The Lexicographer's Rules

"It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that storybooks had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they came from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with themÑwith the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them."

—New York Times. Writer Eudora Welty died Monday at age 92. "It took Latin to thrust me into a bona fide alliance with words in their true meaning. Learning Latin (once I was free of Caesar) fed my love for words upon words, words in continuation and modification, and the beautiful, sober accretion of a sentence. I could see the achieved sentence finally standing there, as real, intact and built to stay as the Mississippi State Capitol at the top of my street, where I could walk through it on my way to school and hear underfoot the echo of its marble floor and over me the bell of its rotunda."'

Name:

Email:

Location:

URL:

Remember my personal information

Notify me of follow-up comments?