Thoughts on words

I had fun posting here yesterday. It felt like back in 2008 when I first started my Wordpress blog and I had no followers and just wrote about whatever was on my mind. Kind of how I tweet now, but a bit longer.

Yesterday I was tutoring a seventh grader, and we were going over different types of pronouns: interrogative, demonstrative, reflective, etc. I kept having to go back and reread the definitions myself. This morning I woke up with a half-formed thought: What if we had pronouns that were descriptive of the person’s character rather than their gender identity? I’ve been playing with that idea throughout the day and I’m not really sure how it would work, but it’s been fun to think about.

As a writer I think a lot about words—how they work, how they sound together, what they mean. I like the idea that language is playful, that it’s not a set of rules but rather a set of pens or paints that we can use to create something beautiful and expressive. If there isn’t the exact shade of red that we need, we can mix in some blue, or some yellow, experiment, make up words or combine them into new portmanteaus. We can break the rules, because the rules are man-made anyway, and language is man-made, and it’s our turn now to make it. Shakespeare famously made up dozens of words, including my own name, Jessica. So I can, too.