Sunday 28 December 2014

Munificence.

Language is the handmaiden of thought, it is the 'minds' only route out to communicate, other than writing what thoughts have been formed and need to be expressed.
Different nationalities each have their own language and in many ways the languages speaks volumes about the people who use it.
French has always appeared to me as a language which propels the speaker into a statement but midway through enunciating the statement there is always a pause as if at the last moment the speaker wishes to have one final look at what he is saying before committing himself. The pause is mid sentence and then there's a rush to get the rest of the words out, it's as if they have become superfluous to the point made at the juncture of the pause.
Italian is combative, its fiery and emotional a torrent of words to match the Latin temperament, there seems to be an argument but it's no more than a rhetorical flourish.
German is definitive and efficient it has a job to do, each word is precise only the specific gender test causes the beginner a problem.
English is rich in double meaning it is a diplomats language useful when he wants to disguise what he is really saying, subtle in its blend of locality, weighty when in the hands of Shakespeare where a few words ring out a deep and subtle truth, each word or phrase rings around inside the head like the resonance of a bell.
I'm in Dylan Thomas country again, Swansea and the house where he lived and wrote in Laugharne, jutting out looking to the sea, a scene of occasional wild external torment to match his inner raging. He was a man of genius built on deep flaws, emotionally unstable, loving someone who couldn't reciprocate, being loved by another to destruction but who he would not acknowledge, he fell to the bottle to bolster the iniquity.
His language has the clarity of someone who has been into everyone's head, read all their secrets and as he staggers down the cobbled, pitch black, bible black street he hears their gossip, their oaths, their revenge plotted. 
For young people to be exposed to the poetic cadence, an unfurling story about real people, living real lives and pitched to their young ears by a master of delivery, Richard Burton. I would hasten a guess that it would awaken in the young mind some sort of understanding about the depths of language and it's communicative ability.
Munificence is as close to it as I can get. A word, like so many which was lodged in my mind at some stage down the years virtually unknown and yet it came peeping out like a naughty child as I wrote the sentence. Not through dint of trying but through dint of reading. Words are like diamonds in the alluvial sediment waiting their turn to be plucked out and used to define a thought which, if you remember is where we came in !!
 

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