Winged Words in the Arena

Aristotle, whom no less than Dante dubbed il maestro di color che sanno, “the master of those who know,” told us that of all the powers human beings possess, the capacity to use speech is the prime faculty distinguishing us from animals. Human beings and animals may all be sentient, armed with instincts for survival and propagation, but only the man and woman, boy and girl, can grasp the meaning of an idea or the quiddity of an impression as it speeds by the consciousness, either bringing it down like a pheasant in autumn, bagged and secure in an ordered, capacious mind, or watching helplessly as it wings past to alight on another mind better able and eager to crack its code. That is not a bad way to think about words: They shoot out of the dark and break into the sunlight, sometimes elusive, often stubborn, but bestow enlightenment on those who have consented to pay the disciples’ dues to master them. Words make us fully human; they enable us to live better lives—though their misuse and willful abuse can also degrade an otherwise worthy life and deprive it of its latent promise. Any honest struggle to use words well sets us all on a path not only to the intelligent life but to the decorous life, one graced with dignity and élan.

Yet how many have pondered the primordial aptness of the term “winged words,” when words seem to be set in stone, unmoving, dead? How can words “fly” in any but a poetic sense so fanciful that it begs credulity? To most habitués of classrooms, words are those fixed emblems that we memorize, look up in dictionaries, get quizzed on, and later often forget. And yet their lives begin in flight. “Winged words” is a formulaic idiom we find in Homer, one of his idea-epithets—epea pteroenta—that has over millennia worked its way into the bloodstream of every language touched by the lithe genius of the Greeks. Words are not those pesky alphabet characters we find on pages; most essentially, they are vibrations in the air until they are transformed and committed to paper as written signs and symbols that allow them to be deciphered by anybody of passably literate ability. But first they are sounds, audible articulations of ideas, and as sounds, they fly. They move in the marketplace. Words make civilized life possible and, at their highest reaches, they mark Man’s participation in the eternal Logos. They touch the sacred.

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