The writer Richard Trench has a lovely quote that echoes Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous lines about language as fossil poetry: “Language is the amber in which a thousand precious thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Fossil Poetry”
I often like to quote Ralph Waldo Emerson and what he said about language being fossil poetry.
I found another quotation that’s sort of related to that from Richard Trench.
And it goes, language is the amber in which a thousand precious thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved.
I’d never quite thought about it that way.
You know, I think about an insect in amber, but precious thoughts.
Because a particular construction or phrase, an idiom, must have at one point been brand new.
It was the brainchild of somebody who needed to communicate.
Yes, Thomas Carlyle said the coldest word was once a glowing new metaphor.
Right.
You don’t pick them off trees.
They come to a human mind, and then they spread from there.
Yeah, but I love the image of them preserved in amber.
Nice.
I wonder if we can make T-Rexes out of them.
877-929-9673.
Email words@waywordradio.org.
