First Congress of New Words After Babel Steven C. Reese Called by the suddenly seventy ways to say table, they sit, done streaming like unseen bats out the tower’s windows. Gorgeous day. Light licks them to a sheen of multiplied senses, sounds with a mind to play and talk of roots, kinship, accent, nuance, aptness for figures, issues of timbre, tone, weight. Polysyllables work kinks from their joints, birth-sore. Some contemplate a larger meaning, the shared life of the sentence. A few jokers lobby for elections of officers; the different tongues laugh the same laugh, a fact which escapes no one’s attention (ditto the fact that if in each language leaks a pheromone for which none present is the word, but all feel the buzz of pure possibility it gives them). To some the thought of usefulness occurs, and grows. Others are right at home being words for their own sake, just signs, just because. And while the superlatives think too well of themselves and certain verbs lack a direction, that they all mean what they say, and in good will, is never in question. Their hubbub is the babble of innocents, still. They are too new, still drying in the sun, awkward with one another, awed with being there at all, to think on why, to imagine the mind that would prepare so dire and perverse a smack-down; that would fashion understanding’s overthrow through increase of its means—these very words—by seventy-fold. The ends they’ll be used for they can’t yet guess, turned stones in the mouth, hurled to do hurt or set to build walls, borders; the peace
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