What’s in a Word Anyway?
People like to look at words and claim them not as so,
they will pick them up and look under them
as if there is something hidden below.
Cutting words down and looking at their roots,
“a word derived from latin!” is often a common excuse.
Scholars tend to think of words like wells,
deeper and darker do they like to dwell.
Some may spend days, if not years, searching -
the sad part of their story is
that the writer was simply joking.
If you like to look for meaning,
then please, by all means, look for some in this!
You are bound to find something for your searches
in my plainly written lists.
(and you ought not try to dig further, anything worth while is buried in clay)
What I’m really aiming at, or rather, trying to say
is that words can be just that - words,
put in a place because they needed a verb
or rhyme, and I am going to end this stanza with hay.
Do you see what I did there? Call me crazy, or perhaps sane.
To get to the bottom and really dig deep
is actually to skim the surface and see,
displace the rocks and look under them to find
that many authors and writers were never really thinking the “how” or “why” -
but just wrote what they were feeling at a particular time.
- Derek Ellis
