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nouns, names, and slang
More on naming, this time from Gertrude Stein's "Poetry and Grammar" (from Lectures In America):
"[A] noun is a name of a thing, and therefore slowly if you feel what is inside that thing you do not call it by the name by which it is known. Everybody knows that by the way they do when they are in love and a writer should have that intensity of emotion about whatever is the object about which he writes. And therefore and I say it again more and more one does not use nouns. ... Now actual given names of people are more lively than nouns which are the name of anything and I suppose this is because after all the name is only given to that person when they are born, there is at least the element of change and anybody can be pretty well able to do what they like, they may be born Walter and become Hub, in such a way that they are not like a noun. A noun has been the name of something for such a very long time.
"That is the reason that slang exists it is to change the nouns which have been names for so long. I say again. Verbs and adverbs and prepositions are lively because they all do something and as long as anything does something it keeps alive."
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Friday, April 18, 2003
1:39 PM
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