Becoming A Word Magpie

Photo by Antony Hyson Seltran on Unsplash

Like many, my first word was “ba”—or Dad, in Vietnamese—uttered in a rambling patter song that, perhaps, echoed the urgency of longing. I wish I could remember the first English word I ever spoke. Probably, it was something like “hello” or “please,” or one of the many other building blocks en route to social courtesy. In that way, a simple word can ease open a new story.

Science tells us that after the age of one, children will typically be able to understand about 50 words; four short years later, at the age of five, those same kids can understand up to 10,000 words. This leap only accelerates with every passing year, though the progress does stall into adulthood, with an average twenty-year-old only amassing 42,000 words. With a 79% rate in U.S. literacy as of 2024, I can only imagine a collapse of the word acquisition curve in years to come.

Once, after a speech at a book festival, a participant approached me and said, “You love words.” I began to agree, but she cut in and said, “No, I mean, you really love words.” And that’s true. My logophilia isn’t a passing fancy; at times, it skirts the edge of propriety. If I encounter a word I haven’t heard, I’m compelled to sit with that word for minutes at a time, turning it over and over on my tongue the way one might roll a sweet morsel in the mouth. I want to taste it, to consume it and make it mine. I doodle it in my notebook like a lover’s name. If I’ve searched too long and fruitlessly for the correct word, I am glum and remote. I recognize in myself an avariciousness about language that is, maybe, rooted in an erstwhile dearth of it.

When I entered kindergarten, I knew only a handful of English words. I didn’t understand how to tell the teachers that I was to ride on the school bus at the end of the day, resulting in a frenzied pickup from my poor mother, who spoke about the same amount of English as me. For months, I was marooned into myself, a castaway without a means of communicating to the outside world of the classroom. My thoughts and desires were stagnant; I moldered in loneliness. And then, miraculously, I began to reach for a new word, and another, juggling each in my mind until I discovered that their mellifluous arrangement could build a door for me to walk through. As I was learning to speak English, I concurrently learned to read and write in English, so the three are interconnected for me, pillars of logic and emotion. Without them, I am deserted again on the island, adrift in incomprehension.

These days I collect words like a magpie, running to my dictionary app each time I encounter a word I don’t understand. I want to dissect its definition like a specimen on a lab table, teasing apart the etymology and precise cultural connotation until I can confidently use that word in my own life. In my most joyful moments, I can hear the harmony of words strung together with lift and rhythm. Sometimes, I see words as tiny animals crawling on the page, each with its specific character and motivation. An unexpected pun can spin me on my axis of delight for hours. Portmanteaus jog my pulse. And when I misplace the meaning of a word, I feel despair and self-betrayal, as if I’ve lost a precious object. Words are more alive to me than many other things I have encountered.

If you’re reading this newsletter, I suspect that you also nurse a keen affection for language and its manifold pleasures. It’s labyrinthine, full of hidden corridors we might explore, mental traps we must avoid. I think of language—that ancient art of expression—as a sort of treasure hunt. You rifle through the not-quites until you land upon that word or phrase that is the just-right. That resulting satisfaction is an exultant triumph of aptitude over its dolorous opposite, helplessness. Each time I add a new word to my ever-expanding satchel, I find myself pulled into the light of understanding, as I was so many years ago in that tiny kindergarten classroom that housed a rotating spectrum of curious, word-hungry minds.

Just for fun, here are a handful of magpie-gatherings I’ve jotted down from the last weeks of reading*:

• Susurration: a murmur, or a whispering sound

• Shambolic: obviously disorganized or confused

• Psychopomp: a conductor of souls to the afterworld

• Pellucid: reflecting light evenly from all surfaces; easy to understand

• Turbid**: deficient in clarity; characterized by or producing obscurity

• Borborygmus: intestinal rumbling

• Frangible: readily or easily broken

* Definitions from Merriam-Webster.

** Frustratingly, I’ve looked this word up many times over and can’t seem to cement its meaning into my personal lexicon.

What words have given you pause or delight? Let’s share them with each other. Language is rich and plentiful. In a time of scarcity in good and true things, we can all revel in the abundance of words.