Word Nerds Unite

Today is St. Patrick’s Day, and I have to say I don’t feel the least bit celebratory. I’m far from Irish, but I don’t think it’s that. More importantly, it’s just not green yet. Things are still covered with a bit of snow and ice here, and nothing has sprouted — not even those ill-fated daffodils that come out after the first warm day but before the last frost. If I had the luck of the Irish perhaps I would be living in the Bahamas. 

That’s not to say that spring isn’t coming. The air is more humid, the ground is wet with melting snow, and there are even a few bugs around the windowsills these days. There is something valuable in the anticipation, in the delay.

The same is true in writing. That one zinger of a line — a writer’s equivalent to the first flush of spring — feels flimsy without the build-up of the words before, the subtle resonance in the words that follow. In my opinion, the solid construction of good writing is something that isn’t celebrated often enough. We pull sage quotations from the classics without taking the time to appreciate how such lines sounded — what they meant — when they were embedded in the work as a whole. 

Today, I’d like to quietly celebrate (with a glass of Merlot rather than green beer) writers everywhere who toil to build full and expansive work. If the payoff is a single line of staggering genius, we must recognize the thousands of words that support that sentence, the paragraphs that prepare us to read it, and to drink it in.

Here’s to winter.