Commander of Words

I HAVE a profound admiration for those masters of language who wave a baton and are instantly rewarded by attention from the rank and file of words. They possess that remarkable gift — command over a vocabulary. They are generals by divine right, and at their ‘Forward march! Column left! About face!’ the boldest word in the dictionary falls submissively into position. They have but to give orders, and neat lines of words parade beautifully across innumerable pages, paragraph following paragraph more perfectly than ever regiment follows regiment. ‘At ease!’—and the nonchalance of an informal essay delights your eye. ‘Shoulder arms!’ — a thesis faces you, clear and grave. ‘Aim! Fire!’ — and down go your prejudices under an attacking brief. Every word is always ready for inspection, uniformed and tidy, each in its place and as erect as the straightest lieutenant eager for promotion.

My vocabulary is the very antithesis of this. Perhaps because I have not the mind of a general, or even of a corporal, it is scarcely under my control at all. Words will not pay me the respect and obedience I ask. They regard the dictionary as a ballroom and life as a festival; they dance their way and hardly hear me as I call. They are too charming for me to lose temper with them, their politeness being exceeded only by their caprice; and combined beauty and temperament have ever proved irresistibly fascinating.

There are feminine words, gracious, graceful, that move softly, wearing deep-colored garments with a rich embroidery of connotation. Some have feline eyes, it is true, and carry a keen double meaning, like a dagger hidden in a garter. Pompous powdered Latinates bow in magnificent dignity, hand on heart; though, indeed, their bows are granted to only a few. Dark Italian ladies smile subtly into the eyes of blond Scandinavians. An occasional ouveau-Riche, clad in a foreign accent, rustles her gaudy silk to attract attention. Ragamuffins who have crept in through the back doors whirl their vivid tatters of slang in your face. Flirtatious foreigners stand about in little phrases, ogling the young suffixes and prefixes. Here and there is a word of exotic parentage, whose clever disguise in native English is betrayed only by the loss of a letter. Curious masked creatures steal about like smoke; they are social ghosts, outworn slang and diction grown obsolete.

And every word among them is a very Janus. Their moods are as shifting as the colors in an opal, and they slip from meaning to meaning as a girl changes her dress. ‘Fast’ is now lithe, slim, faery; now meagre and wrinkled. ‘ Wind ’ is now a flying-garmented being with swift sweet breath; now, in a somersault, it is jocund, with a thin painted face. ‘Fall ’ is a little harlot of a word, unfaithful to any one meaning but favoring many, indiscriminately and coquettishly noun one moment, verb the next. They hail you as playfellow-well-met from one corner; as quickly as you can turn around, they send a roguish challenge from another corner, and you hardly know them the same. They are as brisk and heedless as lambs in a spring meadow, or children at hide-and-seek in a hayloft.

Were they not so lovable in their disobedience, I should renounce their company forever, confine myself to a few Anglo-Saxon dependables, short and stolid, and leave my charmingly wanton vocabulary to mope without me. I should bury a thousand potential poems in the dusty pages of the dictionary, where they could never be more than inarticulated words, never hand-joined to the beauty of a Whole. But the moment that I dream of such a thing, an adorable throng comes dancing into my mind: the soft sound of one, as it whirls on its pointed toes; the dark-browed loveliness of another; the tiny perfection of this elfish creature, the slim posturing of that, recall me to the impossibility of abjuration. After all, if I have no power to force these light-footed crowds to my will, shall I deprive myself of the pleasure that comes from playing with them? Because my mind is not military, and cannot order my vocabulary to parade as I wish over the paper where it frolics, gleeful, shall I throw away the pen that marks me master? Shall I become ungracious, resort to sullenness, and tie down my speech to monosyllables, because I am not ruler, but slave, to the sparkling beauty of words?

&c.

To me, &c. has always possessed a certain indefinable charm, due, I suppose, to its plastic vagueness and to its potential source of haunting mystery and beguiling fancy. When, as a child, I glibly learned to ‘say my letters,’ each individual repetition would have been incomplete and unclimactic had I failed to end with &c. There is really something fascinating in that classic measure — X, Y, Z, &c. Sometimes I said it all slowly and solemnly and coalescingly, and it reverberated with a rhythmic andante movement; at other times, it seemed more fitting to give it in staccato effects, and then &c. snapped back like the crack of the ringmaster’s whip.

The sign and its sound somehow suggested a long, long train of letters that some day might come into consciousness, and be as specific and tangible as those which stood out in substantial reality on my square red blocks.

