Mark Morgan Ford - How to Speak Intelligently About Everything That Matters

By words we learn thoughts, and by thoughts we learn life.

Jean Baptiste Girard

One of the best learning experiences I ever had was an introduction to classical thought. It was a course offered by Queens College and taught by an exceptional teacher: Lillian Feder.

My exposure to ancient Greek and Roman literature was minimala Mary Renault novel and a few Hollywood movies. So I eagerly looked forward to discovering many important and timeless ideas. To my chagrin, Professor Feder told us that we would be spending the first several weeks learning the meaning of a dozen Greek words.

Ridiculous, I thought. I dont need vocabulary lessons. Im in college. Im here to think!

Happily, I didnt voice my objection. Had I spoken up, I would have been obliged to tell Professor Feder how wrong I was. Those vocabulary lessons changed my life.

Thanks to Professor Feder, I began to think in a serious way about drama, literary criticism, and rhetoric. The words we learned were old. They were employed by Aristotle 2,400 years ago in the Poetics, his great treatise on literary theory. It was my first acquaintance with hubris, hamartia, catharsis, and peripeteiawords that gave me a deeper understanding of not just Oedipus Rex and King Lear but also CNBC and Fox News.

Hubris, for example, is commonly used as a synonym for pride. But as Professor Feder explained, Aristotle meant much more than that. He meant the kind of pride that comes with ambition, is excited by greatness, and provokes arrogance.

Professor Feder wanted to make sure we understood the difference between the way a parent might feel seeing his child perform at a school play, and the hubris of a president who believes he is above the law and breaks it without considering the consequences. That sort of distinction is not semantics. It is a necessary discipline for anyone who wants to talk about important ideas in a serious way.

Ordinary wordscarefully usedcan be soldiers in lifes battle against inanity, dullness, and nonsense. Marshaled properly, they can push our thoughts and feelings toward useful discussions and lively conversations. And certain words can be lieutenants or commanders or even generals, guiding us toward a more satisfying experience of life.

This book presents 1,280 nuggets of information that can help you speak intelligently about everything that matters. That includes people, places, books, essays, films, poems, plays, and works of art that you should be familiar with. It also includes nearly 600 commanding words and phrases that, in my view, can enrich your life.

In defining those words, I have worked to make their meanings simple and useful. Simple enough to be understood readily and remembered easily. And useful in helping to make sense of some worthy part of the world. In most cases, the definitions are straightforward. An iamb, for example, is a two-beat poetic foot in which the second beat gets the stress. But in some cases, I have been more expansive and have provided examples to illustrate my points.

The book is organized like a reference manual. To make it easier to use, Ive divided it into categories: Art, Architecture, Literature, Poetry, Theater, Tools of the Writers Trade, Literary Criticism, Le Mot Juste, and Philosophy.

But its not a reference in the standard sense. I dont expect you to consult it when an unfamiliar word comes up in reading or conversation. Google and Wikipedia are better for that. But I do expect you to be intrigued by some of the ideas you will find here. And I am hoping that will inspire you to dig much deeper into those ideas on your own.

Page by page, this book will help you become a more precise and polished conversationalist. It will help you exchange ideas with educated people without feeling foolish and humble foolish people without being pompous.

Think of it as your private regiment of soldiers, ready to be mobilized in your campaign to conquer bad thinking and acquire the spoils of a rich cultural life.