By Jean Ponzi
Word Families
I’m a Word Nerd by nature. Being also an ecological educator by trade and vocation – and Ecology studies life through relational lenses – I love to go exploring relationships among words.
My curiosity gets jazzed and piqued by contemplating who’s etymologically related to whom, how their connections shape culture among us human speakers, and what these kinds of verbo-geneo-logical bits might contribute to our species as we persist, insist, resist in consistent (or sporadic) Growth & Change.
For example, consider the Spects. From the Latin specere (to look) arises a host of observant kin: inspect (look into closely, examine), respect (look more deeply, which begat regard), perspective (look through, as a mode of understanding), circumspect (any of this in a round-about way), spectacle (something to see here, folks!), and spectator (one who watches it happen, also their low-heeled style of shoes).
As a practice, this personal study has a lot of Looking Up, Writing Down and Thinking About.
Essential tools include:
- Dictionary of Word Origins (Thank you, Dr. Bill Bugs Russell, MA, MFA, DC, for one of the most useful Earth Day presents ever!)
- Science Dictionary
- Roget’s Thesaurus
- Synonym Finder (the Oxford Unabridged for synonymity)
- Scholastic Rhyming Dictionary (Thank you, dear math teacher friend Mz. Friz, whose gifted joy I so admire in play with numbers and words. Twenty-six letters I get, clear as clock-es, but them ten digits my poor brain flummoxes.)
- Webster’s New Collegiate, of course.
Recording my wordplay findings needs the trusty notebook and pen. Electrons are great when paragraphs get going, but word-by-word research calls for Hand, Eye, Brain, Spiral-Bound and the classic BIC 4-Color, now available with gel ink. It is THE tool for a person whose penmanship out-scribbles any of her doctors. Switching colors on the page for content sections helpsme decipher what the heck I meant there, from the moment after I wrote it.
Notebook ready? Join me on the quest.
The Dicts and the Ducts are distinct word clans with relations rooted deep in human times. I feel a special kinship here, because they deal with Speaking and Leading. There’s diction (how you say it), predict (say in anticipation, before it occurs), and contradict (say in opposition to). Also deduce (be the first to figure it out), reduce (leader of those Green Three R’s) and educate, one of my all-time faves, who leads us out of ignorance and opens minds and hearts to becoming (hopefully) wiser guys. And gals, and they and them. Words will work for us all!
Some words get to mix it up. Prefixes and suffixes are like hats and shoes, they change word appearance and support different functions without altering a word’s central character. Ones everyone knows are dis- (separate), con- (with), sub- (under) contra (against), inter (between), and intra (within). Fun ones who function after words are -ing (nudges noun-thing, report, into verb-action, reporting), -less (takes away or obscures, as smoke and smokeless), and -able, the all-out you-can do, like measurable tracks the progress of what you’re striving to assess.
Word relations! Changes over time shape how we speak, and that shapes How We Is — to put it present-ly.
To be clear, my word rambles are hedged inside the English word garden. It’s my only lingo fluency, though I can hold my own conversing in Plant Latin, Astrology, and more than a few Music vernaculars. In today’s global world, English-only makes me a dinosaur. But it’s my word home, my focus.
I feel humbled and inspired by indigenous folks, studying to keep their languages alive, while elder native speakers bravely hold and share precious sounds and sense that, in turn, hold spirit for their culture.
Coming from a word-world patriarchally forged by the uber-colonizing Roman Empire and further roughed in by Germanic tribes, how would it be to talk in tones free of dominance?
I welcome words who sing out kind ideas, and their families, to speak through me.
Jean Ponzi is a strong local voice for Earth, through her longtime work from Missouri Botanical Garden and enviro-conversations on her KDHX show Earthworms.