It was only a little later in my development that I began to invent names for these strange unborn children of my orthographic fancy. A few of those christened characters I still recall — vem, sed, rit, ras, lac, and umber. I remember, too, that one afternoon, condemned by parental decree to the solitude of my bedroom, where I was to expiate my crime, — some childish prank of which my little sister was the victim, and informer! — I spent a pleasant rather than a punitive hour in a restless endeavor to give vem and sed and rit a satisfactory visible creation. The attempt proved difficult — so difficult that when I later read of the feat of Cadmus, that master inventor from Phoenicia, I had an exalted idea of the range of his adventurous genius.

When in my preparatory school, I began my study of Greek, I felt deeply humiliated that, with all my fanciful playing with alphabetic symbols, I had never once had the ingenuity to create anything half as sonorous and soulsatisfying as alpha, beta, gamma, delta, &c. Yet I am deeply grateful to the beginning I made — the genesis of my creative instinct for the lore of &c.; it has stimulated my fancy in labyrinthine ways other than alphabetic.

As a youngster in school, I was extremely ambitious to win athletic honors, and impatiently longed for the time when I could ‘make the team. One early spring day, as I furtively scanned the bulletin board where the names of the baseball nine were posted, I completed the reading of the list with a feeling of grim despair, for my name, alas! did not appear.

But evidently the captain’s final list was not quite complete in his own mind, for, at the end, he had vaguely expressed his indecision by writing the sign, &c. My despair gradually gave way to a glowing hope, as I ran over in my mind the names of those whom that mystery-laden symbol might ultimately include — Ralston, Denny, Jones, Dalrymple, Dalton, Cummings, and — possibly — myself. It was a dangerous flight of fancy, I knew; and later, I found that the fate of Icarus was mine. But there were compensations — the ambitious journey had been full of joyous, breath-taking thrills.

Afterward, as I came across lists of names of those who had attained eminence in lines of accomplishment in which I was interested, I found it pleasant to write my own &c.’s.

The field of politics was, in my early manhood, most alluring. I was active in the Debating Club; I read pages and pages of history, and columns on columns of the Congressional Record, and I found infinite delight in the World’s Almanac. As I read down the lists of Congressmen representing the districts in my native state, I let my fancy play its habitual whim and add that strange connotative symbol &c. I would fill up the list with the names of those of my mates whose interest in local elections and whose skill in public speaking and debate seemed then the fair prelude to the national caucuses and forums at Washington. Here Billings at least would surely go; and when his experience in the House had fitted him for that field of larger usefulness in the United States Senate, what more eminently logical than that I should be his brilliant successor as the Representative from the Second Congressional District! But, somehow, Fate has played her cards a bit differently: Billings was once an alderman, I believe, and is now successfully running a small garage in my native town. I was defeated at the last election in my candidacy for the School Board — the only time I ever ran for public office.

In a literary way the &c. of previous years has yielded a somewhat fuller fruitage. At least, my royalties have been more liberal than Wordsworth’s, for they have paid for my shoestrings, and my golf-balls as well. But the other day, when a new history of American literature came from the press, I noted in the closing chapter the names of many of my contemporaries, — many portraits of my literary friends, indeed, — yet neither in the index of authors, nor among these portraits, did I find my own name listed. And there is n’t any &c. printed in that index; this editor was evidently surer of his judgment than was my generous athletic captain of an earlier day. Shall I write down &c. in my own copy of that text, and repeat the optimistic fantasy that we always may be what we might have been? I think I’ll hardly allow myself to be thus beguiled. Still, I shall not lose interest in the pattern which the fates are diligently weaving.

For to-night, while I am writing, I find it interesting to pause and picture the present, busy happenings and the happenings that are to be. The &c.’s of a thousand varied lists are emerging from their obscurities, and are finding, or seeking, or being assigned, their places in the Great Design.

The lists of earth — lists of officials, boards of directors, army rosters, eligible voters, criminals, telephone subscribers, poor debtors, old maids, benedicts — these and a thousand more, ever and ever lengthening! The lines will stretch out till the Crack of Doom, and will always be intent on making the abstract &c.’s more and more concrete.

And finally comes the In Memoriam list, where each of us is to be inevitably enrolled. But even to this we do not write Finis; instead, we append our mysterious sign, suggesting to some merely the Great Perhaps, but symbolizing to most of us registry as a permanent citizen in the Celestial City of our dreams.