Thursday, June 12, 2008

In the beginning was the word

Queen"In the common words we use every day, souls of past races, the thoughts and feelings of individual men stand around us, not dead, but frozen into their attitudes like the couriers in the garden of the Sleeping Beauty." -- Owen Barfield, author (1898-1997)

Every word has its beginning, a first time it was uttered, either as a new idea or as a replacement for an older word. Every word has important moments in its "career", moments when its presence in a speech or writing changed the course of events for good or bad.

Tell its story from the point of view of the word. You can use a real word and even be inspired by its real origin. Or make up a word and its story.

If you want to use a real origin, most dictionaries have word origins, as does Wiktionary, but here are a few sites with brief stories about words:

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