It all comes down to scholarship.
[LAUGHTER]
"Etymological Dirge."
There's a part of "Amazing Grace," that ever beloved hymn,
that nobody ever sings on NPR or NBC.
And it's the stanza that has the line "Twas grace that
taught my heart to fear," which is what made it beloved of me.
"Twas grace that taught my heart to fear."
All of these etymologies come from
an etymological dictionary, which I've been told later
by scholars is a suspect source, that particular dictionary.
So no matter how hard you try to peddle to catch up
with the guys who really know the discipline you're in,
it's a hopeless enterprise.
So this is from the heart, forget
the book, the other book.
This is the book of a certain peculiar heart,
but I read it there.
"Calm--" many of these are true, I
don't mean to disparage the source entirely.
"Calm comes from burning."
I mean, we were talking about googling at dinner.
Don't ask me why-- because we were gurgling
and we couldn't help ourselves.
And really, search is very interesting
and also just the derivations that you
discover by following trails of things
are quite astonishing sometimes.
And for me, the unexpected in the scan is the thing.
So if you're scanning across a dictionary or an encyclopedia,
what I'm alerted by are the spikes
in the EKG, the exceptions in the pattern.
And these, in a way, are--
the editorial function at work in this dictionary
was to look for the things, the peculiarities,
the ones you would never think were possible.
Because the other stuff, if you could already
think it was possible, it doesn't need to be said.
That's why cliche is not useful in art.
"Calm comes from burning.
Tall comes from fast.
Comely doesn't come from come."
You see the trail here.
"Person comes from mask.
The kin of charity is whore.
The root of charity is dear.
Incentive has its source in song.
And winning, in the sufferer.
Afford yourself what you can carry out.
A coward and a coda share a word.
We get our ugliness from fear.
We get our danger from the Lord."
You can almost feel the tracking back from Lord to domain
to danger somehow.
But it doesn't quite feel yet etymologically apparent,
but there's a little of it there.