Lexicon

The English language is full of idiosyncrasies. Why the there, their, and they’re? Why do c and s sometime have the same sound and sometimes not? How do poop, shit, and feces all mean the same thing, but have three entirely different connotations? The answer may never be entirely clear, but in a way that’s the beauty of English. I’ve always loved language and its power. The power it has to move, to shock, to express, to relay, to convey, to make change. How cursive, print, and American Sign Language can all have the same alphabet, but look entirely different. English is an art. My Spanish professor once told our class that he loves English because it is one of the most creative languages he has ever encountered. I thought he was crazy at the time, knowing how ridiculous and unclear the rules of the English language can be, but looking back on my career in English, I think he may be right.

As a lot of kids do, I used to dumb myself down in school to interact with the other kids. It’s apparently cool not to care. Senior year, however, something changed in me and I decided to start using the pile of vocabulary that had been gathering dust in the back corner of my mind. I began incorporating scholarly vocabulary into my every day life and you know what? It felt good. I finally understood what my father had been getting at when he encouraged me to use “50 cent words,” which turned into a little game where he would score my integration of more uncommon and intellectual words into every day sentences. I now use 50 cent words as often as I get the chance.

I think the most powerful thing about language, the reason I dedicated my college career to studying the English language, is its profound ability to impart some of the most breathtaking beauty. Language has an amazing ability to engage all of the human senses with a mere syntactical feat or an elliptical that can say all at once, “this sentence is over, but this is not all.” Phrases can induce tears, words can build characters and worlds that we can explore from nothing just by putting words on a page. Words are an endless realm of possibilities and I want to continue to explore them, learn them, play with them, exhaust them, exasperate them until they can do nothing else for me (though I doubt this will ever be the case). This is why I am an English major, this is my art, this is all of our arts. This is Harry Potter and The Great Gatsby and Othello. This is all of the poems I wrote in middle school and the complete works of William Wordsworth. This is nature and culture, history and the future, reality and fiction. Wherever my future holds, I’m ready because I know the power of language.