song for the Day” delivered twelve years ago at the Inauguration of the 44th President of the United States. Clap back if you dig the piece.
