Lewis Thomas
American doctor and essayist
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Today's language is the result of an interminable series of small blunders, one after another, leading us back through a near infinity of time. The words are simply let loose by all of us, allowed to fly around out there in the dark, bumping into each other, mating in crazy ways, producing wild, random hybrids, beyond the control of reason.
—Lewis Thomas, American doctor and essayist, The Medusa and the Snail, 1979
Posted on October 2, 2003 at 5:18 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
The things I like best in T. S. Eliot's poetry, especially in the Four Quartets, are the semicolons. You cannot hear them, but they are there, laying out the connections between the images and the ideas. Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath.
—Lewis Thomas, American doctor and essayist, The Medusa and the Snail, 1979
Posted on March 23, 2000 at 7:59 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
It may be that the evolution of language was largely a matter of luck, like the evolution of creatures. Even though the facts of the matter have been firmly nailed down by two centuries of meticulous philological scholarship, there is a general, unavaiodable sense of high improbability in the whole business. If this is the way words evolved, its seems to have depended upon a lot of pure chance, or, as the French say, hazard.
—Lewis Thomas, American doctor and essayist, The Medusa and the Snail, 1979
Posted on June 15, 2000 at 5:40 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
I have grown fond of semicolons in recent years. The semicolon tells you that there is still some question about the preceding full sentence; something needs to be added; it reminds you sometimes of the Greek usage. It is almost always a greater pleasure to come across a semicolon than a period. The period tells you that that is that; if you didn't get all the meaning you wanted or expected, anyway you got all the writer intended to parcel out and now you have to move along. But with a semicolon there you get a pleasant little feeling of expectancy; there is more to come; read on; it will get clearer.
—Lewis Thomas, American doctor and essayist, The Medusa and the Snail, 1979
Posted on January 18, 2001 at 1:20 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
The gift of language is the single human trait that marks us all genetically, setting us apart from the rest of life.
—Lewis Thomas, American doctor and essayist, The Lives of a Cell, 1974
Posted on March 29, 1999 at 6:39 AM
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