{"id":114,"date":"2015-11-30T21:52:54","date_gmt":"2015-12-01T02:52:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/2d823b65bb.nxcli.io\/?p=114"},"modified":"2016-05-25T13:39:26","modified_gmt":"2016-05-25T17:39:26","slug":"a-meditation-upon-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/2015\/11\/a-meditation-upon-things.html","title":{"rendered":"A Meditation upon Things"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Meditation upon Things in which I will briefly speak of the Icelandic Parliament, “creature features” of the 1960’s, Cicero, Duke Ellington, Shakespeare and excessive pedantry.<\/p>\n

The Wall Street Journal<\/em> yesterday had a short piece by James R. Hagerty that raised my ire:\u00a0 “Use More Expressive Words!” Teachers Bark, Beseech, Implore<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 The article describes teachers who have banned certain words from student assignments, like “go,” “said” and “good” because they are considered insufficiently expressive.\u00a0\u00a0 This attitude is not new, of course.\u00a0\u00a0 It certainly existed when I was a young student.\u00a0 I suspect it was first promoted by Peter Mark Roget’s<\/a> publisher, to spur sales.<\/p>\n

Among the condemned is the word “thing.” \u00a0\u00a0 I’d like to make a plea, if one can be entertained at this late date, for full pardon, and show that “thing,” like all words (even big words) can be used in insipid ways by mediocre authors, it is also capable of great delicacy, truly a word to be cherished, not discarded.<\/p>\n

Let’s start with a simple, familiar example, the legendary song, “It don’t mean a thing (if it ain’t got that swing)<\/a>” with music by Duke Ellington, words by Irving Mills.\u00a0\u00a0 How can one write this without using “thing” or “anything”?\u00a0 We could try, “Your music will not have popular or critical acclaim if it lacks rhythmic syncopation in the current vernacular,” but this is hardly an improvement.<\/p>\n

Of course, we don’t need to stray from the King’s English to have a fling with a thing.\u00a0\u00a0 The Bard himself used this forbidden word to good effect, in Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene 1, where Marcellus berates the hoi polloi<\/em> for turning out for Caesar’s triumph: “You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!”<\/p>\n

It is worth mentioning, in passing, that Caesar himself would have been familiar with “thing” in its Latin form, “res”.\u00a0\u00a0 In Latin the term has a dual meaning, “thing” but also “affair” or “deed.”\u00a0\u00a0 So his adopted nephew, Octavian would later have inscribed in bronze his “Res Gestae Divi Augusti<\/a>” (Things Accomplished of the Divine Augustus).\u00a0\u00a0 One of Caesar’s enemies, Marcus Cicero, wrote a book called De Re Publica<\/a><\/em> or “of the public thing”, maybe better translated as “concerning public affairs” or, in the word as it has come down to us, “On the Republic.”<\/p>\n

Some of that flavor lingers on in English today.\u00a0 You might say you cannot accept an invitation because, “I have a thing next week.”\u00a0 The British English (forgive the redundancy) “husting” (what Americans might call a “stump speech”) was literally the “house thing” or a small deliberative assembly.\u00a0 In modern Icelandic (forgive the oxymoron) they have the Althing<\/a> or “all thing”, their legislative general assembly.<\/p>\n

“A thing may be incredible and still be true; sometimes it is incredible because it is true,” as Herman Melville said.\u00a0\u00a0 Well before Melville, and well after, things that go bump in the night have been called…well…things.<\/p>\n

Consider Hamlet, Act I, Scene 1: “What, ha’s this thing appear’d againe to night?”\u00a0\u00a0 And then consider all the horrible horror movies that haunted movie screens (and UHF television channels) in decades long past, such as:<\/p>\n