[lit-ideas] Words, wirds, werds

I've been puzzling about when is a word a word?  "Rice" is in the word rice.  
Are both words or only one or none?
Grice too can be found in "grice" and "thrice" in thrice.  "In Fun In The 
Monkeyhouse," I think it was, John Barth says that "unth rhymes with month" and 
given that 'unth' is the subject of the sentence and all subjects are 
substantives and all substantives are nouns and all nouns are words, there is 
therefore a word that rhymes with 'month'.   But what does 'unth' mean?  Many 
demand that a word must have a referent to be a word.  'Unth', of course, 
means: "a word that is a word (if only through a technicality) that means there 
is a word that rhymes with 'month' 

Some might think this is trifling.  But what of 'pompitous' then?  Who can deny 
the "pompitous of love"?  Has 'pompitous' not become a word in its own right, a 
word meaning: "'pompitous' -- the word that has no meaning."  Is it not a 
paradox of semiology -- the sign that signs the sign of no sign?  

I'm always perplexed and amused by those who write G*d for God.  What's so 
sacred about "o" I wonder that it cannot be shown to the world.  Surely G*d 
means God to those who use the Trigrammaton.  If speaking a word or seeing it 
in its naked reality, drags an idea out into the world and clothes it in the 
corruption of our fleshly existence, then how in hell is thinking that word not 
a thousand times more blasphemous?  For what could be more filthy and rotted 
with evil than a man's mind?  What crimes and villainies, what pollutions has 
it not envisioned, desired, plotted, brought to fruition?  And yet we encounter 
"G*d", especially in the South, as, I suppose, an acknowledgement of a 
sacredness too sacred to be acknowledged, as an act of reverence too reverent 
to be referenced in human sound.  It is our goy version of YHWH.  How does one 
pronounce "G*d"?  Gasterisked?  "I believe in Gasterisked, the Father Almighty, 
Creator of heaven and earth."  Will they change our money to read: "In 
Gasterisked we trust"?  Etc, etc, etc. ---  Just doesn't have the same music to 
it.  The question is -- is 'G*d' a word yet?

Mike Geary
Memphis

Other related posts: