As Marie Kondo instructed, I laid every book I owned onto the floor. And as I reached into my pile of linguistics books, I opened the cover of this book about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (a famous linguistic conjecture that suggests the language(s) that one speaks influences their notions/conceptions of the world).
Nestled into the bind of the cover, I discovered a postcard in which the front is a photograph of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s house, the room in which he compiled his magnum opus—A Dictionary of the English Language (1775), which established modern lexicography (though he faced much criticism). He was a weird dude, but, nevertheless, he congregated the English language into its most comprehensive collection of the time, manifesting a magnificent cultural and literary history. Take this one definition he wrote: “Fart, noun: Wind from behind.” His definitions were accompanied by actual literary quotations, and this one, by Sir John Suckling, followed fart:
“Love is the fart
Of every heart;
It pains a man when ‘tis kept close;
And others doth offend, when ‘tis let loose”
On the back of the postcard, dated Sunday, August 14, 1983, the sender addresses my (now emeritus) grammar professor, Professor Connie Eble of UNC-Chapel Hill. The sender implies a congratulation to my professor: “hearing news of you & Chapel Hill,” the sender wrote. Dr. Eble is the reason I study linguistics. She was trained in traditional philology (a subject that mesmerizes me, and a quick google of the term presents a shallow definition at best). Scarce today is an understanding of philology’s historical centrality to the structure of the modern humanities in colleges and universities. Furthermore, an analogy: from physiology and philosophy, psychology was born; out of philology, linguistics was born. Her legacy to me is supreme in transforming my love of parsing sentences into my love for language as a science.
I defied Marie Kondo (author of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up). She expressly instructed that I neither read nor open the books (because it distracts and clouds judgment), and she instead insisted I feel and hold them to see if they “bring joy.” Something about this one caught wind of my intuition.
Dillon Bolding 