| April 12, 2001 The Pictures in the Words I considered this report with curiosity, first of all because a BYU professor wrote it. I wondered exactly how I would respond if one of my professors had us working on something like this. But as I read the article I realized what an interesting experience that would be. Obviously the students gained a great deal of insight into Emily Dickinson’s poem simply by examining the way the word was used in the dictionary she used. The students in the study became quite excited about lexicography. Why? What can be exciting about a word? It is more than that, actually, something that the students realized. A word is really a picture. It represents that entire picture; it is simply the way the word is presented that tells us which part of the picture to focus on. What the students were doing was finding out which part Emily Dickinson was focusing on. A different part of the picture could significantly change the meaning of a poem. This is not so different than examining the way a word was used long ago by using the OED dictionary. Or, more close to home for LDS is the use of the Bible Dictionary. Meanings of words change over time, not just the words. Imagine how many different pictures one word can represent! Dickinson does a lot of playing on words. She mixes those pictures, combining similar pictures even when the primary words might not make sense together. Only by examining these words and comparing them with her source were students able to decipher her precise (or almost precise) meaning. If we all wrote this way, I imagine the English lexicon would change quite a bit. Words would come to mean something different to us. A picture can say a thousand words – but turn it around. A word can portray a thousand pictures! Archaic language, otherwise reserved only for poetry, might be used more frequently and begin to be considered common terminology. With every sentence, we would be aware of the imagery being portrayed. This is what the students discovered as they defined Emily’s poems. Every poem was a majestic work of art. Every word was carefully placed. The very origin of the word could represent something in the poem. For students interested in the English the language, it was fascinating to discover what they can do with words. No wonder they became excited. Their professor didn’t know what an opportunity she was providing her students with when she gave them their assignment. Those who took advantage of it learned something that it otherwise might have taken them a lifetime of experience, trial, and error to realize. |