prolegomena

in august will told me "amy, you are going to just fall in love with language."
i thought i already was. but i was wrong.

tomorrow is march and i am in love with language.

i have sound allergies. certain words, when spoken out loud, make my insides cringe that nails-chalkboard kind of cringe. just regular words. my very kind and helpful friends seem to be trying to innoculate me because they kindly and helpfully fling these words at me every chance they get. they inject them into conversations where they have no place. i wonder if anyone ever went into anaphylactic shock from sound allergies. i wonder if that's how you spell anaphylactic.

but aside from that i just want to know everything about language. i want to eat it so it's inside me all the time. i have only ever loved one person this voraciously, and no thing. i don't think i want to love another person this voraciously, but i want to know the bones of language. sometimes i can see its skeleton, when someone says something i see the undershape of the sentence and i can sometimes spin the pieces around and reattach them. i want to see how the flesh of language lays over the bones. i want to know how the meaning is connected.

i want to poke at people's brains to find the edges.
like that guy in pi, absorbed in the swirl of cream into coffee.
but i don't think it's math that holds the kind of answers he was after.

i want to know the history of every word in every language.
i think if i could know that then i would know truth.