Words
The only known surviving recording of
Virginia Woolf's voice.
It is part of a BBC radio broadcast from April 29th, 1937. The talk was
called "Craftsmanship" and was part of a series entitled "Words Fail
Me".
The text was published as an essay in "The Death of the Moth and Other
Essays" (1942).
Transcript:
…Words, English words, are full of echoes, of
memories, of associations. They have been out and about, on people's
lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many
centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them
today – that they are stored with other meanings, with other memories,
and they have contracted so many famous marriages in the past. The
splendid word "incarnadine," for example – who can use that without
remembering "multitudinous seas"? In the old days, of course, when
English was a new language, writers could invent new words and use them.
Nowadays it is easy enough to invent new words – they spring to the
lips whenever we see a new sight or feel a new sensation – but we cannot
use them because the English language is old. You cannot use a brand
new word in an old language because of the very obvious yet always
mysterious fact that a word is not a single and separate entity, but
part of other words. Indeed it is not a word until it is part of a
sentence. Words belong to each other, although, of course, only a great
poet knows that the word "incarnadine" belongs to "multitudinous seas."
To combine new words with old words is fatal to the constitution of the
sentence. In order to use new words properly you would have to invent a
whole new language; and that, though no doubt we shall come to it, is
not at the moment our business. Our business is to see what we can do
with the old English language as it is. How can we combine the old words
in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that
they tell the truth? That is the question.
And the person
who could answer that question would deserve whatever crown of glory the
world has to offer. Think what it would mean if you could teach, or if
you could learn the art of writing. Why, every book, every newspaper
you'd pick up, would tell the truth, or create beauty. But there is, it
would appear, some obstacle in the way, some hindrance to the teaching
of words. For though at this moment at least a hundred professors are
lecturing on the literature of the past, at least a thousand critics are
reviewing the literature of the present, and hundreds upon hundreds of
young men and women are passing examinations in English literature with
the utmost credit, still – do we write better, do we read better than we
read and wrote four hundred years ago when we were un-lectured,
un-criticized, untaught? Is our modern Georgian literature a patch on
the Elizabethan? Well, where then are we to lay the blame? Not on our
professors; not on our reviewers; not on our writers; but on words. It
is words that are to blame. They are the wildest, freest, most
irresponsible, most un-teachable of all things. Of course, you can catch
them and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in
dictionaries. But words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the
mind. If you want proof of this, consider how often in moments of
emotion when we most need words we find none. Yet there is the
dictionary; there at our disposal are some half-a-million words all in
alphabetical order. But can we use them? No, because words do not live
in dictionaries, they live in the mind. Look once more at the
dictionary. There beyond a doubt lie plays more splendid than Antony and
Cleopatra; poems lovelier than the Ode to a Nightingale; novels beside
which Pride and Prejudice or David Copperfield are the crude bunglings
of amateurs. It is only a question of finding the right words and
putting them in the right order. But we cannot do it because they do not
live in dictionaries; they live in the mind. And how do they live in
the mind? Variously and strangely, much as human beings live, ranging
hither and thither, falling in love, and mating together. It is true
that they are much less bound by ceremony and convention than we are.
Royal words mate with commoners. English words marry French words,
German words, Indian words, Negro words, if they have a fancy. Indeed,
the less we enquire into the past of our dear Mother English the better
it will be for that lady's reputation. For she has gone a-roving,
a-roving fair maid.
Thus to lay down any laws for such
irreclaimable vagabonds is worse than useless. A few trifling rules of
grammar and spelling is all the constraint we can put on them. All we
can say about them, as we peer at them over the edge of that deep, dark
and only fitfully illuminated cavern in which they live – the mind – all
we can say about them is that they seem to like people to think before
they use them, and to feel before they use them, but to think and feel
not about them, but about something different. They are highly
sensitive, easily made self-conscious. They do not like to have their
purity or their impurity discussed. If you start a Society for Pure
English, they will show their resentment by starting another for impure
English – hence the unnatural violence of much modern speech; it is a
protest against the puritans. They are highly democratic, too; they
believe that one word is as good as another; uneducated words are as
good as educated words, uncultivated words as good as cultivated words,
there are no ranks or titles in their society. Nor do they like being
lifted out on the point of a pen and examined separately. They hang
together, in sentences, paragraphs, sometimes for whole pages at a time.
They hate being useful; they hate making money; they hate being
lectured about in public. In short, they hate anything that stamps them
with one meaning or confines them to one attitude, for it is their
nature to change.
Perhaps that is their most striking
peculiarity – their need of change. It is because the truth they try to
catch is many-sided, and they convey it by being many-sided, flashing
first this way, then that. Thus they mean one thing to one person,
another thing to another person; they are unintelligible to one
generation, plain as a pikestaff to the next. And it is because of this
complexity, this power to mean different things to different people,
that they survive. Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet,
novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their
liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning, the
meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass
the examination…
