Principle and Principal Statements

Words, words, words. The life stuff of my being. Just as in my youth, I would rather read than experience, I am more attached to writing than talking. Getting to sculpt the words, to fashion a thought out of syllables. It was said of Oscar Wilde that he spoke as if he had drafted and crafted the entire conversation well in advance. I remember reading that statement in a dusty college library and it has found residence in me ever since. Another, allied observation said something to the effect that one's vocabulary had three tiers: speaking, writing, and reading, with ~1000, ~5000, and ~10,000 members respectively. I am trying to level word edifice by using the full membership at each phase. It became conscious as well as a game when writing my thesis; my advisor noticed a page tacked up over my desk with a list of words, in many inks and from a wide variety of pens, some crossed out, some untouched and some un-crossed out. Words like amanuensis, sedulous, and our title, inchoate. Curious, but at the same time, wisely apprehensive, he asked about the list. I replied that they were words that I liked and as I worked them into the thesis, I crossed them out. As the thesis was on seismology and how to distinguish earthquakes from explosions, these were not words he expected to read, much less see. He declared that just as I was dedicated to using these words, he too was dedicated to extirpating them (not his exact word, mind you). So the game began, and played out through many drafts that spring and summer of 1977. While some were indeed found and removed, others remained. Not because they went undetected, but because I had inserted them into contexts where there really was no other choice but to eliminate the paragraph and section. Wittgenstein, Derrida and Foucault notwithstanding, words do have exact meanings, and meanings too can be refined and imposed to further understanding. If you take the trouble. And that is what I will be attempting. It is yours to catch me when I try to fake it.